featured:
“An incomplete list of things invented at Bell Labs during its heyday: lasers, fiberoptic cables, satellite communications, cell phones, the C programming language, solar panels.
My favorite story in here: John Bardeen and Walter Brattain plug away for years to find the right materials to create the first functioning transistor. Their boss William Shockley, who had laid some of the theoretical framework for their achievement, gets angry about not receiving enough credit. So he stays up all night in a hotel room on New Year’s Eve writing out 30 pages of notes describing a better approach, and is able to prove out the concept in a few months. His version becomes the standard.
The book will get you thinking about innovation and the circumstances that lead to it. Much is a reinforcement of the now-fashionable idea that all invention is iteration, not the solitary genius model you might have learned in school. But that new dogma is also challenged, or at least tempered. Consider Claude Shannon, who showed up for work whenever, spent much of his time creating electromechanical mice and riding around the office on a unicycle, and knocked out the whole foundation of Information Theory in between games of chess.”
Roger Taylor
“There’s one main theme to Essentialism: prioritizing the important things and throwing away the rest. While this sounds simple in concept, whether in a professional or personal context, we tend to often prioritize incorrectly or choose to include non-important tasks due to outside pressures. The audiobook weighs in at over 6 hours for this central topic, so it definitely gets repetitive, but the overall message is a good one.”
Logic and Design, Revised: In Art, Science, and Mathematics
“The book is a series of vignettes, each of which is comprised of unique ideas and concepts presented visually, non-visually, or sometimes both at once. The idea behind this approach is to force the reader to think laterally when approaching both visual and non-visual problems, and understand how the concepts presented aid in pattern recognition, problem solving, and logical thinking in other disciplines.”
Kevin Olds
The Disruption Machine (The New Yorker)
by Jill Lepore
Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of ‘Disruptive Innovation’
“Jill Lepore’s takedown of “disruptive innovation,” and some of the shaky scholarship and unstated assumptions on which it is based.
And for balance, here’s Innovator’s Dilemma author Clayton Christensen’s response to her criticisms.“
Roger Taylor
Creating Magic: 10 Common Sense Leadership Strategies from a Life at Disney
by Lee Cockrell (available on Audible)
“Advice from a longtime VP of Disney’s operations on how to be a great caretaker of your realm of responsibility, whether you’re in charge of a single table at a restaurant, or a multinational company. There are a lot of obvious points in how to serve well, but they’re good reminders and have the added oomph of being backed by a man with an impressive track record. There are a lot of practical examples of how to achieve that sometimes vague hallmark of “going above and beyond”.”
Brian Herbert
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
by Tony Hsieh (available on Audible)
“Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness begins with the story of his life. His story is interesting and largely highlights his love of entrepreneurship starting at an early age. He details his various business endeavors through the years, along with what makes him tick and the decisions that were made. As the book shifts to his later companies, LinkExchange and Zappos, he explores the importance of company culture and his ideas for breeding a great culture. To finish the book, he talks about his current quest: maximizing human happiness.”
Matt Kemmerer
