Alistair Davidson, Harvey Gellman, and Mary Chung are Toronto computer mavens; what they ask in Riding the Tiger is how a manager thrown into a data project can do the job well.

Their answer is hard to understand. Presented via the case of a troubled bank that is not keeping up with its data needs, the authors offer platitudes like “Most companies do themselves more harm by being penny wise and pound foolish.” They accompany these bits of unsurprising wisdom with boxed “tiger pearls:” e.g., “Good strategies are about what you are not going to do.”

Advice on computer projects is abundant in the literature of project management. Riding the Tiger’s advice is unassailable – but also obvious. Does a manager need to be told that expectations should be defined, that folks have to work together, and that senior managmement should be behind a given project? Within the lists of the obvious are genuinely good ideas, yet it is irritating to have to pick through such cute sayings as “an organization should learn from its own best practices….Identify yours and propagate them,” in order to find them.

Aphoristic business writing is a fashion. Academic business journals are filled with advice to go forth and contemplate. Perhaps the saving grace of Riding the Tiger is that readers may absorb such thoughts as “you can’t compress thinking time,” and “build a prototype to discover the system’s weaknesses,” and emerge with a deep understanding of what it means to be well shod, data-wise. Yet managers whose time does need compressing and who are impatient with motivational messages with the weight of fortune cookies may look elsewhere for advice.