Essential.

One of the greatest pleasures of my life is reading books. It not just open the minds to new thoughts, it takes away any prejudice one might have. And any good thing in life is as much about knowing what not to do than obviously knowing what to do. Over the last 30 days, i have kind of covered some ground in terms of reading great stuffs. I am writing this blog to throw some light on 3 books recently finished. All three are intertwined in terms of scope at times, but very different in issues each address.

Tools and Weapons by Brad Smith: President of Microsoft in his book talks about the current challenges of the technological era. He speaks from his experience at Microsoft as the Legal head, how we are to navigate the wired world we live in. We have reached an inflection point when world has turned information into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon. This inflection point should give way to a new rule of law to govern the world of AI/Robots/Machine Learning. Mr. Smith advocates greater responsibility from the companies that build greater technologies. Challenges in no defined order including Cyber crimes, social media and ethical issues with AI will need to be dealt with more holistic approach to governance from lawmakers and CEOs. Challenges to democracy are high due to these technologies, and the impact of it can be seen in the world. This is not the glorification of Microsoft, but how Microsoft 2.0 (Satya Nadella’s era) is trying to strive a right balance between technological advancement and ethical technological use. To paraphrase the author these issues are bigger than any single person, company, industry or even technology itself, it’s about fundamental human rights.

The Tech Whisperer by Jaspreet Bindra:  On digitization and digital transformation. "Digitization involves standardazing business processes and is associated with cost cutting and operational excellence, whereas digital transformation involves rethinking the company's value proposition not just it's operations". Author sets out to define how the advent of technology has gone ahead and changed (or is changing) the whole business model/ customer experience/ culture of the society along with the company. The impact the companies like Uber, Airbnb etc have had on how their respective industry is working.  It grapples which the question of how data, accessibility of it, ability of the companies to mine information out of it has changed the way businesses will operate. This book is a professorial course on how technologies like AI/Blockchain is making every company a technology company. It delves on IoT (Internet of Things) which is coming up as new product lines. And lastly  it has a chapter on AI written by an AI. Very interesting to know how it came about.

Tim cook by Leander Kahney: With the passing of Steve Jobs in 2011, Apple had lost its charismatic CEO. The baton was passed to an Operations guy named Tim Cook. For a person who loves what apple does, it is finest read on how the company was moved forward from there. Tim Cook’s background and early life helped forge the company into a more ethical, environment friendly, bringing in values of diversity and inclusion and above all of that keeping the flag of innovation high. Apple was the first company to reach the trillion dollar in market cap, it has come along with great products, from the culture of empathy, drive towards societal commitments not only financial commitments. Books sheds light on how different CEO’s impacts world differently, case in point Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. It will always be Jobs’ company but what Apple is today is very much Tim Cook’s making. 

"Technology advances could have made human life care free and happy, if the development of the organising power of man had been able to keep step with his technical advances, instead, the hardly bought achievements of the machine age in the hands of our generation are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a three-year old child" - Albert Einstein.