Posts from Books

I've been reading my friend Steven Johnson's new book Where Good Ideas Come From. Steven gave me an advance copy of the book. It is available for pre-order at Amazon [kindle here] and it will be released on October 5th.

I hope Steven is not a stranger to any of you. His books over the past decade are some of my favorites and his take on the intersection between technology, science, society, culture, and innovation is unique and important.

Good Ideas (as I call it) is an examination of the sources of creativity in all of us. It is a deeply scientific book but it reads more like a narrative, which is one of Steven's gifts. He tells wonderful stories about science.

I've been pulling quotes from the book for several weeks onto my tumblog (aka my commonplace book). If you follow me on Tumblr, you will have seen a number of them. I will keep doing that until I finish the book which may happen this week.

Steven showed me this four minute video last week on his iPad. It is an excellent (and whimsical) summary of the book and has all of the core concepts in it.

Steven gave a talk about Good Ideas at TED Oxford in July. TED just posted it to the web today. Here it is. It is worth watching if you have the time (17 mins long). If you watch it all the way to the end you'll hear a great story about the invention of GPS.

Good Ideas is as close to a must read for this audience as there is. It has informed and amplified my thinking about innovation and creativity and I am sure it will do the same for you.

 I’ve been reading Andy Kessler’s novel, Grumby, about a tech
entrepreneur in silicon valley. I’ve known Andy for a long time, since he was a
hot shot tech analyst at Morgan Stanley in the early 90s. He’s written a bunch
of books but to my knowledge this is his first novel.

It’s about a hacker who starts with a small idea,
essentially building a better version of Shazam, and then takes it to a whole
new level by hacking a toy and creating a sensation.

It’s your classic boom bust morality tale and I’ve witnessed
at close range many of the mistakes the entrepreneur makes, and have made of
few of them myself. If for no other reason, you should read Grumby so you are
less likely to make those mistakes yourself.

But the thing I liked most about Grumby was the way that
Andy wove so many of the important trends going on in technology today into the
story. The Grumby is smart because it collects information and knowledge from
its users. The Grumby is open so anyone can build apps for it. The Grumby is
manufactured in China but the software running on it comes from all over the
world.

If you are highly technical, you may have to suspend belief
on many of the engineering feats they pull off. That is the beauty of a novel.
It is the story that matters, not the facts and figures.

And there’s even a cameo by this blog in the book. Which of
course I love.

If you work in the tech business and enjoy a good tall tale,
I think you’ll enjoy Grumby. I read it in my iPad over the course of a week,
mostly on planes. I think you could probably read it from cover to cover on a
cross country flight.

The title of this post comes from a saying I've always attributed to John Doerr, one of the top VCs of the past 25 years and the lead partner at Kleiner Perkins.

In this day and age, having a financial interest in something means you've got a conflict and your opinion is somehow "tainted."

But that wasn't always the case. I'm reading a book called 722 Miles, about the history of the NYC Subway System. It was recommended to me in the comments to the blog post I did about the subway system a few weeks ago.

The original plan for the NYC subway system was drawn up by The Steinway Commission in 1891. It featured the main downtown line from south ferry, up Broadway, to Union Square, then forking off in two branches, one headed up the west side and the other headed up the east side. That plan had to be changed later in order to keep the construction costs below the mandated $50mm (a huge sum in those days) but it was in many ways the blueprint for what got built.

The Steinway Commission was the name attached to the Rapid Transit Commission called for in the Rapid Transit Act of 1891. The commission was charged with laying out the basic plan and assigning a franchise for construction and operation of the subway.

It was called The Steinway Commission because it was chaired by William Steinway, founder and CEO of The Steinway Piano Company, a major manufacturer and real estate developer in Astoria Queens. In addition to Steinway, the commission included John Starin, owner of tugboats and other waterway transit businesses, Samuel Spencer, a railroad executive, Frederick Olcott, a banking executive, and Eugene Bush, a railroad lawyer. All of these men had business interests that would be enhanced or possibly damaged by the development of a subway system.

And yet they largely did the right thing, got the plan approved, and eventually funded and built. None of them ended up with the franchise (that went to August Belmont, who also built Belmont Park, one of the three legs of the Triple Crown in horse racing).

At the turn of the last century in NYC, there was an alignment of business and political interests that got things done that seems lacking in today's political environment. We have a taste of that in NYC with our current Mayor Mike Bloomberg who has brought a business mind to job of governing NYC. But on the national level, we see much less of this kind of thing.

It's really too bad because interest implies knowledge and understanding and leads to good decisions if the people involved have integrity and the ability to put the interests of the community first and their financial interests second. The business leaders of NYC were able to do that in the late 19th century and early 20th century and we have them to thank for our wonderful subway system.