Books that have made me stronger in my work. Part 3. All Things Innovation

This is the third entry of the series, recommending the best non-fiction books I have found useful in my work. Thank you for your interest and feedback - the first article was about books on personal development, the second - on content and product alignment. Each entry covers five books and I am grateful for your suggestions off of the back of the first two articles. Once again, please send me your ideas for this and other lists in the comments. The series will conclude next week with a collection of books on leadership and management. 

We start with, perhaps, the most impressive non-fiction book I read in 2020, written by David Rowan, the founding editor of UK’s Wired magazine and the founder of an exciting Voyagers community (Disclaimer: I am a part of this group). I am grateful that I read Non-Bullshit Innovation: Radical Ideas from the World’s Smartest Minds, because a) its findings and examples could be applied to many sectors, which is important for a fluid, modern, flexible workforce, b) the author tackles the glitzy and sometimes superficial world of ‘innovation conferences’ and ‘innovation grand-sounding titles’ head-on and c) the examples are all based on first-hand experiences and interviews. Whatever industry you belong to, many of the examples collected in this book would speak to you, and many of the takeaways are applicable, actionable and transferable to other sectors.  

Quote: “Innovation isn’t about labs or acquisition funds or job titles or conferences keynotes. It’s about embedding a culture within an organisation that enables internal teams to think and execute quickly and iteratively like the most effective startups”. 

Anything we have in our lives right now has been invented at some point in the past, so the next book discusses lessons humanity can draw from groundbreaking innovations from the past. How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson is full of compelling stories, fascinating anecdotes and surprising discoveries. It taught me that more often than not, the most interesting - and useful - things happen at the intersection of disciplines, something that we in media got to know very well through our own experimental labs, too.    

Quotes: If we think that innovation comes from a lone genius inventing a new technology from scratch, that model naturally steers us toward certain policy decisions, like stronger patent protection. But if we think that innovation comes out of collaborative networks, then we want to support different policies and organizational forms: less rigid patent laws, open standards, employee participation in stock plans, cross-disciplinary connections.

 So how can one develop their detection and perception skills? How do you know where and when to look to identify emerging trends at their earliest, especially if we know that the really innovative things are not always considered such at their very beginning?  This is where the next entry comes in - The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream by a leading US futurist and the founder of Future Today Institute (their newsletter is highly recommended!) Amy Webb. 

Quotes: Organizations that can see trends early enough to take action have first-mover influence. But they can also help to inform and shape the broader context, conversing and collaborating with those in other fields to plan ahead. Too often, leaders ignore the signals, wait too long to take action, or plan for only one scenario. Not only will first-movers create new strategies, thought leadership, hacks, or exploits to align with the trend, they are likely developing third and fourth iterations already.

Two of these trends that have come to dominate the XXI century are the topics of the last two entries of this collection, and they are directly linked to each other - robots and artificial intelligence. 

The first one - on the inevitable robotisation of many aspects of our lives, and  The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment by Martin Ford is a fantastic book to get yourself educated about its broad impact. This technological disruption won’t be cured by additional training or education of the workforce, and the author argues that we as a global society, will have to decide if the future will bring broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. 

Quotes: Acquiring more education and skills will not necessarily offer effective protection against job automation. A great many college-educated, white-collar workers are going to discover that their jobs, too, are squarely in the sights as software automation and predictive algorithms advance rapidly in capability.

Of course, a complex network of machines executing billi0ns of tasks every day is being enabled by the rise of artificial intelligence algorithms and quickly improving machine learning techniques. Amy Webb, whom I have already mentioned earlier, gets the second shout-out for her well-argued and researched book on the key companies (6 in the US and 3 in China - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Apple and Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba) that are moulding the AI world for the human race right now - The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity. The most intriguing part of the book is where the author outlines - in great details and with a dispassionate view - the three scenarios of how AI proliferation could go - optimistic, pragmatic and catastrophic scenarios. This is a must-read, as it also highlights another crucial point in AI development - lots of biases and inequalities can filter though algorithms via their human creators.   

Quotes: It's time to open your eyes and focus on the boulder at the top of the mountain because it’s gaining momentum. It has been moving since Ada Lovelace first imagined a computer that could compose elaborate pieces of music all on its own. It was moving when Alan  Turing asked “Can machines think?” and when John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky gathered together all those men for the Darthouth workshop. It was moving when Watson won Jeopardy and when, not long ago, Deep-Mind beat the world’s  Go champion. It has been moving as you’ve read the pages of this book. Everybody wants to be the hero of their own story. This is your chance. Pick up a pebble. Start up the mountain.    

Thank you for your interest and attention so far - we conclude this series next week with a selection of the best books on leadership and management. Stay tuned and happy reading!