Booklist: Brulant CEO Len Pagon

In Booklist, we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite books. For this list, we asked Len Pagon, CEO and president of Brulant, a company that combines technology, interactive marketing and creative design.

The Fifth Discipline

By Peter M. Senge

A great source for understanding mental models, systemic thinking, and the power of dialogue, designed to help companies develop dynamic ways to pinpoint the threats that face them and to recognize new opportunities.

The Art of Profitability

By Adrien Slywotzky

A book of parables that reveal the invisible, but important governing principles that can mean the difference between business failure and success.

How to Grow When Markets Don’t

By Adrien Slywostky

This work uses case studies to demonstrate how to leverage hidden assets and move toward a more integrated relationship and higher value relationship with customers, and implicitly touches upon the phenomenon of business process outsourcing.

Managing the Professional Service Firm

By David Maister

The “bible” and de facto book on running a professional services firm; it outlines procedures for bringing solid business practices into the professional workplace.

Double-Digit Growth: How Great Companies Achieve It—No Matter What

By Michael Treacy

A five-part portfolio of management disciplines, designed to help companies increase their growth rates.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t

By Jim Collins

A new interpretation of corporate success; a company’s move from mediocrity to greatness is achieved through discipline, as opposed to the traditional notions of strategy and technology.

Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge

By Geoffrey Moore

Useful guidelines for the technology adoption cycle, including moving products beyond early adopters and into the lucrative mainstream market.

The Gorilla Game: An Investor’s Guide to Picking Winners in High Technology

By Geoffrey Moore

This book is an adaptation of the technology adoption cycle; it reveals the dynamics involved in investing in public technology companies, as well as the forces that propel certain companies to “gorilla” status, dominating the markets they serve.

The Innovators Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

By Clayton M. Christensen

Christensen discusses business opportunities and the systemic challenges large companies face to address new markets created by disruptive technologies.

The Innovator’s Solution and Seeing What’s Next

By Clayton M. Christenson

Following The Innovators Dilemma, these books provide detailed industry case studies that enable us to understand the effects that industry change and competition have on the future success of a company.