The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by Scott Galloway
This is the story of how print media was left behind.
Category: books
Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David C. Robertson
Fascinating U-turn in the middle…
The Millionaire and the Bard by Andrea Mays
The net result of this book was to instill in me a desire to visit the Folger Library in Washington DC. Henry Folger was Rockefeller’s right-hand man at Standard Oil; Rockefeller as the richest man in the world and one of the richest humans who has ever lived. Folger had the money and power to indulge himself, and his chief indulgence was a burgeoning obsession with Shakespeare. After Shakespeare died, a group of his friends and fellow actors collected his work into a “First Folio” of plays. It’s unlikely that Shakespeare’s plays would persist to this day had it not…
Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore by Arnold Thackray
Moore is famous for the law that bears his name: namely, that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip doubles every 2 years. The “law” originated from Moore’s insatiable love of data, his tendency to take copious notes, his reflective, analytical thinking and his affinity for graphs. Moore made this prediction in 1975 and although it is now generally held to have expired, it held true for 30 years, a testament to Moore’s vision for the field. He predicted “portable communications devices” – phones and so forth. Moore himself seems to have been a staid bit…
Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
One can seethe with rage reading this book.
These days I’m reading about crazy ideas and the people who bring them to life.
There’s no shortage of good ideas. The significance of a technology is not really in the idea; it’s in the execution. A mere idea will not change the world. Good leadership, good communication and faultless and execution will. I’m interested in big ideas: the bigger the better. The conquest of the South Pole, the circumnavigation of the North Pole, the genesis of neural networks, the Theranos and WeWork scams, the world domination of the ubiquitous toy LEGO. I’ve enjoyed biographies of Roald Amundsen, who won the race to the South Pole by stratagem, and of Ernest Shackleton, another polar explorer…