What’s Your Arc?

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What’s Your Arc?

It’s one of my favorite scenes in The Sopranos. Christopher talks about his arc. Where’s my arc, Paulie?

I was watching that scene today and I started thinking about my arc as a writer. With the first book, I wrote about what I knew. It’s pretty common for a non-fiction writer to do this. I had seen so many IT projects blow up, why not write a jargon-free book about them? So I did.

The second book is based on the premise that organizations that can’t implement mature technologies well have a tough road to hoe with respect to emerging technologies like cloud computing, MDM, open source, etc.

But big companies face big struggles. What about smaller organizations? Aren’t they doing some cool things? Yes–and that’s the premise behind book number three.

And then there are those large companies that are acting like small ones. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are nothing less than “big small” companies. They still innovate better than many companies 1/100th their size. That’s the fourth book in a nutshell.

“The Gang of Four” does many things well, including managing vast amounts of data. Big Data. Really Big Data. That’s a big part of book number 5.