(FORTUNE Magazine) – Beyond gurus

What's the Big Idea? by Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak (Harvard Business School Press)

When it comes to organizational change, dreaming up ideas is the easy part. Implementing them is where the hard work comes in. Davenport (director of Accenture's Institute for Strategic Change) and Prusak (founder of IBM's Institute for Knowledge Management) don't disparage the importance of idea captains like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. (Indeed, one of the book's highlights is a ranking of 200 such gurus, gauging their influence using a combination of Google hits, academic citations, and LexisNexis mentions. The winner: Harvard's Michael Porter.) But more important, the authors say, are the first mates, those "idea practitioners" within organizations who take what gurus say and make it real. Sprinkled with mini-biographies, this is a careful, hype-free discussion of how to capitalize on the best management thinking. --Ellen Florian

Biobucks

It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business by Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis (Crown Books)

"In the same way that researchers at PARC and Fairchild Semiconductor and Bell Labs created technology that established a new economy based on information," write Meyer and Davis, director and a research fellow, respectively, at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation, "scientists in labs today are inventing a future based on molecular technologies." The notion that biotech holds the seeds of the next economic revolution is hardly new. But this book goes far beyond mere stargazing, thoughtfully and persuasively detailing how the "labs of the next economy" contain the management solutions we need to thrive in this one--making possible everything from better market research to quicker responses to changing business conditions. --Nicholas Stein

Warp speed

Magic Cancer Bullet by Daniel Vasella, MD (Harper Business)

When one thinks of the marvels of medical alchemy that have shaped our era, the heroes are clear: scientists bent over microscopes, tireless clinicians, patients who undergo risky protocols. Well, add one more hero to the list: corporate culture. That is the compelling message of Vasella's book, which chronicles the discovery and development of Gleevec, a designer molecule that may be the first "smart bomb" in the war on cancer--and which went from its first patient trial to FDA approval (and mass production) in just 35 months. Vasella, CEO of Swiss pharma giant Novartis, reveals not only the innovative strategies that rushed this orange capsule to desperate patients in record time but also why he bet his company's financial health (and his own career) on the thinnest of scientific hopes. A heroic saga indeed. --Clifton Leaf