The next leap in productivity: what top managers really need to know about information technology.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf - The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent and Accelerate Performance - Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity and Reap Big Results - Book review

The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know About Information Technology. By Adam Kolawa. John Wiley & Sons, 205 pages. $29.95.

As author Kolawa writes in his introduction, this book is really two books in one. The first is about information technology strategy and the second about IT tactics. He believes few C-suite executives (apart from the chief information officer), really understand how IT works or how it should be managed.

He details a few key precepts. While companies (and CFOs) constantly complain about IT costs, its expense is usually well below those for sales, marketing, research and development and other traditional cost centers. Managed properly, IT helps companies make money. Poor IT management, conversely, costs companies money, market position, prestige and brand equity.

Kolawa hones in on two types of software advances: Developer leap, which occurs at the tactical level, and enterprise leap, which happens at the strategic level. To truly harness both, he writes, a CEO must go beyond delegating IT issues to the CIO, but understand enough about software productivity to make critical choices.

Trained as a theoretical physicist, Kolawa founded a long-running software firm, Parasoft. He uses those experiences, and interviews a number of top IT executives, many of them CIOs, to lend perspective. This is a slim, easy-to-follow volume that opens each chapter with a short executive summary. It's an insightful read that makes the language of IT easy to understand and appreciate--and that in itself is quite a feat.

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The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent and Accelerate Performance; revised edition. By Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. Free Press, 251 pages. $22.95.

In this, their second look at the use of corporate carrots--the first edition was a big 2007 seller--authors Gostick and Elton offer further evidence that praise and recognition belong in every manager's toolkit. In fact, they write, in the long-standing recession, "the Carrot philosophy has never been more relevant."

Indeed, finding ways to recognize people and honor their work doesn't require new resources, just new ways of thinking. Recognition isn't simply the softer side of leadership, they write, but a "secret ingredient that great leaders add to their companies for [a] direct impact on profits."

Organizations that more effectively recognize and reward...