1. Blockchain Revolution, How the technology behind Bitcoin is changing money, business and the World
This book by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott is from 2016 and is a great resource for readers who want learn about this technology which is set to change the whole concept of ‘Money’ and how it is used. It goes into some detail around the history of the protocol, how it can be applied in the world of business, and what hurdles it faces around regulation as it emerges and becomes more widely adopted.
The Blockchain is set to completely disrupt our way of life and decentralize power in the financial and economic system giving control back to the people from large corporate and financial intermediaries. The protocol will enable global peer to peer transactions seamlessly over the Internet, cutting out the middleman. Clearly this is set to upset the establishment and they will do what ever they can to stop its wide scale adoption.
2. Exponential Organizations, Why new organizations are ten times better, faster and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)
Salem Ismail’s book written in 2014, takes a close look at how in the past 10 years the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company – the Exponential Organization – that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology. An ExO can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers.
3. Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki
I first read this book about 15 years ago and it really provoked me to start questioning everything I had grown up to know and understand about money and education. The author reveals in a very enlightening method that our education system completely omits any lessons on what money is and how it works and all it does is just prepare us to be workers and not entrepreneurs.
Robert Kiyosaki uses the examples of a gentleman who thought him everything about money and business while he was an 11 year-old child calling him his Rich Dad, while at he same time he refers to his paternal father a second generation Japanese American, well educated PHD qualified college professor as his ‘Poor Dad”.
The author repeats several times that his Poor Dad was constantly on his case about him going to school to get a qualification, in order to be able to get a job and save enough money through a pension. His ‘Rich Dad’ taught him that he should never become a slave to a job where you trade time for a pay cheque and that he should use money/debt to generate wealth.
Needless to say Robert who was trained as a pilot and flew for the US Army in Vietnam on returning from war was advised by his ‘Poor Dad’ to take up a job with one of the commercial airlines to earn a pay check and accumulate a pension. His ’Rich Dad’ who was a successful investor in real estate left a lasting impression on him and he followed his example to become a successful real estate investor in his own right.
4. The Google Story, David A. Vise
Google is one of the first generation of big tech companies from the mid-90s, which today is consistently among the largest global companies by market capitalization, which at the time of writing was $1 trillion. The book is very interesting as it goes into a lot of detail on how the founders, Larry Page an American and Serge Brin a Russian who met at University and at the time were an unlikely combination, teamed up to build a search engine that could store enormous amounts of data on a stack of servers that needed to be constantly updated increasing its storage capacity. They built an engine that was intuitive using algorithms. They then found a model to generate revenue by including adverts on the side bar of search pages driven by key words!
The book is also instructive for founders of any entrepreneurial venture in that to actually scale the business, it is often required for the founding entrepreneurs to step back at a point in time and find a suitable manager to take a business forward when it becomes corporatized, as founders of a company do not always make the best managers. In Eric Schmidt they found an experienced executive, with whom they could work to drive the broader organization, while they focused on the backend technological development of the company, their strong suite and the rest is history!