I’ve spent my entire professional life dealing with how technology impacts business. I started out writing code to improve the operations of retail stores and factories. I managed teams developing products from videophones to cellphones. I’ve had a front-row seat to the evolution of the music business, from selling CDs to streaming files to billions of fans. These experiences provided the background for writing a book about tech disruption in the music business, starting with the phonograph and leading to Generative AI. The books on this list gave me the broader historical perspective I needed and the context to understand how other industries dealt with their own seismic changes.
I wrote...
Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry
In recent years, narratives about the music industry have tended to follow a consistent theme: it was humming along for decades until the Internet and Napster disrupted it. My book shows that this view is incorrect: the industry was shaken up not once in the 1990s but ten times over more than 100 years.
These ten disruptions came with the introduction of new formats for enjoying recorded music: starting with the cylinders and discs played on early phonographs, then moving through radio, LPs, tapes, CDs, television, digital downloads, streaming, and streaming video, and finally Artificial Intelligence (AI). This book devotes a chapter to these formats, illustrating how they fostered shifts in creativity, consumer behavior, economics, and law.
Successful companies almost always struggle to deal with the threats posed by new technologies. They fail to recognize the dangers posed by new entrants, and they are slow to move to the “next big thing.”
I think Christenson wrote THE seminal book on this topic and gave me the tools to understand this from both a theoretical and practical perspective.
Named one of 100 Leadership & Success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon Editors A Wall Street Journal and Businessweek bestseller. Named by Fast Company as one of the most influential leadership books in its Leadership Hall of Fame. An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen's work continues to underpin today's most innovative leaders and organizations. The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, by renowned author Clayton M. Christensen. His work is cited by the world's best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller--one of the most influential business books…
I never knew that the telegraph started as a series of physical towers conveying coded messages by line of sight from one hill to another. It took years for the word telegraph to refer to the system we know so well, relying on electrical lines, the telegraph key, and Morse code.
I love how Standage finds the through line from this 19th-century communications network to the Internet we all take for granted today.
A new paperback edition of the book the Wall Street Journal dubbed “a Dot-Com cult classic,” by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first “Internet.”
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts…
It is impossible to overestimate the breadth and importance of Edison’s contributions to our lives. But Stross gave me a much better picture of Edison as a relentless competitor who often struggled to develop the business practices and processes to achieve commercial success with his numerous inventions.
The fact that I could visit the Menlo Park historical site in NJ to see things for myself made the book come alive.
At the height of his fame Thomas Alva Edison was hailed as “the Napoleon of invention” and blazed in the public imagination as a virtual demigod. Starting with the first public demonstrations of the phonograph in 1878 and extending through the development of incandescent light and the first motion picture cameras, Edison’s name became emblematic of all the wonder and promise of the emerging age of technological marvels.
But as Randall Stross makes clear in this critical biography of the man who is arguably the most globally famous of all Americans, Thomas Edison’s…
A few weeks after completing my PhD at Cornell University, I walked into my first real job as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories. I stayed there for 20 years. Gertner’s book describes that storied institution and how it provided the fertile ground for so many innovators to thrive, from the creators of the transistor to the discoverers of the Big Bang.
My favorite chapter covered the development of mobile telephone networks. Yes, it is an interesting tale, but for me, the best part was that I knew and worked with several of the key players in that story during my career there.
From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs.
In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the…
I always enjoy Isaacson’s biographies, and this time, he taught me how Jobs was able to envision and then deliver products that literally changed how you and I interact with the world every day. He also gave me a better understanding of Jobs as a person, warts and all.
As someone who has worked in the music industry for almost 30 years, I can say that no single person played a bigger role than Jobs.
From bestselling author Walter Isaacson comes the landmark biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs' professional and personal life.
Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members, key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.
I first went to Berlin after college, determined to write a novel about the German Resistance; I stayed a quarter of a century. Initially, the Berlin Airlift, something remembered with pride and affection, helped create common ground between me as an American and the Berliners. Later, I was commissioned to write a book about the Airlift and studied the topic in depth. My research included interviews with many participants including Gail Halvorsen. These encounters with eyewitnesses inspired me to write my current three-part fiction project, Bridge to Tomorrow. With Russian aggression again threatening Europe, the story of the airlift that defeated Soviet state terrorism has never been more topical.
Stopping Russian Aggression with milk, coal, and candy bars….
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians will starve unless they receive food, medicine, and more by air.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour, and children’s shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in the West. Until General Winter deploys on the side of Russia...
Based on historical events, award-winning novelist Helena P. Schrader delivers an…
In the second book of the Bridge to Tomorrow Series, the story continues where "Cold Peace" left off.
Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians in Hitler's former capital will starve unless they receive food, medicine and more by air.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight Lieutenant Kit Moran once risked their lives to drop high explosives on Berlin. They are about to deliver milk, flour and children's shoes instead. Meanwhile, two women pilots are flying an air ambulance that carries malnourished and abandoned children to freedom in…
