It’s been a big year for technology, with the rise of generative AI sparking new conversations about how tech will shape the future of work and society at large. The books below offer a range of perspectives on recent developments in data and AI, as well as resources to help leaders navigate an increasingly complex and fast-moving technology landscape.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma, by Mustafa Suleyman and Michael Bhaskar
Suleyman, the co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, has been a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Bhaskar and he believe the coming decade will bring a diverse selection of intensely capable and fast-proliferating new technologies. In The Coming Wave, they explain how these technologies present an existential dilemma as we work to control them: unregulated use on one side, and overbearing surveillance on the other.
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, by Michael Lewis
Lewis’ latest book tells the psychological story of the dramatic rise and fall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest billionaire, who became a leader in crypto almost overnight before losing it all. Lewis tells his story from the vantage point of being in the room to witness the rise and the fall first hand.
Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems, by Frances X Frei and Anne Morriss
The informal Facebook motto “move fast and break things” gained a lot of traction across businesses but in a somewhat skewed way. It implied that breaking things, no matter the cost, is simply the price organizations pay for innovation.
Best-selling authors and leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss believe this way of thinking is deeply flawed and hinders leaders from building a truly resilient company. They argue there shouldn’t have to be a tradeoff between speed and excellence, and that companies can solve difficult problems quickly and fix things at the same time. Drawing on work with leading organizations like Uber and ServiceNow, Frei and Morriss identify five key steps, one per each day of the workweek, that leaders can take to solve their organizations’ most complex problems quickly.
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Acemoglu and Johnson revisit a thousand years of history and economics to demonstrate how technological progress doesn’t have to lead to a loss of human empathy. Power and Progress explores how technology was once – and could be again – brought under control and used for the benefit of most people.
All-in On AI: How Smart Companies Win Big with Artificial Intelligence, by Tom Davenport and Nitin Mittal
All-In on AI is an insightful look into the magic behind the success of the technology’s leading adopters. While most companies are placing small bets on AI, a select few are embracing the technology to transform their products, processes, strategies, and customer relationships and experiences. Using examples from organizations including Anthem, Ping An, Airbus, and Capital One, Davenport and Mittal explore what AI looks like at the cutting edge and help organizations understand what’s needed to take AI to the next level.
The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li
In her memoir, Stanford professor and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li describes how a Chinese immigrant living in poverty in the United States overcame adversity to become one of the leading contributors to modern artificial intelligence. Whether sharing her own journey or exploring the incredible dangers and opportunities AI poses, she tells a story Reid Hoffman describes as “a testament to the power and possibility of humanity.”
Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team to Reach Their Full Potential and Build a Business that Builds Leaders, by Robert Glazer
Being a leader is a balancing act. Not only must one find and retain top talent, but he or she must also ensure those teams perform at the highest levels and deliver results while avoiding burnout. A follow up to Glazer’s 2019 book, Elevate, this book provides strategies and tools to help leaders unleash their teams’ full potential and build the leaders of tomorrow.
Data Is Everybody’s Business: The Fundamentals of Data Monetization, by Barbara Wixom, Cynthia Beath, and Leslie Owens
The authors, leaders at MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research and UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, provide a guide to help people across organizations (not just on data teams) think more expansively about how to turn data into money. Covering approaches such as wrapping products with data and selling broader information offerings, show how leaders can drive positive outcomes and generate excitement around new data opportunities.
Think Like a CTO, by Alan Williamson
In this book, Williamson highlights the common themes CTOs should consider as they work to become the trusted leader their company needs. He also adds commentary from industry experts and veteran CTOs to illustrate the book’s focus areas, which include establishing strong relationships with C-suite peers, architecting future-proofed systems, and leading with data rather than passion.
Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification, by Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear
Drawing on years of research and insights from organizations such as Amazon, Apple, and NASA, Kim and Spear show how leaders make the “social wiring” that drives results and allows others to thrive. They describe their system for moving problem-solving from risky danger zones to low-risk winning zones and provide a playbook for leaders to rewire their own organizations.
Scott Galloway wants to be the most influential thought leader in the history of business. When asked why, he offered his usual self-criticism: mostly narcissism, a desire to be relevant, fear of death, a drive for economic security. “Mostly selfish reasons,” he summarized. Upon reflecting further, however, he noted, “I also feel as if I have something to say about technology and monopoly power and unchecked corporate interests. They’ve always existed, but I think it has gotten worse. As I’ve gotten older, experienced fatherhood, and looked back on how fortunate I was to be born when I was born, to be born who I was, and some of my struggles as a young man, I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about young men who I think are struggling in our society, and I want to have a positive influence there. It’s a mixture of wanting to be influential for some good reasons and some less good reasons.” For Prof G, it is always about finding pathways to self-improvement and helping others through comparable journeys of self-discovery.
Today, Galloway seems ubiquitous: from his podcasts, Pivot and the Prof G pod, his venture backed ed-tech company, Section 4, Prof G Media, which produces not only his podcast, but a weekly newsletter, YouTube videos, and a column for New York magazine, he is in your ears or in front of your eyes in many forms. Add to that his propensity to publish a book every 12 to 18 months or so, and it can feel like he is everywhere. His latest book has just been released, and it is called Adrift: America in 100 Charts.
Many of the 100 charts paint a bleak picture as to the state of the union in the United States. Galloway makes the case that, just as in 1945 and 1980, America is once again a nation at a crossroads. Some sections of the book include titles such as “Idolatry of Innovators”, “Privatized R&D; Privatized Progress”, “The Hunger Games”, “From Lopsided to Dystopian”, “The Attention Economy”, “Political Censorship and Fake News”, and “House of Cards.” It seems at times that Galloway believes there is more wrong than right with America. He admits to being a glass is half empty kind of guy, but he forces himself to highlight silver linings in addition to noting the existential challenges that we face. “Whenever I really sit down and look at the data, I think there’s a lot of wonderful points of light,” said Galloway. “You can be a pessimist, but we have one in five households with kids were food insecure pre-pandemic. It went to 1 in 11. With a simple child tax credit, we were able to reduce child poverty by 50%. Now the bad news is we decided at the last minute to strip it out of the infrastructure bill, but the good news is I’m not sure any of us even thought we could reduce it by 50% in a year.”
Galloway also pushes us to view the challenges with more perspective. Though the issues of the day might seem insurmountable, they are not greater than challenges we have given ourselves and accomplished in the past. “50 years ago, we sent three men into space, a quarter of a million miles away, and figured out a way to land them on…we didn’t even know what they were landing on,” said Galloway. “Somehow, we got them there and figured out a way to get them back home alive. It just feels like these are enormous problems and they’re…mole hills compared to the Everest that we’ve climbed as the nation before. Taking any one in isolation, that’ll never happen.”
Galloway is fond of saying, “There is nothing wrong with America that can’t be solved with what is right with America.” He notes that at a time when 54% of Democrats are most worried about their kid marrying a Republican and a third of each party sees the members of the other party as their mortal enemy, there are moments of remarkable grace. “If you look at a sober analysis of how we got here, the skills we have, the capital we have, the innovation, the generosity that’s built into the DNA of Americans, the uptick in empathy,” there is reason for optimism, said Galloway. “The most wonderful chart in the book [highlights] that people all over the world universally, are spending more time helping people that they will never meet. Planting trees [creating] shade of which they will never sit under.”
Among the solutions he speaks most passionately about are the necessity for national service. The fact that our representatives in government are less likely to have served in the military than in past generations means that Democrats and Republicans do not have a shared bond of service. “[In the past, representatives] absolutely saw themselves as American first well ahead of Democrat or Republican,” said Galloway. He believes following the lead of a country like Israel, making national service a required right of passage would have the advantage of forging those bonds while creating a new generation of Americans who have that much more of a relationship to giving to their country. “I think national service and creating more connective tissues give kids a chance who are increasingly segregated, a chance to mix with other kids from different ethnic backgrounds, different income backgrounds before they even developed this crazy polarization around politics,” he noted.
Perhaps the most ironic analysis comes in his views on four-year universities, considering he is a professor at one, albeit at the graduate level, serving as a professor of Marketing at the Stern School of Business at New York University. He stresses that the pathway to upward mobility will increasingly come through community colleges and vocational schools, and he encourages the government to continue to fund these alternatives appropriately. “I think we need to stop fetishizing the traditional four-year degree from elite universities,” Galloway said. “There’s this pathway that every parent and kid is focused on, and we all track towards it. I’m tracking toward it with my kids that they need to get to MIT or an Ivy League School, and then up at Google or KKR, and anything diverging from that is a disappointment. It’s not only not true and it’s bad for the economy, and it creates an unbelievable emotional stress.”
A serial entrepreneur, Galloway’s latest foray has been Section 4, an ed-tech start up that provides “business education for builders, disrupters, doers, changemakers and builders.” This hands-on experience taught by top professors made enormous progress since its launch through the pandemic, where online training options were the best and often only option for many. During that period, Section 4 signed up 1,200 people per class, covering topics in the business core, leadership, marketing and product. “We knew we had wind in our sails, but we didn’t realize how much the winds would die down when COVID ended,” Galloway admitted. “That business is off, business was growing 70% a year. This year will probably be down 30% or 40% because nobody wants to be in their home staring at a screen and learning right now. That’s been tough.” As his start up goes through a rough patch, traditional higher education is as strong as ever. “Traditional education at an elite university has never been stronger, and I would argue it’s strong for the wrong reasons that we’ve embraced this LVMH, rejectionist, NIMBY model,” Galloway noted. “We artificially constrain supply such that we can grow or raise prices faster than inflation, constantly coming up with new departments and administrators that never go away.”
Galloway noted that UCLA, where he did his undergraduate studies, accepted three out of every four applicants when he applied. He believes that four years ago, universities were much more apt to attempt to lift up the unremarkable to make them remarkable. Now, only the already remarkable are the ones who get in, and plenty of them are rejected. “We’ve decided that we’re an Hermes bag, and we want to identify the top 1%, the freakishly remarkable and kids of rich people, and turn them into billionaires,” said Galloway. “I think we’ve absolutely lost the script in Higher Ed. The cartel is more corrupt than OPEC…I think we’re preying on the hopes and dreams of the middle class and leveraging this fetishization and this dictum where you have failed as parents if you don’t get your kid through a traditional four-year degree. I’m trying to do something about it, but at the same time, I continue to affiliate with NYU.” When asked how he squares this ironic position of being a chief critic of higher education, especially at elite universities, increasingly competing with them through his start up while also affiliating with one of the elites, he noted that he gains mightily through this affiliation. “It provides a halo of credibility,” Galloway noted. “I’ve been at NYU 20 years I’d like to be there another 10 or 20…I may not be because I say some provocative things. I’m not sure I’d be as patient with me as they are with me. I do bite the hand that feeds me. I’ve returned all my compensation for the last decade…they’re just incredibly flexible with me and I have wonderful friends there and there’s just no getting around it.”
Galloway’s influence grows as he masters multiple media. Whether he reaches his goal of being the most influential thought leader in business history remains to be seen, but he will be continue to be a great source of insight at the very least.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
