My business books recommendations from 2023

Let me share a couple of titles that I had a chance to read this year and I find worth remembering. I usually do not start a year with a "to-do" list of reading. It was true also this year - my list is largely coincidental, collected and read per need or recommendation.

My list

Chip War The Fight For The World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller

Some say that "data is the new oil". Chris Miller does not agree with that - it's actually the "supply of computing power the new oil".

There cannot be another book occupying the top of my list. After all, the chip industry and its products are making possible the world we know - from the tiniest and simplest to the most advanced products across all industries.

Miller tells a story that brought us to the point when we're all dependent on small devices which are products of truly global efforts.

A typical chip might be designed with blueprints from the Japanese-owned, UK-based company called ARM, by a team of engineers in California and Israel, using design software from the United States. When a design is complete, it's sent to a facility in Taiwan, which buys ultra-pure silicon wafers and specialized gases from Japan. The design is carved into silicon using some of the world's most precise machinery (...). These tools are produced primarly by five companies, one Dutch, one Japanese, and three Californian (...). Then the chip is packaged and tested, often in Souteast Asia, before being sent to China for assembly into a phone or computer.

And the most advanced chips are produced almost solely on the precise rift between the great geopolitical rivals of the century: China and the US. Mind boggling!

The Age of AI And Our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher

The combination of technological and geopolitical significance makes the question of AI one of central to all humans. It is not covered on a daily basis and does not occupy the "breaking news" bar, but the race to develop "the best AI" is happening and is probably the most significant process you are not aware of.?

The characteristics of AI - including its capacities to learn, evolve, and surprise - will disrupt and tranform them all (industries/politics/policies). The outcome will be the alteration of human experience of reality at levels not experienced since the dawn of the modern age.

Maybe it's time to start following those developments. After all: what can go wrong in our just and peaceful world?

Change by Design How Design Thinking Transform Organizations And Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown

Design Thinking as a process originated at Stanford University. Applied for engineering at first, it has spread to numerous domains including business since then. Tim Brown - former CEO of the most prominent design companies in the world (IDEO) is giving a comprehensive overview of Design Thinking philosophy, techniques and strategies.

One day I was chatting with my friend David Kelley, a Stanford professor and the founder of IDEO, and he remarked that every time someone came to ask him about design, he found himself inserting the word "thinking" to explain what it was that designers do. The term "design thinking" stuck.

If you heard the term "design thinking" but you're not really sure what that really means - this book is for you.

Lead and Disrupt How to Solve The Innovator's Dillema by Charles O'Reilly III and Michael L. Tushman

The history of capitalism is a history of success and failure. The tricky part is that past success is no guarantee for future success. The classic "innovator's dillemma" goes a step further claiming that it very often is the opposite.

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change. (Ch.Darwin

But when it comes to business, the adaptability does not happen by chance. What is critical to understand about innovations is that they are a decisive factor in maintaining competitive advantage and therefore survival in the marketplace.

Using Steve Blank's words from a foreword of the book:

What you're holding in your hand is a revolutionary document. It answers the questions of why some companies trace a brilliant arc as a shooting star and then flame out while others, once market leaders, are disrupted? Is it that some CEOs are better than others? Are their people smarter? Do they have better sales, marketing, or product development groups?

You'll find the answers inside the book. It is worth reading them.

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism by Martin Wolf

Last but not least and the only one on the list which (as of 27/12/23) I haven't read yet - just starting. The topic of this book is in my view the underlying principle for all of the books above.

It is the coexistence of political and economic systems that we tend to treat as somewhat natural.

We are living in an age when economic failings have shaken faith in global capitalism. Political failings have undermined trust in liberal democracy and in the very notion of truth. This book is a forceful rejoinder to both views. It analyses how the marriage between capitalism and democracy has became so fraught and yet insists that a divorce would be an almost unimaginable calamity

I believe the analysis and message in this book will be a good opening for the year 2024 with all its challenges and unknowns.