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Adam Grant – Give and take

In order to be successful, ‘givers’ have to be smart about how they direct their giving.

Remarkable how social environment and incentives can shape giving/taking behavior of individuals.

Deborah Blum – The poisoner’s handbook

Following development in chemistry and society, forensic toxicology experienced fascinating progress in the early 20th century.

Treasure trove of slightly lugubrious annecdotes on crimes, accidents and government schemes.

Ben Horowitz – The hard thing about hard things

In the end no-one but the founder-CEO really cares how difficult it is to do the right thing for your start-up.

Comfortingly desillusional perspective on entrepreneurship, with reassuring insights like: “No one cares.”

Stanislas Deheane – Consciousness and the brain

Combining carefully designed experiments with monitoring of brain activity has led to fadcinating insights about consciousness.

Fascinating read about how much progress has been made on the path initiated by Daniel Dennett in “Consciousness explained”.

Michael Smith – Streaming, Sharing, Stealing

For the first time in decades, the simulaneous developments in distribution and production of media give traditional ‘majors’ something to worry about.

Recent move of Disney to boycot Netflixs proves that incumbents are starting to realize the new reality.

Yuval Noah Harari – Sapiens

The rise of Homo Sapiens to the top of the food chain has been the result of its remarkable ability to construct a collective imagination of things like God, nations, money, and corporations.

Refreshing evolutionary perspective, emphasizing the cognitive, agricultural, and industrial revolutions as turning points in human development.

Naomi Klein – No is not enough

All “progressives” should unite against Trump, who’s communication strategy is that of a WWE wrestling star.

Solid analysis of politics and mass communication ends in a disappointingly polarized plea for “us v. them”-thinking.

Pedro Domingos – The master algorithm

The author’s invention (“Markov logic networks”) may unify the symbolist, connectionist, evolutionary, Baysian, and analogizing approaches to machine learning.

The brave attempt to cover an inherently deep subject in a non-technical way.

Richard Evans – The pursuit of power

The 19th century saw the birth of many aspects that still define our world today; from the end of feudalism to the birth of modern democracy and from the death of god to the emergance of Medicine as a scientific discipline.

Masterful balance between major developments and impact on human scale.

Martin Lindstrom – Small data

Information that is typically not captured in ‘big data’ is essential for creatives shaping a marketing message.

The author suggests a (false) dichotomy between small and big data.

Ashlee Vance – Elon Musk

With the cash you get from selling PayPal you can stay solvant longer than the market can stay irrational.

Do not read the Dutch translation: Henk Popken did a crappy job.

Philip Fernbach and Steven Sloman – The Knowledge Illusion

In a world that is both complex and polarized , progress (which is fueled by sharing knowledge) is in serious danger of reversal.

The concept is almost trivial (which makes for a boring 1st half of the book), but the examples (partizan politics, fake news, pseudo science, etc.) are convincing and entertaining.

Clayton M. Christensen – Competing against luck

When working on innovation, always ask yourself: “What job does my product/service do for its user?” as a first test.

Good thought starter and a great tool to point out failures afterwards, but usually hard to get “the job” right before launch

Kevin Ashton – How to fly a horse

Creativity ( = ‘logical thinking’ + ‘trial-and-error’ ) does not fit well with most organizational cultures.

Unfortunately, the book contains too many anecdotes that feature Woody Allen.

Robert Gordon – The rise and fall of American growth

High growth is a thing of the past: all great major inventions have been made and can only be made once.

OK… exponential decrease of discomfort may imply decreasing marginal gains, but that does not imply that the future will not see consumer surplus stemming from future inventions.