Highlights from 2016 reading. Discussed are:
BUSINESS STRATEGY
- The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss (Ron Adner, 2012)
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY
- Book Pair: Wonderland (Steven Johnson, 2016); The Invention of Air (Steven Johnson, 2008).
- Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--and Started the Protestant Reformation (Andrew Pettegree, 2016).
- Book Quartet: What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly, 2011), The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Luciano Floridi, 2014 ), Industries of the Future (Alec Ross, 2016); Cataloging The World: Paul Otlet & The Birth Of The Information Age (Alex Wright, 2014).
- Book Pair: Chaos Monkeys (Antonio Garcia Martinez, 2016), Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Startup Bubble (Dan Lyons, 2016).
US HEALTHCARE HISTORY
- Book Pair: The Real Voice (Richard Harris, 1964) and A Sacred Trust (Richard Harris, 1966).
- The Great Prostate Hoax (Richard Ablin, 2014)
PEOPLE & HUMAN
NATURE
- Creatures of a Day, and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (Irvin D. Yalom, 2016 ), Love’s Executioner (Irvin D. Yalom, 2012).
- Get Out Of My Life, But First, Can Could You Drive Me & Cheryl To The Mall (Anthony E. Wolf, 2002)
FICTION/ENTERTAINMENT
- The Relic Master (Christopher Buckley, 2016)
- Based On A True Story [Memoir] (Norm MacDonald, 2016; audiobook read by the author).
- Book Pair: And Yet… (Christopher Hitchens, 2016); Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (Gore Vidal, 2006; read by the author).
NEXT YEAR:
- Jobs To Be Done, Theory to Practice (Anthony Ulwick), Jobs To Be Done, A Roadmap for Customer Centered Innovation (Stephen Wunker).
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
This year continued the theme that many of these were absorbed as audiobooks; most others as eBooks.
For my 2015 book list, here. For my consulting business website, here. For my regular health policy and Medicare blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, here.
For my 2015 book list, here. For my consulting business website, here. For my regular health policy and Medicare blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, here.
BUSINESS STRATEGY
The Wide Lens: What
Successful Innovators See That Others Miss (Ron Adner, 2012)
Last year I read several books on business disaster (e.g.
Decline and Fall of Nokia; and Losing The Signal on the fall of
Blackberry).
In 2016, the business book that made the strongest impression was The Wide Lens. I had encountered the idea before [for example, supermarkets in the 1920s required the invention or coordination of (a) refrigeration, (b) parking lots, (c) people with cars, and (d) shopping carts]. Wide Lens is well-written and provides many principles and case studies of the “supply chain” not for a single product, but of a whole system of services and needs that overlap in the creation of successful and widely-adopted innovation.
Although the book doesn’t focus on medical technology, given the interlocking complexity of healthcare services and the need for real innovation despite that, it’s notable reading.
(For a shorter tour than his 2012 book, see the author's article in Harvard Business Review, November 2016).
In 2016, the business book that made the strongest impression was The Wide Lens. I had encountered the idea before [for example, supermarkets in the 1920s required the invention or coordination of (a) refrigeration, (b) parking lots, (c) people with cars, and (d) shopping carts]. Wide Lens is well-written and provides many principles and case studies of the “supply chain” not for a single product, but of a whole system of services and needs that overlap in the creation of successful and widely-adopted innovation.
Although the book doesn’t focus on medical technology, given the interlocking complexity of healthcare services and the need for real innovation despite that, it’s notable reading.
(For a shorter tour than his 2012 book, see the author's article in Harvard Business Review, November 2016).
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, SOCIETY
Book Pair: Wonderland (Steven Johnson, 2016); The
Invention of Air (Steven Johnson, 2008).
Last year, I discovered Steven Johnson, who has written a
half-dozen really fascinating books on technology history. For 2016, he produced Wonderland, about how entertainment, very broadly construed, is a
driving force in the last several thousand years of history and culture. Each chapter is packed with a rich mine of
anecdote, obscure history, and interlocking details. For example, he traces scary or exciting
entertainment from ghost shows and automatons of the 1600s through video games
of 2016.
Also enjoyed his earlier book, The Invention of Air, about the coincidences, chaos, and controversy around the discovery of oxygen in the 1700s. Also tells the story of how polymath Joseph Priestley escaped England, settled in America, and was a favorite author of Thomas Jefferson’s.
Also enjoyed his earlier book, The Invention of Air, about the coincidences, chaos, and controversy around the discovery of oxygen in the 1700s. Also tells the story of how polymath Joseph Priestley escaped England, settled in America, and was a favorite author of Thomas Jefferson’s.
Last year I had read Johnson's "How We Got To Now," which I later learned is also a very entertaining and beautifully done PBS series of six one-hour documentaries. In the chapter (and video episode) GLASS, he talks about glassmaking in he Roman era, the consolidation of glassmaking technology in Venice, the invention of clear glass in Venice, then the invention of spectacles, then the invention of the printing press, which is not itself "glass" but led to skyrocketing numbers of readers, who needed far more spectacles, leading to a boom in the spectacles-making industry, which led to rising know-how in optics, which then spun off microscopy and telescopes, which led to the Copernican revolution, and eventually to fiber-optic international cabling. That's how this guy thinks.
Brand Luther: How an
Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself
the Most Famous Man in Europe--and Started the Protestant Reformation
(Andrew Pettegree, 2016).
Luther created a societal revolution in part by his
new-fangled, energetic, and inventive use of pamphlets, publishing them
feverishly for decades. (The Martin
Luther house/museum in Wittenberg, south of Berlin, is in large part of library
of preserved pamphlets.) Timely today,
in light of the 500th anniversary of the Luther Reformation, and equally, in
light of the massive explosion of social media and how it impacts our society.
Book Quartet: What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly, 2011),
The 4th Revolution: How the
Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Luciano Floridi, 2014 ), Industries of the Future (Alec Ross, 2016); Cataloging
The World: Paul Otlet & The Birth Of The Information Age (Alex Wright,
2014).
After reading a couple of books last year on the impact of
Digital Health on healthcare, this year I looked at this set of books about the broader
view of information transforming society.
I can’t honestly recommend any single one over the others. As the fourth book, I've added a fascinating biography of Paul Otlet: Otlet is a now-obscure Belgian who attempted to catalog all the world’s
knowledge in the very early 1900s. He was a mad genius, tireless, and brought his own "reality distortion field" in fund-raising and promulgating his vision.
Book Pair: Chaos Monkeys (Antonio Garcia Martinez,
2016), Disrupted: My Misadventure in the
Startup Bubble (Dan Lyons, 2016).
Much of my business work is for Silicon Valley
companies in the healthcare and genomics space.
None are crazy like the two companies profiled by Martinez and
Lyons. Still, these two 2016 books are entertaining light autobiographies as each author ventured in some crazy way through the wild
world of venture capital and digital startups.
US HEALTHCARE HISTORY
Book Pair: The Real
Voice (Richard Harris, 1964) and A
Sacred Trust (Richard Harris, 1966).
The Great Prostate Hoax (Richard Ablin, 2014)
Here I’m listing two books that are 50 years old, as well as
a book I don’t agree with in significant part but found worth reading.
In the mid-60s, journalist Richard Harris produced two books, respectively on the history of the 1963 FDA Act (Kefauver Amendments) and the crazy and difficult path that led to the creation of Medicare in 1965. Since we are living through crazy and difficult times with the creation, implementation, and perhaps blow-up of Obamacare, it’s reassuring to know that major health legislation of past decades, even past generations, was just as nuts.
Both Harris books are available as used books for a few dollars from Amazon.
In the mid-60s, journalist Richard Harris produced two books, respectively on the history of the 1963 FDA Act (Kefauver Amendments) and the crazy and difficult path that led to the creation of Medicare in 1965. Since we are living through crazy and difficult times with the creation, implementation, and perhaps blow-up of Obamacare, it’s reassuring to know that major health legislation of past decades, even past generations, was just as nuts.
Both Harris books are available as used books for a few dollars from Amazon.
Unusually, here is a book where I disagreed quite a bit with the author, but still found it worth reading and even recommending.
The Great Prostate Hoax is a book that accuses the PSA industry of being badly intentioned and overcommercialized from the start to the present. While I don't agree, the author’s assembled “I-was-there” history and his extensive research and extracts from deep in the FDA archives and digging through quotes and facts in contemporary news articles is still pretty darn interesting. (I quoted from some of this in October, to show there was plenty of concern about the "clinical utility" of diagnostics in the 80s and 90s.)
Today, there is a great deal of effort today to improve on prostate cancer prognostics and drug therapies, which I applaud. Ablin, at the end of this book and writing up to 2013/2014, surveys some of these efforts but seemed to think nothing will ever help create better prostate cancer management. On that, I can't agree at all. Improved diagnostics are both critical and possible, and will greatly impact management. Read this book for his tales of the 1980s and 1990s.
The Great Prostate Hoax is a book that accuses the PSA industry of being badly intentioned and overcommercialized from the start to the present. While I don't agree, the author’s assembled “I-was-there” history and his extensive research and extracts from deep in the FDA archives and digging through quotes and facts in contemporary news articles is still pretty darn interesting. (I quoted from some of this in October, to show there was plenty of concern about the "clinical utility" of diagnostics in the 80s and 90s.)
Today, there is a great deal of effort today to improve on prostate cancer prognostics and drug therapies, which I applaud. Ablin, at the end of this book and writing up to 2013/2014, surveys some of these efforts but seemed to think nothing will ever help create better prostate cancer management. On that, I can't agree at all. Improved diagnostics are both critical and possible, and will greatly impact management. Read this book for his tales of the 1980s and 1990s.
PEOPLE & HUMAN NATURE
Creatures of a Day,
and Other Tales of Psychotherapy (Irvin D. Yalom, 2016 ), Love’s Executioner (Irvin D. Yalom,
2012).
Get Out Of My Life,
But First, Can Could You Drive Me & Cheryl To The Mall (Anthony E.
Wolf, 2002)
Yalom is a retired Stanford clinical psychiatrist who’s in
turn textbook author, novelist, and essayist.
A movie about his life story exists (Yalom’s Cure, 2014), my
wife and I caught a rare screening of it in Beverly Hills last summer. These
two books are similar books of essays about unusual and memorable patients
(published with the patients’ permissions).
I enjoyed both as audiobooks.
Get Out Of My Life
is a classic self-help bestseller on living with teen-agers. Enough said.
FICTION/ENTERTAINMENT
The Relic Master (Christopher Buckley, 2016)
Based On A True Story
[Memoir] (Norm MacDonald, 2016; audiobook read by the author).
Book Pair: And Yet… (Christopher Hitchens, 2016); Point
to Point Navigation: A Memoir (Gore Vidal, 2006; read by the author).
Relic Master: Christopher Buckley, son of the late William
F. Buckley, writes an entertaining comic caper set in the early years of the
1500s. Enjoyed this comic novel as an audiobook. Real
and fictional characters mix and merge in the early years of the Protestant
Reformation in central Germany.
If you like bizarre comedy, read by the author and legendary comic Norm MacDonald, here is his highly fantasized autobiography.
Essayists Gore Vidal
and Christopher Hitchens have been
gone for several years now, but a late collection of Hitchens essays (not read
by the author) appeared as And Yet… I
caught up with Vidal’s second book of memoirs, Point to Point, which is read to us by the inimitable
author, and it makes my top list too.
Honorable mention:
Several audiobooks of essays by Joan Didion (White Album, Slouching Towards
Bethlehem.)
NEXT YEAR:
Jobs To Be Done,
Theory to Practice (Anthony Ulwick), Jobs
To Be Done, A Roadmap for Customer Centered Innovation (Stephen
Wunker).
In 2008, I heard a talk by Harvard business guru Clayton
Christensen where he discussed the “job to be done” approach to business
insight. For example, commuting drivers liked to
get milkshakes at 8 am from McDonalds because it “gave them something to do”,
while being “easy to set down” and “providing calories” (the core job.) Another longstanding way of saying this, the
customer doesn’t need a hammer, he needs a hole for a nail.
Christenson and coauthors got around to writing a full length book on the topic in 2016 (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice), which arrives after several books on the same theme by other authors (as above: Ulwick, Wunker). It's now crystalized as the "Jobs To Be Done" school of business innovation and analysis. I’m looking forward to catching up with either one or more of these during 2017.
Christenson et al. also published a Harvard Business Review article on this theme in September 2016, here.
Christenson and coauthors got around to writing a full length book on the topic in 2016 (Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice), which arrives after several books on the same theme by other authors (as above: Ulwick, Wunker). It's now crystalized as the "Jobs To Be Done" school of business innovation and analysis. I’m looking forward to catching up with either one or more of these during 2017.
Christenson et al. also published a Harvard Business Review article on this theme in September 2016, here.
