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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…
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…

Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre
We’re all doomed, was my internal head-shaking reaction, when I read this very unsettling book. Ben Goldacre is a British physician with a wicked sense of humour. In Bad Pharma he takes aim at the unholy and uneasy alliance of pharma companies, regulatory bodies, journal editors and even physicians who conspire to sell drugs to patients. If the drugs are efficacious and safe, so much the better. If not: we have a pill for that. Goldacre credibly presents the strategies deployed to pass off good results as bad. The first eye-opening point for me was: why are drugs always compared…