www.baleadership.com

Kogan Page have brought out the book in hardback! It does look great and it will be much more durable than the paperback version. It’s pricey through, costing almost three times as much as the paperback. However, there a big discounts to be had online if you’d really like a copy. Here’s mine.

Happy New Year! I hope that 2015 is a really happy and productive year for you, your projects and your family. Thank you for being part of the BA Leadership community.

The IIBA have chosen our book to be part of their Online Library. If you are a member, you will be able to access the book by logging in here.

I’ve just been in to have a look and I’ve found that our book is one of the ten top titles from the first week of 2015. So you’re in good company being here.

Hi there and thank you for your interest in Business Analysis and Leadership.

A year on from publication is a good time to take stock and look back. I’m delighted that the book has done so well, consistently on the bestseller list on Amazon.co.uk in the category of Change Management. It’s currently sitting at number 20, above many of the books I’ve found helpful over the years. Gulp!

Here are a few of the reviews that we’ve seen. If you have spotted some more, please do let us know and I’ll update this post:

IIBA

BCS – UK

Amazon.co.uk – five star reviews

Amazon.com – mostly five star reviews

A Blog from Brazil (in Portuguese!)

If you’re in London, UK on 14th November, then you’re invited to join our book launch party at Cass Business School that evening. You can see all the details and book your ticket here.

Here’s how James describes the evening:

Join the authors for an evening of discussion hosted by CASS Business School,
Thursday 14th November 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start until 8.30pm CASS Business School, London

Please register for your ticket here.

There will be lively panel discussions and debate with over 12 of the contributors to the book and plenty of time for discussion and chatting with nibbles and a glass of wine.

The book is about how to influence and lead change without often having formal authority.

The book examines leadership and business analysis from different perspectives: leadership of self, leadership within your project, leadership within your organization and leadership within the wider world.

Topics covered by the authors at the launch include: Skills, Facilitative Leadership, Communication, Difficult Stakeholders, Facilitation, Problems, Visual Thinking, Design Thinking, Agile, Uncertainty, Global Working, Power and Politics, Partnering, Strategic thinking, Leading from the middle, Professionalization, Ethics, Becoming a change leader and Context, climate and culture.

While that’s brilliant for those who can come, what should we do for those who can’t make it to London? I would be happy to write a blog post and share video snippets of the evening. Would you like that? I haven’t yet found a virtual replacement for drinking wine together, but perhaps you’ll raise a toast to our book wherever you are on 14th November. Thank you!

James and I were delighted to present Debbie Paul, keynote speaker and writer of the Foreword, with a signed copy of our book at BA2013. Here she is with it:

The whole process of creating the book took about a year and half. During that time, James and I talked a lot and we both talked one-to-one with individual co-authors. We authors only met as a group in video conferences! So it was wonderful to meet twelve authors at BA2013 where we presented a panel session on ‘Business Analysis and Leadership’. Some of us even managed to be in a photo. You can see (back row) Tamsin Fulton, Melanie Rose, Penny Pullan, Corrine Thomas (front row) James Archer, Dav Bisessar, Sarah Coleman, Suzanne Robertson, Andy Wilkins, Jake Markham:

Here’s the start of our presentation:

Here’s a picture of the panel seated on the stage (we almost didn’t fit!):

Once we had set the scene and introduced the idea of BA leadership and the framework, we asked for questions from our participants:

Here are the ones we managed to answer in the panel session:


Here are the ones we promised to answer in this blog:

This week, both James and I attended the BA2013 conference on business analysis. With close to 400 attendees over three days, it was a great place to talk about business analysis and leadership. We had to sign a lot of copies of our book and my own copy now has been signed by many of our co-authors.

One of my topics is visual thinking and I made visual notes of all the sessions I attended over the three days. You can see them and some other snaps and video in my video summaries of each day of the conference:

Day 1: Workshop day – ‘BA from Follower to Leader’ and ‘Ethics of Business Analysis’

Day 2: Presentations in the BA Leadership Track

Day 3: Presentations in the BA Leadership Track

It seems that the lovely quotes are just pouring in now! Here are some more:
David J C Morris ‏(@DavidJCMorris) based in New Zealand:

A reader in the US:

Elizabeth Harrin (@pm4girls) in the UK:

We also have our first five star Amazon review – thanks Brian!

The reaction at the BA2013 conference was also very positive… but more on that in a different post.

We know that many of you are reading the book and want to wait until you’ve finished it before commenting or reviewing it in detail. This means that we haven’t yet seen any Amazon reviews or published book reviews. We know this will change, but in the meantime, it’s been lovely to hear from people with short comments over Twitter, Linked-In, e-mail or comments.

Here are a few from Twitter: