IT Strategy (CIS 9000)
If you're taking CIS 9000 (IT Strategy) with me at Baruch – or you finished the semester and want to keep going – this page is for you. Nothing here is required beyond what's on the syllabus. These are the books I assign and ones that almost made the cut, as well as some that I've shared with students interested in the course or students who've already taken it and want to go deeper on certain topics.
On the Syllabus
- Adventures of an IT Leader
A Harvard case study that reads like a novel: a new CIO learns the job in real time, one crisis per chapter. IT strategy is a series of judgment calls, not a framework, and our hero Barton makes the judgment calls visible. I treat a portion of the course like a book club, where every week we read a chapter or two and discuss (some students say the book club is their favorite part of the course). The format – business lessons smuggled into a novel – is heavily inspired by The Goal.
- IT Strategy for Non-IT Managers: Becoming an Engaged Contributor to Corporate IT Decisions
Tiwana wrote the textbook for exactly this course's audience – managers who need to make IT decisions without becoming technologists. The chapters on governance and technical debt earn their spot. A strong contender to replace the textbook – maybe when a new edition comes out.
Almost Made the Syllabus
- The Phoenix Project
The novel-shaped version of everything that goes wrong when business strategy and IT operations don't talk. It nearly made the syllabus – it teaches DevOps more than strategy, but the dysfunction it describes is the reason this course exists. Similar structure to Adventures of an IT Leader and The Goal.
- Netflixed: The Battle for America's Eyeballs
Blockbuster vs. Netflix is the IT strategy case – technology choices as company-level life and death. Dated in the best way: you know how it ends, so you can watch the decisions instead of the plot.
- Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Not an IT book, but the strategy foundation underneath the course. Rumelt's kernel – diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action – is the tool I keep reaching for when a case discussion drifts into wishful thinking. A great pre-read for anyone who hasn't taken a graduate business strategy course yet, and highly recommended for anyone who learns best from in-class case discussions.
Before the Semester
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
A business book disguised as a novel about a failing factory – the easiest pre-read on this page. The Theory of Constraints shows up everywhere in IT: find the bottleneck, and stop optimizing everything else. Arguably even more relevant today than when it was first written, with AI letting us treat everything like a factory.
- The Tiny MBA
One hundred short lessons you can read in an evening. If you're coming to the course without a business background, this is the fastest way to pick up the vocabulary.
Going Deeper
- The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI, 2019–2025
How we got from autocomplete to agents that ship code, told by the people who built it. I'm folding the recent history of AI into the refreshed curriculum – this is the long version of that story.
- If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
The strongest version of the case that we should be scared. I don't buy all of it (some books are here because they're worth arguing with), but you should know this argument before you put AI in production, not after.
- Apple in China
A technology strategy case for this decade: how Apple built the most sophisticated manufacturing operation on Earth, and what it cost strategically.
- Only the Paranoid Survive
Grove on strategic inflection points – the moments when technology quietly rewrites your industry's rules. Every IT strategy case has one; Grove teaches you to see it coming.
If one of these lands with you, email me – hearing what stuck is the best part of teaching. I'm also always trying to learn and am interested in feedback, so let me know if you think I'm missing anything.