Gazettabyte is asking industry figures to pick their reads of the year. In the penultimate entry, Prof. Yosef Ben Ezra, Dave Welch, William Webb, and Abdul Rahim share their favourite reads.
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Professor Yosef Ben Ezra, PhD, CTO, NewPhotonics
My reading in 2024 continued to augment my technical knowledge with insights on how to bring innovation to the market.
As part of our mission to shift the industry with innovative products, I have been focussing on decision-making as the key to transitioning from technology development to product-market impact and fit. Our company entered a new phase at the beginning of last year, moving from an early-stage technology start-up to a customer-centred growth company. In reading The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries, I better understood how we must apply evidence-based decision-making even as we establish a more agile environment where rapid experimentation and learning from customer input takes precedence over extensive planning and development cycles. This insight was critical as we moved from research to delivering a product that met market demand.
Another instrumental read in 2024 was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. With our team growing quickly, the company leadership began facing significantly broader input and issues tied to decision-making that reached beyond engineering. Kahneman's insights on the interplay between two systems of thinking—intuitive and deliberate—provided an expanded mindset for dealing with a range of cognitive perspectives and biases that influence contextual, practical, and effective decision-making, which is vital to our progress.
The final book I'll reference has proven to be an essential follow-up to an earlier read that played an instrumental role in starting our company: Blue Ocean Strategies. We strongly identify with this, so Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, was an excellent follow-up for me. Ultimately, it spotlights the importance of originality and boldness in innovation. It aligns strongly with our aim to avoid imitation and incremental improvements to connectivity and instead seek transformative advances that offer substantial, long-term value.
I identify strongly with the idea of pursuing a daring and groundbreaking product introduction that reaches new heights, like the distinction Thiel explains in horizontal versus vertical innovation.
Dave Welch, CEO and Founder, AttoTude
One Summer: America, 1927, by Bill Bryson. A fun read about a similarly fascinating time of technology, politics, and human behavior.
William Webb, Independent Consultant, Board Member and Author
I much prefer fact to fiction and often read books about politics, economics and philosophy. But occasionally Amazon suggests something different and I give it a try. Two such random suggestions this year stood out.
The first is Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman by Callum Robinson. A true story of a woodworker in Scotland with his own small company that has to suddenly change tack when a major client cancelled a huge order. It's beautifully written with a love for woodwork, craftsmanship and friends. It's not normally my sort of thing, but this book is one that you won't put down and will make you think again about what's important in life.
My second suggestion is completely different - Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Maths Behind Modern AI by Anil Ananthaswamy. The book sets out the mathematics behind how large language models and other AI systems work. It is written for someone with fairly rudimentary mathematical skills. It isn't a light read, but I found it valuable to understand just how models are trained and the compromises and choices behind it all. AI is so important for the future and now I feel that I've got a good handle on how it works.
Abdul Rahim, Ecosystem Manager, PhotonDelta
The book I enjoyed most this year is Overcrowded: Designing Meaningful Products in a World Awash with Ideas, by Roberto Verganti.
The book treats innovation as a gift towards the beneficiaries of innovation and presents a framework for innovation of meaning. This framework is different from design thinking, which is geared towards finding solutions to a problem in an empathetic manner. Roberto's framework requires a sparring partner who challenges, questions and criticises in the journey of innovation of meaning. The photonics integrated circuit (PIC) community can learn a lot from this book.
The other book I read - well, listened to - is How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. This one needs no explanation.