Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (2011)

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Publisher Simon & Schuster, 2011
ISBN 1451648553, 9781451648553
656 pages

review (Evgeny Morozov, The New Republic)
review (Sam Leith, Guardian)
review (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
review (Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, Bloomberg)
review (Huffington Post)

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
EPUB (updated on 2012-7-25)

Yochai Benkler: The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest (2011)

What do Wikipedia, Zip Car’s business model, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and a small group of lobster fishermen have in common? They all show the power and promise of human cooperation in transforming our businesses, our government, and our society at large. Because today, when the costs of collaborating are lower than ever before, there are no limits to what we can achieve by working together.

For centuries, we as a society have operated according to a very unflattering view of human nature: that, humans are universally and inherently selfish creatures. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures – our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation – have been built on the premise that humans are driven only by self interest, programmed to respond only to the invisible hand of the free markets or the iron fist of a controlling government.

In the last decade, however, this fallacy has finally begun to unravel, as hundreds of studies conducted across dozens of cultures have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed. Here, Harvard University Professor Yochai Benkler draws on cutting-edge findings from neuroscience, economics, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, and a wealth of real world examples to debunk this long-held myth and reveal how we can harness the power of human cooperation to improve business processes, design smarter technology, reform our economic systems, maximize volunteer contributions to science, reduce crime, improve the efficacy of civic movements, and more.

For example, he describes how:
• By building on countless voluntary contributions, open-source software communities have developed some of the most important infrastructure on which the World Wide Web runs
• Experiments with pay-as-you-wish pricing in the music industry reveal that fans will voluntarily pay far more for their favorite music than economic models would ever predic
• Many self-regulating communities, from the lobster fishermen of Maine to farmers in Spain, live within self-regulating system for sharing and allocating communal resources
• Despite recent setbacks, Toyota’s collaborative shop-floor, supply chain, and management structure contributed to its meteoric rise above its American counterparts for over a quarter century.
• Police precincts across the nation have managed to reduce crime in tough neighborhoods through collaborative, trust-based, community partnerships.

A must-read for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of cooperation in 21st century life, The Penguin and the Leviathan not only challenges so many of the ways in which we live and work, it forces us to rethink our entire view of human nature.

Publisher Crown Publishing Group, 2011
ISBN 0307590194, 9780307590190
272 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (EPUB)

e-G8 Forum report (2011)

“Fittingly, this e-book is a virtual incarnation of an event whose physical existence was fleeting, but whose impact will endure. Opened on May 24, 2011 in Paris by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the e-G8 Forum gathered together the finest minds and most skillful operators of the Internet for just two days. But the Forum’s effect as a catalyst—on participants, on the G8 Summit that succeeded it, and on public policy by governments worldwide—was, and will continue to be, far more meaningful.

The Forum was an intense and ambitious gathering of 1500 participants from more than 30 countries. It culminated in a delegation to the G8 Summit of Heads and State and governments, where questions regarding
the Internet were on the agenda for the first time in the history of international summit meetings. The delegation was led by Maurice Lévy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, and comprised Hiroski Mikitani, the CEO of Rakuten; Yuri Milner, CEO of Digital Sky Technologies; Stéphane Richard, CEO of France Telecom-Orange; Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook.” (from Preface)

Edited by Ruth Marshall
Produced by PublicisLive
Published in June 2011
76 pages

authors
wikipedia
protest site

PDF