Business and Technology titles ...

I have not blogged about business or technology books in a while.  Here are several that we have ordered recently:

TROUBLEMAKERS by Leslie Berlin is all about “Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age” and as such it focuses on the years from 1969 to 1984.  I was shocked to realize that over the space of a few years (and roughly thirty-five miles) these five major industries were born:  personal computing, video games, biotechnology, venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic. Berlin is Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University and author of The Man Behind the Microchip.  In her new book, TROUBLEMAKERS, she tells the story of several innovators such as “one of seven women among nearly eight hundred graduate engineering students” at Stanford in the late 1960s:  Sandra Kurtzig, who ultimately became the first woman to take a high-tech company public.  Others who are profiled include Bob Taylor (Defense Department and Xerox internet guru); Al Alcorn (video game/Pong designer); Mike Markkula (Apple executive); Niels Reimers (Stanford academic); Robert Swanson (Genentech and venture capital innovator); and Fawn Alvarez (ROLM telecom executive).  TROUBLEMAKERS is truly fascinating reading about the culture, challenges and triumphs associated with a time of dramatic change and will be of special interest to students of business and technological history.  There is an extensive bibliography and notes section.  

A DOZEN LESSONS FOR ENTREPRENEURS written by Tren Griffin and published by Columbia Business School provides a more modern day take on Silicon Valley and venture capitalists, focusing on key attributes of successful start-ups and business ventures. Griffin has interviewed 35 entrepreneurs (such as Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel) and then reviewed their responses for patterns, with factors like markets, mission, and recruiting appearing most often.  Griffin summarizes by saying, “perhaps the playbook of industry disruption requires being naïve enough at the start to question basic assumptions and then staying alive long enough to employ skills that are unique and advantageous in the industry you seek to change.” Griffin has made an effort to include 6 women (of 35 total) amongst those being profiled, well above the industry proportion at senior levels. In addition, he writes in an engaging manner such as when discussing Rich Barton (Expedia, Glassdoor and Zillow) and stressing that acquiring skills may require a path that is nonlinear; “the ‘jungle gym’ replaces the ‘ladder’ as the metaphor for a career.” I have already recommended this book to our business department (there is a nice glossary of terms, too) and I know that the Entrepreneur class is anxious to see the copy we have ordered.   

In THE SENTIENT MACHINE Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition in Austin, Texas, focuses on “the coming age of artificial intelligence.” He opens with a story regarding the happenstance, due to having the right doctor with the right search terms, of finding an effective medical treatment for his extremely painful cluster headache condition.  From there, he refers to the benefit of having machines keep up more effectively than humans with the many medical advances – or their potential contribution in numerous other fields like astronomy, manufacturing, and financial services.  He goes on in Part One to outline the history of our fears about technological change, to explain what AI is, and to acknowledge the concerns expressed by Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others.  In Part Two, he explains that trying to suppress artificial intelligence work, “or subject it to draconian regulation, will be incredibly harmful to us as a civilization.” The final section looks to the future, reflecting on what is uniquely human and what is our purpose. THE SENTIENT MACHINE contains suggestions for further reading, extensive notes and a detailed index.

Looking for other new books on business and technology? Try Vivek Wadhwa’s DRIVER IN THE DRIVERLESS CAR  -- he contributes to pbsNewsHour and was featured in this report on the jobless future in August, 2017 OR look for HIT REFRESH by Satya Nadella about Microsoft. And you can soon check out GREAT AT WORK by Morten T. Hansen who just crafted a wonderful piece about “The Key to Success? Doing Less” in The Wall Street Journal. As always, if you have a title to suggest, please let us know.