Why is there a page called Bookshelf?
I’ve read a good number of books, but only a subset remain on my bookshelf. For instance, I love graphic novels, but I pass them on to friends. They entertain, but in general they don’t stay on the bookshelf. When I say bookshelf that’s probably inaccurate for a few reasons.
Some of the older books remain in crates at my parents house from my move to Hong Kong, but are still valued. I’ve managed to repurchase some of these again by accident. Others that I tend to use for work are in the bookcase in my living room, so bookshelves rather than a bookshelf. I tried using ebooks. That was fine or entertainment, but for some reason I didn’t retain any of the content on this electronic bookshelf.
I’ll be updating this bookshelf page over time, so think of it as a living document. (I last updated Bookshelf on January 11, 2026).
Behaviour change
Behaviour change is important to so many things now: design, new product development, advertising and service provision. This is why it has become a major part of my bookshelf.
Deep Simplicity: Chaos Complexity and the Emergence of Life by John Gribbin I first came across Deep Simplicity from the interest in chaos theory and fractals. This book is one of a number of popular science books which have sold well, providing the answers to big questions for a society that has never been more divorced from both science and religion. I revisited Deep Simplicity because the book shows how small simple rules can develop into complex behaviour. This complex behaviour then provides an analogue to understand the `unforeseen consequences’ that drive a lot of things that currently interest me like behavioural economics. I am careful not to take the conclusions too far as I still believe in free will. Models only work at scale.
Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do by B.J. Fogg. Fogg’s book and foundational work on captology is the foundation for a lot of modern products from apps you can’t put down to health tech. I recently re-read it and wrote my take on it here.
Tiny Habits by B.J. Fogg – Fogg wrote this consumer-friendly book on personal behaviour change.
China
East and Southeast Asia went from being the poorest region of the world in the immediate aftermath of world war 2, to the most dynamic region today. China and the overseas Chinese community is a key piece in this puzzle. China makes up a good chunk of my bookshelf.
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos. Osnos does a good job of catching the ambition of the Chinese people. If the book has a flaw, it is in its lack of real understanding of Premier Xi Jingping and his administration.
Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg. Both of them are academics. Their book highlights how China is influencing and reshaping the world outside China. Through engagement with elites, multilateral bodies and its own diaspora with focus and scale. I reviewed it in more depth here.
What Chinese Want by Tom Doctoroff. From 1994 to 2016 Doctoroff worked for J Walter Thompson as a client services lead covering Greater China markets. Initially he was based in Hong Kong and then he moved to Shanghai. What Chinese Want is a distillation of everything Doctoroff learned delivering work in China for the likes of Kraft and Kimberley Clark. Firstly, few people get that opportunity immerse themselves in a market, with one agency in the way that Doctoroff managed to do. Secondly, Doctoroff manages to articulate his thoughts in knowledge in a manner that I would expect from a senior strategist; rather than someone from the client services side of the business. I got this book soon after I started working in Hong Kong and it served me really during my time in China and afterwards when I worked on Huawei’s then fast-growing smartphone business.
Chinese Antitrust Exceptionalism by Angela Zhang sounds exceptionally dry to the uninitiated. But if like me, you’ve worked on brands like Qualcomm, Huawei or GSK you realise how much of an impact China’s regulatory environment can have on your client’s success. Zhang breaks down the history of China’s antitrust regulatory environment, how it works within China’s power structures and how it differs from the US model. What becomes apparent is that Chinese power isn’t monolithic and that China is weaponising antitrust legislation for strategic and policy goals rather than consumer benefit. It is important for everything from technology to the millions of COVID deaths that happened in China due to a lack of effective vaccines. Zhang’s book won awards when it first came out in 2021, and is still valuable now given the relatively static US-China policy views.
Design
Design isn’t just making a thing. But an expression of an idea, a philosophy and an embodiment of quality. Poor design indicates poor thinking, a flawed or lack of philosophy behind the product and goes hand in hand with poor quality. With that in mind, I have always thought that the thinking behind design is similar to the thinking behind strategy. And sometimes we just need nice things around us. That’s why design gets a place on my bookshelf.
8vo On the Outside by Mark Holt and Hamish Muir – 8vo was one of the trendsetting graphic design outfits of the 80s and 1990s. They did a lot of pioneering work on information design pre-internet. If you were an early Orange mobile phone customer – they designed your bill. If you read magazines like iD or other publications that took iD as their role model, then the typography usually owes a debt to 8vo. Both the work the minutiae of running an agency are fascinating.
Creating a brand identity by Catherine Slade-Brooking – although its orientated towards graphic designers this is an excellent guide to process, methodology and avoiding pitfalls in crafting a brand identity.
Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams edited by Klaus Klemp and Keiko Ueki-Polet. One of the best works cataloguing the work of Dieter Rams. Rams philosophy of good design does a lot to inform us of what good strategy should exhibit
My Rugged 211 by Minoru Onozato. I consider curation to be a type of design. Onozato-san was the founder and long-time editor of Japanese style magazine Free & Easy. Free & Easy also extended itself into retail. Its impact on the menswear fashion world was as big as Vogue was for womenswear. All of it came from his very particular vision on ‘rugged’ items. A mix of new and vintage things that reflected quality and items imbued with stories. The 211 came from Onozato’s constant pruning and refining of his collection. When he got above 211 items, the excess would be sold or given away. More on the book here. Free & Easy has closed down, but its spirit lives on in HailMary – a magazine set up by many of the editorial staff.
teamLab Continuity edited by Kari G Oen and Clare Jacobson – teamLab is a a Japanese collective that have been going since 2001, they’re work crosses boundaries between art and design. The digital world and the real world. Art often informs the future that we create, which is why I think teamLab’s work is so important.
The Pentagram Papers. Pentagram is a UK-based design agency. They periodically published brochures covering esoteric subjects as a form of inspirational materials. The brochures were collated in this handy volume.
Type Matters by Jim Williams. Typography is under examined in digital design projects. Veteran graphic designer put together an accessible syllabus on typography and graphic design in its purest sense. More here.
Economics / Finance
1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History by Andrew Ross Sorkin was a decade in the writing following on from his previous book Too Big To Fail about the 2008 financial crisis. Sorkin makes the story readable despite the book being chunky enough to be a door stop. He does so by telling the stories of the individuals involved. In doing so he also challenges many of our learned assumptions about the crisis. The timing of its release while concerns turn towards an AI driven stock market bubble gives it addition relevance.
Panic! edited by Michael Lewis. Michael Lewis became famous when he wrote an account of his career in investment banking in Liar’s Poker. His career overlapped with the 1987 financial crash. Since then he has been a writer who has documented key turns in the economy. Because of this background Lewis was the ideal person to curate a history of financial crisis from contemporary accounts at the time. Panic! covers the 1987 financial crash, the 1998 debt crisis, the dot com bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8. I read the book in short bursts mainly due to asks on my time, rather than the nature of the book. I didn’t put this in the technology and economics sub-section of this bookshelf because it covered more than technology related market events. But the publication of Pegasus Research’s iconic quantitative research on ‘burn rates’ in March 2000 on dot.com company burn rates makes it highly relevant to revisit when we are in hype cycles such as those surrounding health tech, fintech, crypto and more – if for no other reason than pointing out the folly of trying to pick winners in hype-driven public markets with a high degree of opacity.
Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything. Mazzucato’s work was reflected in the Labour Party’s economic manifesto during the 2024 general election. The book does a good job of diagnosing the current challenges that the UK economy faces at the present time. More on the book here.
Engineering
In an Irish household up until the present you might have come across the phrase ‘calling’. As in ‘Bridget’s older brother had a calling to become a priest’. My Dad’s calling is as an engineer. He grew up as the middle son on a small farm in the west of Ireland. He was never going to inherit the farm. As a small child he took an interest in things, making his own cart to help with chores and tinkering with things to get them working. He never went to university but instead served a four-year apprenticeship working for what was the Irish Sugar Company. He was servicing and making machinery out of parts that they had to hand, and manufactured in their own machine shop. This weird mix of devices were used in an experimental farm in peat land exhausted from harvesting by Bord na Móna. He got seriously ill as a travelling repair man for Massey Ferguson‘s range of industrial and agricultural machinery, living out of a suitcase and a Commer van, while staying in some of Ireland’s best hotels. He went on to help build ballistic missile carrying nuclear submarines, and vessels that served in the Falklands conflict. He maintained at least one car manufacturing plant, a liquid packaging plant and a paper mill during scheduled shutdown. Eventually he ended up working in plant hire.
He fabricated fixes to various machines, the original manufacturers then paid my Dad’s boss and patented those innovations without his name appearing on the patents. He gave me an appreciation (if not the talent) for engineering whether it’s Swiss watches or power stations. My time working in the petrochemical industry was partly down to his influence.
Modern Petroleum Technology by the Institute of Petroleum takes you through all the stages of the oil industry. From understanding the geology, right the way through to refining oil for chemical feedstocks. The engineering solutions outlined in of themselves highlight solutions to future problems that we’ll have with geothermal energy to hydrogen fuel cells. It also brings home the ubiquity of oil in our lives. Oil isn’t just about home heating oil, fuel for the car or the airplane, but the polymer covered batteries and circuit boards in the computer I type this on.
Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Getting stuff out of meetings
The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless – think of this as a tool box for moving forward workshops, product development meetings etc.
History
Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and The Great Secret of China by Simon Winchester. English academic Needham looked to preserve the history of China’s scientific and inventive accomplishments during world war 2. From his work we get a different narrative about inventions, compared to the one that you and I probably learned at school. It adds evidence to the hypothesis that innovations have their time and the inevitable progression of technology (Kevin Kelly’s technium) almost has a life of its own. More here.
Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark – I’ve got a lightly worn soft back edition of the book that mirrored and complemented Clark’s tale of western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. It is a beautiful and coherent portrayal of European history. I can also recommend the series which is available on DVD. The BBC revisited this with a portfolio of presenters in the TV series Civilisations – which felt dumbed down for a modern audience.
Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail’72 by Hunter S Thompson. Less well known than Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Hells Angels. Thompson embedded with the political media for Rolling Stone magazine. He talks extensively about the Democratic party primaries used to find a candidate to run against Richard Nixon. What results is a classic example of the new journalism pioneered by Tom Wolfe and Thompson. Thompson opening up the inner workings of the body politic for our own amazement and curiosity. Politics doesn’t come off well from the experience.
Ireland by Robert Kee. My Dad bought this book for me. It was designed to give me a sense of my own history. This book was an accompaniment to Ireland – A Television History. A thirteen-part series narrated by Robert Kee. Kee’s TV series isn’t available on Blu-Ray or DVD; but if you poke around on YouTube, you may be in luck. Having the book and the show authored by Kee meant that both worked really well with each other. Despite Kee’s sterling efforts, there is a still a lack of understanding of Irish history in Britain.
Michael Collins by Tim Pat Coogan. Collins is was founding father of modern Ireland. He died at the age of 32 and was a complex person, a polymath and military figure. His actions were subsequently studied by other countries leaders including Yatzik Shamir and Mao Zedong during their fight for change. Coogan provides a comprehensive, authoritative and independent biography of Collins.
Six Days – How the 1967 war shaped the Middle East by Jeremy Bowen. BBC journalist Bowen, provides a well-researched complex recounting of the six-day war that shaped the geography of the modern Middle East. More here.
The Sunday Times Investigates: Reporting That Made History – This is a collection of the biggest stories investigated by the Sunday Times over five decades of the Insights team. Each story has an introduction to the impact that the story had and would have merited a paperback book in itself. They are just a nice length to read before bed each night. There are a wide range of stories covered including the Cambridge Three spy ring focusing on Kim Philly, the Thalidomide scandal. The Thalidomide section shocked me as it demonstrated Grunenthal’s ruthlessness to cover up the scandal, foreshadowing the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma by decades. Their confirmation of the Israeli nuclear weapons programme is the real stand-out piece of reporting. The Cash for Questions sting operation of 1994 helped usher in the first Blair government as John Major’s MPs were implicated in a willingness to take bribes. This was mirrored by the FIFA investigation some 20 years later. Less impactful at the time, but just as important from a historic point of view are investigations in to how the government failed during the COVID epidemic in 2019 and investigation of SAS war crimes sounding the war on terror. The only story I consider not making the cut is their coverage of Colonel Gaddafi’s attempt to help fund the National Union of Mineworkers strike in 1984-85. I didn’t think that it proved anything significant beyond a meeting having taken place between a financier and the union. It also didn’t impact the broader narrative to sway more people to the government’s side. The book makes an interesting historical curio on my bookshelf, what I also found interesting is how the writing becomes more accessible over time. The Cambridge Three story and Thalidomide were both stories for middle brow readers.
The Bhutto Dynasty by Owen Bennett-Jones. I knew very little about Pakistan and for that fact alone, it would have earned a place on my bookshelf. The story of the Bhutto family is a story of fierce ambition with bursts of hubris. But it is also the tale of the moghul empire of pre-Raj India, British rule and post-colonial Pakistan. More here.
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. The author of Liar’s Poker on Donald Trump and the role of government. Lewis’ book is much more than a history, it is a repudiation of neo-liberalism and the Chicago school. More here.
The World At War by Mark Arnold-Foster – the book accompanied at TV series of the same name that featured real world accounts from people at the time still alive to remember and recall the events. The book tells the story in a balanced way, but with a definite British view point. I read this as a child and recently when I was back at my parents one Christmas.
Management
Good to Great by Jim Collins. Based on research conducted since the late 1980s. Collins earned his place on my bookshelf with its common sense advice backed by research.
Marketing
I’d put some marketing-specific recommendations for reading materials here. It pulled in books from different disciplines that would work to inspire a marketer and provide them with effective tools. There is some overlap with this page. The reality is that that I could write up a bookcase worth of marketing books at the very least rather than having them part of this metaphorical bookshelf.
Buying In by Rob Walker. Walker focuses on what makes a brand. It touches on the product, how consumers use the product. The nature of the product of the business in terms of ‘authenticity’ and lastly the impact of marketing. More on this book.
Consumerology by Philip Graves. Marketing psychology consultant Graves looks at the different marketer and consumer biases that can adversely affect research projects. His AFECT research criteria is a useful way to assess the relative effectiveness of a given research project for marketers. More here.
Decoded by Phil Barden. Barden distills marketing thinking around behavioural change and consumer behaviour into an easy to digest book that is ideal for marketers at the start of their career. It works well as a primer for Phil Graves Consumerology and Sharp’s How Brands Grow. More in my review here.
Eat Your Greens edited by Wiemer Snijders is a series of short essays from well known names in advertising creative, account planning, branding, behavioural science and marketing. Its a good light read for marketers at all experience levels. I reviewed in more depth here.
eMarketing eXcellence by Dave Chaffey and PR Smith. Like Internet Marketing by Chaffey, this is a good primer on digital marketing for marketers. PR Smith brings his expertise in terms of environment and analysis to this work.
How Brands Grow part 1 and part 2 by Byron Sharp is the modern marketers bible for B2C brands of various stripes. Sharp and his colleagues distill down decades of evidence-based research that has been carried out by Ehrensberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science attached to the University of South Australia. (Reading the books gives you a sense of how marketing technology is often at odds with the task of achieving efficient and effective marketing campaigns. These tools are built and designed by engineers rather than being guided by marketing science.)
The research institute has got a who’s who of corporate sponsors supporting their work and using their data:
- General Mills
- Grupo Bimbo
- Procter & Gamble
- Red Bull
- Unilever
How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie. This book is a guide to customer relationship management, community management and marketing decades before those terms came into existence.
Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice by Dave Chaffey, Richard Mayer, Mr Kevin Johnston and Fiona Ellis-Chadwick. Dave Chaffey is a bit of a legend when it comes to internet marketing. This book is a good primer for marketers on digital marketing.
Planners Guide by JWT London. I work as an account planner. A career path that was founded in London sometime in the mid 1960s. Account planning is a role focused on bringing the consumer into creative thinking. UK ad agency Boase Massimi Pollitt (BMP) are credited with having invented account planning. It was J Walter Thompson (JWT) that gave account planning its name later that year. As is true with the story with many innovations, a similar process happened in Australia at the same time. Both were completely unconnected to each other. Planners Guide by JWT London was originally written in March 1974. It codified the planners role and is still very relevant today. It is the ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ of my profession. It was originally typed up and printed out using a plastic ring binder to hold it together. Eventually the guide seems to have escaped the agency as a photocopy of the original printed copy. It circulated around the industry and was eventually scanned and put online in various places. You can find a good copy here.
The Dentsu Way by Kotaro Sugiyama and Tim Andree highlighted Dentsu’s Cross Switch approach. Much of marketing is very much about silos, if someone talks about multichannel it usually means online with a fig leaf of offline brand advertising. Sugiyama-san and Andree outline a long running more integrated approach to marketing communications. It is remarkably different to most agencies who go with ‘digital is the answer, now what’s the question’. Many similar books are self-serving pieces of agency marketing, but this isn’t, which is why it earned a place on my bookshelf.
The Handbook of Online and Social Media Research: Tools and Techniques for Market Researchers by Ray Poynter. I first reviewed Poynter’s book on this blog back in 2010 and it has weathered that time exceptionally well. One of the things that sets it up so well is that Poynter thought about online in a very wide way, rather than falling into the trap of obsessing about insights derived from social media. I still dip back into it on a regular basis. So it goes on and off my bookshelf on a regular basis.
Philosophy
Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium by Lucius Annaeus Seneca. His letters contain all the wisdom and the poise to enable any inquisitive soul to acquire self control, to endure with dignity the burdens of misfortune, to take success and fame with humbleness and cynicism.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius – Aurelius was the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher. Meditations is a set of reflections and exercises that he developed as he sought to understand himself and the universe around him. They were designed to increase his resilience, providing personal consolation and encouragement. Which is the reason why they have been revisited through the ages.
The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau. Despite being over 50 years old as a book, Kapleau still provides the western reader with the best comprehensive yet accessible guide to zen buddhism.
Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig. I’ve reread this book several times and some of the best times I had in college was discussing it with my house mates during the final year of my degree. ‘Zen’ was our shorthand for the book and the way we used it to reflect on the things going on around us. It’s a great read on many levels. My original copy, was held together by sellotape for many years until it could no longer retain the pages. I am now on my third copy. In the book, Pirsig provides a narrative account of his own pursuit to discover the nature of quality. He paid a high price, which is outlined in the book. In a world of iterative builds on products and ‘move fast and break things’; an understanding of quality has never been more important. Pirsig wrote his book when the most complicated objects in people’s homes where the car in the garage, the TV in the lounge. A sowing machine periodically removed from the cupboard and watch on their wrist. But that doesn’t mean the need for quality has diminished, on the contrary it has increased as fewer objects seem to now possess it.
Psychology
The Mind Is Flat by Nick Chater. In this book Chater posits that humans at the bottom of it all ‘story-spinning improvisers. That they interpret and alter their interpretation of the world in the moment. This idea immediately changes our understanding of how our reality, media and advertising work.
Security
Counterinsurgency by David Kilcullen. I bought several books on the recommendation of friends during the COVD lockdown and am slowly whittling my way through the pile, Counterinsurgency was one of them. It’s a collection of writings by Australian academic David Kilcullen, who advised the US government from 2005 – 2006 about Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is a collection of his writings from articles in military journals repeating many of the lessons learned in the past about fighting against guerrillas to Indonesian history. I had done some campaigns in Indonesia in the past for Qualcomm and Indofoods, so was interested in the post-independence history within it at the time. More about the book here.
Strategy
Blue Ocean Strategy by W Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. Back when I read the book I summarised as: The book’s premise is that most business strategy books are about conflict and competition and this is wasteful. Instead it provides a framework for strategists to Think Different and differentiate their businesses instead. What’s interesting, but not discussed by the authors is how their work is received by the kind of type-A personalities typically found at the top of businesses. It is well worth having on your bookshelf though.
Cultural Strategy by Douglas Holt and Douglas Cameron. Holt and Cameron worked at the time of writing for the Cultural Strategy Group. The book posits that a distinctive position can result in a successful company. They look to back this into the company culture itself rather than as a wrapper around a product. More on it here.
Science, Strategy and War – The strategic theory of John Boyd by Frans P.B. Osinga. Osinga provides context of Boyd’s thinking including how it sprang out of his combat experience. He then talks about the meta analysis of other strategists that Boyd undertook and where he learned from other disciplines including social science, philosophy and scientific theory. John Boyd is a largely mis-understood military strategist whose ideas are increasingly being used out of context in the realms of business and marketing. More on Science, Strategy and War here.
The Art of War by Sun Tzu – Yes I know that applying military thinking to business strategy is a dangerous rabbit hole to go down. But I think that this book is powerful because it acts as a framework to think about problems rather than suggesting answers. I go back and re-read this every so often for inspiration, which it has such a prominent place on my bookshelf.
The Manager’s Guide to Systems Practice: Making Sense of Complex Problems by Frank Stowell and Christine Welch – the book outlines a framework for looking at the world that helps in problem solving. It has a good base given that the authors provide a balanced view of different systems thinking approaches. I liked the book as it eases you into systems thinking and then ramps up your learning. That learning curve alone makes this essential for my bookshelf.
Technology library
Over time I have built up a bit of a library that covered the technology sector. I had an interest in innovation in college and technology was changing in obvious ways. I had access to JANET before the internet was a consumer product in the UK. I have broken the technology section of my bookshelf down into more depth below
Technology and economics
Handbook Of The Economics Of Innovation And Technological Change edited by Paul Stoneman. Stoneman curated a selection of essays that are still as relevant today as they were when I bought this book at a discount book store when I was in college. it seems to be very underrated, not even meriting a single Amazon review.
New Rules for the New Economy by Kevin Kelly – this was pretty much a bible-like publication during the dot com boom. It fed of the utopian post-counterculture vision that the hippies brought to Silicon Valley. But of course, there aren’t perfect markets and consumers don’t have perfect knowledge.
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption by Sebastian Mallaby – this book provides a history of Silicon Valley from the perspective of the venture capital industry that helped finance it. Some of the content is very self congratulatory, such as expansion into China, but overall its a great comprehensive read and an interesting item for the technology section of your bookshelf.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert J. Gordon. Published as part of the Princeton Economic History of The Western World, it was a surprise breakout hit. It became a New York Times bestseller at the time of its release in 2015 and got awards from the Financial Times. It is a weighty tome that took me longer to read than I care to admit, despite being off my bookshelf and by my bed. In it economist looks at how technology and innovation impacted economic growth since the American civil war. Its an interesting book that provides difficult reading for techno-optimists. TL;DR – modern technology didn’t drive as much growth as we think. Incomes have been stagnant with some noticeable peaks for longer than we thought. I reviewed it in a bit more depth here.
Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler. Kessler was a peer of Henry Blodget, Mary Meaker and Jack Grubman. He still invests and writes the occasional op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. In Wall Street Meat Kessler tells the insanity of the original internet bubble from the finance side.
Technology and history
Technology and history is what started me on my career journey during my time at college to today. I loved the Apple PowerBook that I used in college and immediately after. I was inspired by reading Byte, Dr Dobbs Journal (DDJ) and Wired magazines in the college library. I was also inspired by books about Silicon Valley. Specifically one book: Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely was something so different to what I’d been used to. I’d worked in industry, but hadn’t experienced anything like this. Over time, technology and history built up its own section on my bookshelf.
Architects Of The Web by Robert H. Reid. He wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics. It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged during the late 1990s and see how the future has changed. Reid wasn’t a technology writer by trade, but seems to have caught the bug. Since writing this, he went on to write three Silicon Valley based novels. I have no idea if they are any good.
Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. At the time of writing this book Negroponte was at the top of the digital world. He headed up MIT Media Lab, wrote for Wired and was widely quoted in media around the world. Negroponte did work that foreshadowed in-car sat navigation devices, Google Street View and the modern stylus-less touch screen. Some of the ideas in his book around online media and cord cutting was on the money, at the time it would have been on the bookshelf of politicians, marketers, financiers and technologists. More on Being Digital here.
The Big Score by Michael Malone covers a quarter century of Silicon Valley history from the fallout of the traitorous eight who left Shockley Semiconductor to just before the launch of the Apple Macintosh. First published in 1985, it gives a good idea of how the first generation of Silicon Valley movers-and-shakers saw themselves. It is unfiltered by PR people. At the time Malone had been a beat reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and had grown up in the Valley. In his later books he treated people like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard more like august pillars of the community. In The Big Score, he points out their many good factors, but also the social conservativism – endemic to mid-century America. Malone also touches on the Silicon Valley underbelly of hard drinking, hard drugs, broken marriages and endemic industrial espionage.
Bill and Dave by Michael Malone tells the story of Silicon Valley pioneers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Nowadays people think of them as just a brand of laptops or printers. But Hewlett Packard was much more. They pioneered the Silicon Valley start-up, their successor businesses Agilient, HPE and HP. Bill and Dave’s biggest impact was in Silicon Valley culture and law. They built the company in a garage and started the egalitarian culture with The HP Way. That alone would earn Bill and Dave a space on the bookshelf. More on Bill and Dave here.
Chip War by Chris Miller covers the cold war from the Soviet Union to present-day China through the lens of the semiconductor industry. Unlike most of the other books in this Technology and history section, the author wasn’t a Silicon Valley insider or longtime resident. That distance allowed him to write a vast history that ended up being shortlisted by the FT as one of their business books of the year.
Dogfight – Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands. The book is undemanding to read but doesn’t give insight in the way that other works like Insanely Great, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Accidental Empires did. Part of this might be down to the highly orchestrated public relations campaigns happening at the time. (Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007). Instead Vogelstein documents developments that I had largely forgotten about like music labels launching albums as multimedia apps on the new iPhone ecosystem. It’s a workman-like if uninspiring document.
From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture by Theodore Roszak – back in 2008, I wrote a post about a little known 64-page essay pamphlet that outlined the personal memories of a Stanford academic who saw how the counterculture influenced, and gave way to yuppie culture in Silicon Valley. It now costs over £300 on the Amazon UK site.
Google Hacks by by Rael Dornfest, Paul Bausch and Tara Calishain. So five years ago this book would have been in a section called tools. The problem is that a lot of the ‘hacks’ in this book have been shut down by Google as it grew larger and become less Googly. Instead the book has become an artefact of what power netizens have lost. A number of the ideas in there sound like they might make good start-up concepts in themselves; often an idea needs a few attempts before it becomes a business. Skype built on a long line of voice over IP clients, WhatsApp, Signal and Microsoft Teams owe a huge debt to countless IRC and instant messaging clients. Google Talk died in 2013 when they decided to no longer support the XMPP standard. Google Blog Search was shut down in 2011., Google Base was a way of getting documents, images and spreadsheets directly into Google. Google Reader shut down in 2013, after it had devastated the market for RSS readers – RSS newsreaders survive as a cottage industry thanks to the likes of Newsblur. Google Reader had a bookmarking service in it as well, where users lost stored articles when it closed down. Google Desktop provided Google smarts to searching a journaled version of your computer’s hard drive was discontinued by 2011.
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Joe Gertner – Before there was Silicon Valley there was Thomas Edison and the Bell Telephone Company. A monopoly on telecommunications allowed Bell Telephone to invest in deep research. Gertner pulls together a history that starts to fall down when covering the break up of AT&T in 1984. More on my initial reading of the book here.
The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. Pretty much every book that Lewis writes will compare unfavourably to his first book Liar’s Poker, but that book doesn’t mean that The New, New Thing shouldn’t be read. The book profiles Jim Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and aimed at the time to turn the healthcare industry with a new project. Lewis is capturing Clark when he is past his prime from a creative point of view. What Lewis does capture is the optimism and hubris in Silicon Valley that it can change anything.
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. I used to work on the Enron account at my first agency that I worked at. We were promoting Enron’s broadband exchange offering. They explained it to me. It made no sense. In this book Enron’s forays into the telecoms sector was part of a wider story of technology, financial wizardry and magical thinking. Eventually it all came crashing down. It seems to be ancient history and then you read the FT coverage on Wirecard.
What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff. John Markoff is one of the titans of reporting on the business of technology alongside Steve Lohr and Walt Mossberg. In this book Markoff draws a line between the counterculture of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution through to Web 2.0. In many respects it is complementary to Roszak’s From Satori to Silicon Valley
Technology and ideas
Closing the Innovation Gap by Judy Estrin. Estrin wrote this book in 2008, where she outlined how soft innovation had taken over the hard innovation previously done in Silicon Valley. The idea of soft innovation (like my previous employer Yahoo!) was an interesting concept. We see it playing out today as the world tries to catch up with China and Taiwan in certain technology areas. More here.
Technology and media
It took the best part of a century to refine the art of the cinema from photography to storytelling and everything in between. Silicon Valley itself has evolved from hard technology to a media industry as innovation moved away from base hardware to focus several layers of abstraction higher. That’s why it occupies a section on my bookshelf.
Burn Rate by Michael Wolff. Wolff was a successful publisher who decided to move into new media in the 1990s in ‘Silicon Alley’ era New York. He shares in the who went through the trials and tribulations of getting funding and the eventual demise of Wolff New Media. He has continued to write books and provide commentary in the US media.
MIT’s Henry Jenkins – Convergence: Where new and old media collide talks about how technology is influencing the creation and dissemination of media. He starts by looking at how media has become multichannel, for example Star Wars has been animation, films, books, games and web content. Telling a story has moved to leaving bread crumbs and staying just ahead of audience collaborative discovery. More here.
Tim Hwang puts together what insiders know about the online advertising industry and advertising technology or adtech. Subprime Attention Crisis is more of a long essay than a book per se but it’s built on really well-done desk research. Secondly Hwang has a background in public policy at Google and technology policy related think tanks. You can read more about his book here in my review.
Technology and privacy
In an era where we have seen attitudes change from women being concerned about stalkers using where 2.0 services to young adults wanting connections knowing where they are at all times, I do wonder if the greatest threats to privacy is societal attitudes and if this section of the bookshelf will seem outmoded as a distinction in time?
Crypto by Steven Levy. which charted the development of civilian cryptography. If you’ve ever bought anything online you’ve benefited from cryptography. And the reason why you could do this is due to the determination of hackers, geeks and hippies that fought the government and the intelligence services. Given government’s increasingly authoritarian tone and their new desire to have crackable encryption, this work is more important than ever. More here.
Dark Wire – an interesting counterpoint to Levy’s Crypto, Cox’ Dark Wire tells the tale of how governments subverted the encrypted messaging apps used by criminals and created a legal framework to come after privacy orientated services like Signal and WhatsApp in the future. Joseph Cox was one of the journalists whose work I followed on Vice News. He specialises in information security related journalism and turns out the kind of features that would have been a cover story on Wired magazine back in the day. With the implosion of Vice Media, he now writes for his own publication: 404 Media. Dark Wire follows the story of four encrypted messaging platforms, with the main focus being on Anon. Anon is a digital cuckoo’s egg. An encrypted messaging service designed for criminals, ran as an arms length front company for the FBI. Cox tells the complex story in a taunt in-depth account that brings it all to life.
Books about tools
Books that I have found which aided in personal productivity, getting stuff done or thinking myself out of problems. I don’t necessarily read these books from end-to-end but dip into them which is why they’ve earned a place on my bookshelf.
Mac Hacks – Chris Seibold’s book is a handy primer for newbie Mac users. I’ve given out several copies of this over the years and keep one at home. Unfortunately Seibold no longer seems to be writing books for O’Reilly any more.
Trends old and new
Whilst I am skeptical about a lot of trend forecasters, they are important for the framing that they provide marketers and business thinkers. Here are some of the trend books that were worthwhile reading from my bookshelf.
Megatrends by John Naisbitt. Megatrends was based on ten years of academic research and ended up being the New York Times best-seller list for two years following its publication in 1982. Along with Alvin Toffler, Naisbitt was a centrist voice who looked to remould institutions to allow them to better serve use in the future. It is interesting reading now, given the pervasive nature of technology. More here.
Paradigm Shift by Don Tapscott. Paradigm Shift was required reading when I was in college and was one of the most read books on my bookshelf back then. Many of the important concepts such as enterprise collaboration and the co-opting of consumers in the production process have been amplified by technology. Tapscott earned a permanent place on the bookshelf.
Books that aid writing
Writing is a key part of my job, and of this blog. I won’t say that I am a great writer, or a good writer for that matter. But I have tried to focus on being an effective writer in my professional career. On my bookshelf are some items that have helped me with this process.
How to Write a Good Advertisement: a short course in copywriting by Victor O. Schwab. During the CoVID lockdown, I picked up several books on my craft. This was one of them. Schwab wrote this book in 1962, when his audience would have been predominantly writing advertising copy for campaigns run predominantly in newspapers – but all of the principles in the book remain solid. You can read more about what I thought about the book here.
How To Write A Thesis by Umberto Eco. Eco’s book is a really good guide to collecting one’s thoughts and presenting facts gained through a comprehensive research process.
The Chicago Manual of Style is a handy resource when writing for American audience. It’s a vast tome and has a useful guide for referencing. The AMA Manual of Style has been useful when I have been writing on healthcare-related projects.
The Yahoo! Style Guide: The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World – when I started off in agency life, there were three main style guides on your bookshelf. The AP Stylebook, which was adhered for copy going into American newspapers. Either of the Economist or FT style guides were used for UK and Irish business writing. When I got to Yahoo! in the spring of 2005 – I was given a ring bound version of what would be later published as The Yahoo! Style Guide. The Yahoo! Style Guide distills the knowledge of editors who had been writing for the web since the mid-1990s and was pitched at a mainstream audience. If you want to talk and pitch the average member of the English speaking public, there is no better guide to writing than this. Given the reference nature of this book, if you have the opportunity; buy a style guide that is spiral bound. It will be more hardwearing than its softbound brethren and sits flat on a desk when open without having to leave it page down. (I also miss old school spiral bound technical manuals for the same reason). At the time of writing only AP provide this option to the general public and it is worth the extra $12 dollar or so, premium you pay to get it on your bookshelf. Especially if you are using the guide day-in, day-out.
