Enterprise-Value Books

Enrique Castro-Leon is an enterprise and data center architect and technology strategist for Intel Digital Enterprise Group working in OS design and architecture, software engineering, high-performance computing, platform definition, and business development. His work involves matching emerging technologies with innovative business models in developed and emerging markets. In this capacity he has served as a consultant for corporations large and small, nonprofits and governmental organizations on issues of technology and data center planning.

He has taken roles as visionary, solution architect, project manager, and has undertaken the technical execution in advanced proof of concept projects with corporate end users and inside Intel illustrating the use of emerging technologies. He has published over 40 articles, conference papers and white papers on technology strategy and management as well as SOA and Web services. He holds PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Purdue University.

Jackson He is a lead architect in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, specializing in manageability usages and enterprise solutions. He holds PhD and MBA degrees from the University of Hawaii. Jackson has overall 20 years of IT experience and has worked in many disciplines from teaching, to programming, engineering management, datacenter operations, architecture designs, and industry standard definitions. Jackson was Intel's representative at OASIS, RosettaNet, and Distributed Management Task Force. He also served on the OASIS Technical Advisory Board from 2002-2004. In recent years, Jackson has focused on enterprise infrastructure manageability and platform energy efficiency in dynamic IT environment. His research interest covers broad topics of virtualization, Web services, and distributed computing. Jackson has published over 20 papers at Intel Technology Journal and IEEE Conferences.

Mark Chang is a principal strategist in the Intel Technology Sales group specializing in Service Oriented Enterprise and advanced client system business and technology strategies worldwide. Mark has more than 20 years of industry experience including software product development, data center modernization and virtualization, unified messaging service deployment, and wireless services management. He participated in several industry standard organizations to define the standards in CIM virtualization models and related Web services protocols. Additionally, Mark has a strong relationship with the system integration and IT outsourcing community. He holds an MS degree from the University of Texas at Austin.

Parviz Peiravi is a principal architect with Intel Corporation responsible for enterprise worldwide solutions and design; he has been with the company for more than 11 years. He is primarily responsible for designing and driving development of service oriented architecture, utility computing, and virtualization solutions and computing architectures in support of Intel's focus areas within enterprise computing.

Parviz is a key contributor to Intel clustering technology based on Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA) and he represented Intel in the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA) technical working group. He has designed large scale clusters using Oracle's Real Application Cluster (RAC), Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2, and utility computing infrastructure using grid and virtualization technologies. He has numerous certifications in Enterprise Architecture Framework, SOA, ITIL, XML\Web services, and database design. He is currently researching the application of virtualization, SOA and grids within Predictive Enterprise Infrastructure Framework. Parviz joined Intel in 1997 and holds a BS in Computer and Electrical Engineering from Portland State University.

The Lean Enterprise Memory Jogger is worth its weight in gold !. In 150 small pages it describes the lean management process excellently. More importantly it gives a recommended route for implementing lean and when to use the tools - just work through the guide. The book is very well written and easy to read, with clear steps for the tools and good explanations. Great to carry around with you. Of course its small size does mean there are some limitations. There is no background to lean, or case studies, and little discussion of different scenarios. Having said that though, this little book has made the process of implementing lean clearer to me than books two or three times the price. Well worth the money !.

Rabbit & Squirrel is great! Not only does it show how friendship can over come difficulties, but it easily demonstrates the values and qualities of caring in ways that children easily and quickly adapt to.

It's delightful and readily enjoyed by children, parents, and teachers alike, in Canada and the USA. It's on the suggested reading list for the Montessori School in Sewickley, Pennsylvania and is required reading for young speech therapy patients in Charlotte, North Carolina.

A must have for any child who is learning to read or loves being read to!

This is a great example of how to set up the flow of production operation.

This book so inspired and encouraged me to know that the God of the Bible is still the same yesterday, today and forever. He still performs miracles for those who will put thier trust in him. This book was great and I recommend it highly!

Written in a pithy, yet imminently readable style, this book gives a comprehensive treatment of the subject. It's refreshing to read something so concise and well-written from a CPA! Highly recommended.

This book is a good introduction to how to create a business venture in the post.com era. It is used as a text book at Copenhagen Business School, and it has been effective for students like me in order to fast grasp what I need to do in order to create a business. I will recommend this to others who wants to learn how to build companies and needs a guide for how to make a strategic busienss plan, how to acquire capital and how to create breakthrough ideas.

The Values Driven Family is to the home what the Purpose Driven Life is to the church. This is an excellent book for laying (or firming up) a Christian foundation for families. It covers vision, training, love, and discipline, as well as practical matters of family life such as budgeting and scheduling. If you are looking for an excellent overview of the Christian home, look no further--this is it.

I especially liked the section that covers twelve critical character areas. I think this is a great resource for parents who are trying to define what strengths their kids need to develop as well what they need to reinforce in their own lives.

The Carriers do a fantastic job laying a biblical foundation, using an amazing arsenal of Scripture. As a result, one of the things I like the most about it is that it's balanced in all areas. It carries a very strong biblical emphasis without taking extreme positions based on Christian cultural or personal preferences. It's the type of book you can feel excited about giving to a friend without adding disclaimers about the parts that are off-base or offensive.

Thank you for helping me feel good about myself. I've spent years with an inferiority complex and now--well this book has given me a new outlook.

Hey, I'm a winner. I feel it. I believe it. The ideas and techniques in Your Sperm Won really work.

Thank you.

Luther T. Farrell goes by his first name, middle initial and last name, which might be taken as a sign that he might not be as confident as he initially wants to appear. This assumption is correct. Luther is a high school student, academically successful, but socially awkward, who leads a more complicated life than many of his peers. While he may look like just another bright kid who is interested in science and philosophy, outside of school, he holds down a full time job as a caretaker for the residents of his mother's group homes. His mother, the Sarge of the title, is a strong-willed, ruthless woman who has found multiple ways of earning money while skirting the law. Luther is equally keen on winning the school science fair for the third time (a "tre-peat") and escaping his mother's tyrannical hold over him and his dreams. How he does this makes for an engaging read.

The one flaw is that for a child who has been physically and emotionaly abused, Luther is almost too well-adjusted. His anxieties and insecurities seem to fall within the "normal" range for an adolescent.
He just does not seem "troubled" enough given his circumstances. While it is possible to overcome an upbringing like his, I would expect a few more scars to have occurred in the process.

One of the Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults in 2005, BUCKING THE SARGE is a solid read by Christopher Paul Curtis. The early novel of his, THE WATSONS GO TO BURMINGHAM:1963, was chosen as a Newbery Honor Book in 1996, and another of his, BUD, NOT BUDDY, won the Newbery Award Medal in 2000. An already acclaimed author, Curtis has delivered the humorous, if not outlandish story, of Luther T. Farrell, a young black boy and freshman in high school, who lives with and works for the Sarge (a.k.a. Mom), the mother of all mothers.

With his best friend Sparky, his love for philosophy, and his hatred for Flint, Michigan, Luther gets promoted to head of the Sarge's group home. At the same time, he's trying to think up the kind of idea that will win him 1st prize in the school's science fair for the third year in a year, an unprecedented feat. The problem is that the ordained-in-the-stars love of his life that he never talks to, Shayla Patrick, is his greatest competition, having nearly defeated him the year before.

While Luther's working his tail off for the Sarge, Sparky is scheming up ways to get rich quick, searching for the perfect case to take to Dontay Gaddy, the Big D.O.G. lawyer at 1-800-SUE-EM-ALL. Luther has a different plan. For a couple more years, he's going to keep working for the Sarge because she's loading up his education fund and that's the only real way to climb the ladder.

However, his new promotion at the group home gives him access to information he wishes he'd never found, the kind that changes your life forever, for better or for worse. With Sparky and Shayla still doing their things, Luther's going to have to figure out who the Sarge really is, what he's going to do about her, and how in the world he's ever going to make it out of Flint.

Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

Although I was intrigued by this story--flipping pages quickly to find out how the protagonist would buck the Sarge--I was ultimately disappointed. "The Sarge" is a cruel slum lord without a shred of good in her, and the protagonist is the Sarge's 9th grade son without a shred of bad in him.

I'm disappointed in this book because even if I overlook Luther's ability to be so well-adjusted despite his upbringing (after all, Harry Potter did it), and even if I overlook the contrived ending (at least it's not happily ever after), I can't overlook that fact that I am not emotionally hooked.

Curtis had me bawling when reading some of his other books (The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 and Bud, Not Buddy), but I felt no emotion--not sadness nor relief nor victory--when Luther finally bucked the Sarge.

This YA ("young adult") novel takes the reader into the unenviable life of Flint, Michigan 9th-grader Luther. The fatherless Luther is completely under the thumb of his domineering mother, a slumlord and neighborhood loanshark known as "the Sarge." To her, 15-year-old Luther isn't a son so much as unpaid help. She makes him live in one of her halfway homes and supervise its elderly internees. Other tasks include chauffeuring these old men around, cleaning houses after tenants have been evicted, and assisting his mother with the various scams she runs on the state social welfare system. Other than that, Luther is a typical awkward 9th-grader: pimply faced, obnoxious to the girl he has a crush on, and with a keen eye on winning the science fair again. He's also really nice and sweet, and a good kid -- which seems rather implausible given his upbringing.

The story is at turns comedic and tragic, however its main plotline concerns the school's science fair, which Luther is hoping to win for the third year running. This becomes a metaphor for his attitude to life, which is that hard work can lead to good things -- an approach his mother sneers at and calls "the sucker path." Her plan is for him to work for her and then inherit her empire, while he wants to go to college and get out of town. Since Luther makes such a big deal of working on his project, but the reader isn't told what it is, it's hardly surprising when the revelation of its topic ends up being a catalyst for a major turning point in Luther's life. Unfortunately, this climax is across-the-board implausible: (1) It's simply not believable that in the course of weeks of working on the project, the implications wouldn't have arisen in Luther's mind. (2) When the implications are clear, his mother acts contrary to character in terms of trust -- especially given the circumstances -- which allows the ending to unfold as it does. (3) A bit of incredible luck plays a key role in Luther's ultimate redemption. (4) The emotional implications of a kid running away from his only parent are never touched upon at all. The whole end plays out like some kind of film where an essentially good gangster is trying to quit the life and ditch his godfather, with all kinds of frantic scamming and planning.

Perhaps unintentionally it is Luther's acid-tongued mother who is the book's most compelling character -- when she speaks, it's not nice, but it is attention-grabbing. It's rare to find a story in which a mother is the cold-hearted parent, and the book doesn't do a very good job of explaining why she is the way she is. There is a backstory given, but it's rather hokey and simplistic. Her sidekick is a jheri-curled boyfriend/enforcer/gangster who is a barely contained menace to Luther's health. The men in the group home are a typical cast of comic relief, aside from the mysterious Chester X, who becomes a kind of cliche grandfather figure to Luther. His best friend Sparky provides more comic relief, as his solution to getting free of Flint is to fake an accident (with either a pit bull, diseased rat, or falling roof tile) and then win a settlement with the assistance of the local shyster lawyer. Unfortunately, unlike a proper best friend, about all Sparky is good for are numbskull schemes, and he disappears from the story for long stretches. It's a fairly engaging YA story on the whole, but it's also fairly superficial. Luther's predicament is never given the emotional depth or texture or even seriousness it merits, and some of the comic relief sequences are a little too broad and clunky. Not bad, but not great either.

Michael Boatman is a perfect reader for this story. His voice is casual and "philosophical". Some of the story could have gotten bogged down in melodrama, but he keeps things on an even keel, while at the same time making the critique of life in Flint even more devastating. Momma's smooth, cool voice almost sounds reasonable, until you realize how ruthless she is.

Well done. One of the best audiobooks I have listened to.