Ideas drive the world forwards … Mustafa Suleyman’s coming wave, Adam Grant’s science of achieving great things, Martin Seligman’s tomorrow mind, Amy Edmondson’s experiments, and Elon Musk
October 5, 2023
Ideas drive the world forwards.
I remember telling my boss, a South African guy called Bruce Tindale, that back in 1999. He wasn’t convinced. He was a project management expert, focused on making solid things happen. But despite the world being in the grip of a fantastic new craze, called the Internet, people were still uncertain.
We’d just seen the initial crash of dotcom start-ups, who had lost sight of profit in a manic rush for eyeballs. This made him even more sceptical. But then we started talking about what made the winners different, companies like Amazon, who didn’t just want to automate old business models, but had new ideas. I also talked him through the rise of intangible assets – from brands to patents to relationships – which were increasingly displacing the old building blocks of value creation. He started to engage.
We then talked about investors, who look to the future not the past. We talked about leaders who need to go beyond the visions of their predecessors. We talked about brands that engage and inspire consumers with purpose and stories. We talked about innovations which start with the germ of a concept, but then need to be nurtured into something practical.
Eventually he was convinced. He asked me to set up a new business unit – about ideas – and specifically how to engage business leaders and their teams in the future, in possibilities, and to develop new ideas about strategies, innovations and delivery. Together with a colleague, Jonathan Hogg, we gathered a group of idea catalysts from inside and outside the company, and started our ideation journey. We devoured every book around, curating all the best ideas. We formed joint ventures with Pearson, SAP and Wiley. We got more ideas, and started to build a new business.
As for Bruce, a few years later he retired. I asked him what he was doing. He said he’d had a great idea, but never had time to make it happen. Inspired by the vineyards of his native South Africa, he wanted to create an English vineyard in the Surrey Hills near his home. Today I look back and see him thriving on his idea, the High Clandon Estate Vineyard, producing award-winning sparking wines.
Which brings me back to ideas.
And books.
So here are some of the most recent business books, and their big ideas to move the world forwards:
The Coming Wave
Synthetic biology, quantum computing. Everything is about to change.
Soon we will live surrounded by AIs. They will organise your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy.
None of us are prepared.
This is a ground-breaking book from the ultimate AI insider, Mustafa Suleyman, who was co-founder of London-based DeepMind, the AI business which is now part of Google. Recently he left Google to set up Inflection AI with Reid Hoffman, of Linkedin fame and fortune. They are working on a personalised AI called Pi. While ChatGPT will give standard answers to the world, Pi is more intimate, learning about you, and from you, and personalising its intelligence to you.
The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies. He shows how these forces will create immense prosperity but also threaten the nation-state, the foundation of global order. As our fragile governments sleepwalk into disaster, we face an existential dilemma: unprecedented harms on one side and the threat of overbearing surveillance on the other. Can we forge a narrow path between catastrophe and dystopia?
Hidden Potential
The science of achieving great things.
We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distances we ourselves can travel. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door.
Adam Grant, one of my favourite business authors, weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess – it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.
Adam’s book offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. He argues that anyone can rise to achieve greater things. The true measure of your potential is not the height of the peak you’ve reached, but how far you’ve climbed to get there.
TomorrowMind
Martin Seligman is a visionary psychologist. He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, director of the Positive Psychology Center. Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, MD, has served as chief product officer and chief innovation officer at BetterUp, and pyschiatrist.
In recent years, workplace toxicity, industry volatility, employee isolation and technology-driven change have threatened the psychological well-being of employees. The rise of quiet quitting has shown that when we can’t flourish at work, both personal success and corporate productivity suffer.
As we sit on the cusp of some of the most turbulent economic changes in history many of us wonder if we can not only survive but flourish in our careers.
Based on the science of thriving, TomorrowMind proves we can, and provides essential plans and actionable advice for succeeding in the uncertain future of work. Build skills in resilience, foresight and creativity and help to cultivate workplace that fosters connection and meaning for yourself and your team. Engaging evidence shows how individuals, teams, and organizations that excel at these five key attributes will win in the whitewater of work every time.
Right Kind of Wrong
Why learning to fail can teach us to thrive.
We used to think of failure as a problem, to be avoided at all costs. Now, we’re often told that failure is desirable – that we must ‘fail fast, fail often’. The trouble is, neither approach distinguishes the good failures from the bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.
The ideas around experimentation – test and learn – are not new. From Carol Dweck’s book Mindset which distinguished a growth mindset (loving change) from a fixed mindset (loving stability), to Eric Rise’ epic Lean Start-Up, business has increasingly embraced a more agile, experimental approach.
Now, Amy Edmondson – awarding winning Harvard organisational psychologist – frames it as how we get failure wrong, and how to get it right. She draws on a lifetime’s research into the science of ‘psychological safety’ to show that the most successful cultures are those in which you can fail openly, without your mistakes being held against you. She introduces the three archetypes of failure – simple, complex and intelligent – and explains how to harness the revolutionary potential of the good ones (and eliminate the bad).
And she tells vivid stories ranging from the history of open heart surgery to the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, all to ask a simple, provocative question: What if it is only by learning to fail that we can hope to truly succeed?
Build
This is an unorthodox guide to making things worth making.
Tony Fadell started his 30 year Silicon Valley career at General Magic, the most influential startup nobody has ever heard of.
Then he went on to make the iPod and iPhone, start Nest and create the Nest Learning Thermostat. Throughout his career Tony has authored more than 300 patents. He now leads the investment and advisory firm Future Shape, where he mentors the next generation of startups that are changing the world.
As Malcolm Gladwell puts it ‘Tony has made more cool stuff than almost anyone else in the history of Silicon Valley, and in Build he tells us how.”
Fadell calls his book a mentor in a box. But he doesn’t follow the standard Silicon Valley credo that you have to radically reinvent everything you do. His advice is unorthodox because it’s old school. Because it’s based on human nature, not gimmicks.
Elon Musk
Love him, or not, he’s an enigma.
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.
His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.
At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.
It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.
For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?
Beijing Rules
This is the story of China’s two-decade quest for global dominance.
For several decades China’s ascendancy has been supported by an astonishingly broad and deep portfolio of quiet coercion. Stories of the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian reach are breathtaking – the gagging of sports stars and huge Western brands; Hollywood self-censorship; infrastructure deals in exchange for political loyalty in multilateral organizations; and of course – communications firms. But these are just the most visible examples.
Beijing Rules exposes the armoury of strategies with which China has exploited Western weakness to position itself as leader in the game of nations: tying market access to political acquiescence; punitive tariffs; online disinformation operations; use of private companies to spy on global users; leveraging vaccines for geopolitical gain; and the crushing of democracy in Hong Kong. With these weapons and dextrous manoeuvrings during the global pandemic, China positioned itself to take its place at the apex of world powers.
Bethany Allen, an internationally recognized investigator into China’s covert power, shows Western institutions have bowed to and even enabled Beijing’s coercion. As we come reeling out of a global pandemic and eyes are on a new war in Europe, this revealing analysis sounds the alarm about the most significant shift in the new world order, and what we must do to prevent the loss of freedoms we take for granted.
Going Infinite
The rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried.
From the author of The Big Short and Flash Boys, the high-octane story of the enigmatic figure at the heart of one of the 21st century’s most spectacular financial collapses
‘I asked him how much it would take for him to sell FTX and go do something other than make money. He thought the question over. “One hundred and fifty billion dollars,” he finally said-though he added that he had use for “infinity dollars”…’
SBF wasn’t just rich. Before he turned thirty he’d become the world’s youngest billionaire, making a record fortune in the crypto frenzy. CEOs, celebrities and world leaders vied for his time. At one point he considered paying off the entire national debt of the Bahamas so he could take his business there.
Then it all fell apart.
Who was this Gatsby of the crypto world, a rumpled guy in cargo shorts, whose eyes twitched across TV interviews as he played video games on the side, who even his million-dollar investors still found a mystery? What gave him such an extraordinary ability to make money – and how did his empire collapse so spectacularly?
Michael Lewis was there when it happened, having got to know Bankman-Fried during his epic rise. In Going Infinite he tells us a story like no other, taking us through the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own. Both psychological portrait of a preternaturally gifted ‘thinking machine’, and wild financial roller-coaster ride, this is a twenty-first-century epic of high-frequency trading and even higher stakes, of crypto mania and insane amounts of money, of hubris and downfall.
Of course, not all ideas are good.
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