Innovation and Entrepreneurship is one of the foundation stones of the world as we see it today. By no means a novel, the book is slightly older than I am, it still has some sage wisdom even if the specific case studies have slipped from relevance. Drucker's object were threefold: he provides a more rigorous definition of entrepreneurship that reclaims the field from its obsession with the high-tech genius inventor. He uses entrepreneurship to explain the success of the American and Japanese economy after World War 2, particularly how millions of jobs were created for men and women even as traditional smoke stack industries cratered. Finally, he offers some advice for entrepreneurial organizations.

In order, for Drucker entrepreneurship is the profitable harnessing of change to move capital from an area of low productivity to one of higher productivity. New scientific knowledge is just one of seven possible sources of innovation, and is in actually the most expensive and uncertain. The most important skill of the entrepreneur is a keen eye for incongruities and unmet market needs. One of the more moving case studies is a New York department store which "knew" that appliance sales should only be 20% of its business. It spent the consumer boom of the 60s trying to knock down its appliance numbers, and eventually lost position to a competitor who found a market in the gadget hungry Betty Drapers of the era. Novelty is also tied to entrepreneurship. While opening any business is a venture, opening yet another franchise restaurant is not really entrepreneurial.

The best section is on what kills entrepreneurial ventures. Drucker sees an entrepreneurial venture as being like a child. In existing businesses, expecting the new to carry the weight of a mature unit is like asking a six year old to march with a 60 pound pack; neither will get very far. A focus on the profitability of the present business can hinder entrepreneurship. He sees Johnson & Johnson and 3M as companies with the best practices, where a specialized division handles new businesses, which are given a few years to succeed or fail on their own merits before being upgraded to stable parts of the business. Established companies should conduct a regular audit with the aim of killing products which are not succeeding (RIP Google reader) because the time and attention of your employees is the most valuable resource you have.

The other side of innovation is the start-up, though I don't recall Drucker using that specific term. A small and new business can capitalize on doing one thing supremely well to capture a major market, but rapid growth is fraught with pain. Startups invariable run into cashflow and founder problems, and often at the most critical point when they need to rapidly ramp up capacity to succeed. Getting a solid managerial team in place before the crisis is the way to survive it, but good teams are expensive.

Drucker is full of solid 'horse sense' about running a business, and the fundamental are the fundamentals, but his focus on economics renders him somewhat blind to other aspects of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship can also be read as cognitive, as a series of decisions which bring about a new state of the world. And change is hard because it runs up against allocations not only of money, but also power and prestige. Drucker's unstated bias, that concerns about power and prestige should melt away in the face of the capital enhancing power of new ways of doing things, ignores the realities of human psychology.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship is an older book, but well worth checking out. And on a personal note of bitterness, I spent six years earning a PhD in a school which branded itself as "studying innovation" and Drucker never came up once. I'm fully for raiding and pillaging those over-endowed jerks at the B-school, and we should take their ideas along with their nice colloquium room furniture!

I seem to be on a bit of a Second World War procurement kick, having recently finished Freedom's Forge. The Arsenal of Democracy is a much narrower book, focusing on B-24 production at Willow Run and the family drama of the Fords.

Henry Ford was the most famous industrialist in the world, having made the automobile a mass commodity with his Model T. But through the 20s and 30s, his politics and management style became increasingly deranged. Henry Ford published lengthy anti-Semitic screeds, accepted high honors from Adolf Hitler, and turned against his son and heir Edsel in favor of Harry Barrett, a boxer with criminal ties who ran a thousand strong Ford security arm as a private mafia.

Edsel was a fascinating character. The Fords had come from very little to the peak of wealth and privilege, but Edsel was trapped in the shadow of his father. Where Henry Ford was an austere puritan, Edsel was an easygoing man who made friends everywhere and enjoyed drinking, dancing, and smoking.

As Nazi Germany went on the march, Edsel maneuvered Ford into FDR's military buildup. Airpower would be key, and despite the elder Henry Ford's pacifist beliefs and pro-German lean, Edsel broke ground Willow Run, a massive superfactory that had the goal of turning out a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber every hour.

But nothing went easy. The factory was 27 miles from Detroit proper, and there was nowhere near enough housing nearby. Strikes and race riots interrupted production. Design changes caused major hitches in the factory, while trained labor was a continual problem. Meanwhile, Henry Ford sunk into senility, Barrett continued being a mafioso, and Edsel Ford was dying of stomach cancer. Though timelines slipped, Willow Run achieved it's design goal, and B-24s helped win the Battle of the Atlantic and pound Nazi Germany to pieces.

Baime is a pop historian, and he has a talent for keeping a story moving even if it means missing the bigger picture or possible moving a detail or bit of dialog around. If you're going to read one book on the subject, go with Freedom's Forge, but this is still worth a look if you want a second view.

Blum has a talent for capturing the social aspect of sociotechnical systems, in this case the weather forecast that is an entirely unremarkable part of our lives. Weather forecasting has improved immensely, even in a few decades, and this book is how those forecasts are made worldwide.

The first forecasts were local, limited by what the metrologist can see and measure with their own eyes and perhaps a barometer. But weather systems span continents, and tomorrow's rain is often already pouring some miles to the west. In the 19th century, metrologists, with a surprising contribution from Norwegians, began a process of systematic observations reported by telegraph and telephone. While physicists had dreams of being able to calculate the weather, including an immense cathedral amphitheater of 65000 human calculators, the partial differential equations were far beyond abilities at the time. Instead, forecasters relied of crude pattern recognition, matching the fronts and winds they saw with with historical weather to provide a guess which was moderately skillful, one more precise than the simple average for that time and date.

Weather is continuous, but observations are only collected at discrete stations and times. Good data was a matter of massive international cooperation, since only a handful of nations were large enough to meaningfully encompass weather systems. The Cold War, with its advances in rocketry and computers, brought weather prediction into its modern form. Blum sees the launch of a NASA satellite with a billion dollar sensor for measuring surface moisture, and then goes to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, a supercomputer site that gulps in torrents of data from satellites and ground stations and has incrementally produced a model accurate to five to eight days out. You might remember the Euro from hurricane season, when different models try to figure out where the big storm is going to make landfall.

Weather is international science diplomacy, but all is not well. While the traditional system was egalitarian, there's now a split between major powers capable of launching satellites and running supercomputers, and the minor nations still dependent on freely available forecast data. Private companies pose another threat, including US giant The Weather Company, which supplies forecasts to consumers, and a potential future of big data from millions of small sensors, collected and collated by a tech titan.

Blum keeps it light, focusing on the people and places of weather forecasting, so while a nerd may want a more in depth book, this is one that ordinary people can finish.

Tower of Mud and Straw is a lyrical fantasy novel about a disgraced politician overseeing a construction megaproject. Shea Ashcroft is one of the Queen's ministers, who refused to use violence against the mob. His new assignment is out on the frontier, where a 1000 foot air-defense tower is being built. He arrives to find a paranoid and insular group of experts around the local Duke, and that exotic and dangerous antigravity magitech that he has a family history with is being used to build the power. Events move like an avalanche towards the only possible conclusion.

Tower is built around moments of lyric beauty, self-consciously artistic descriptions of the play of light or stormclouds, and then secondly Shea's unravelling psychology and personal neurosis. The plot and other characters are dreamlike at best. But as a novella, this book doesn't wear out its welcome, and the literary qualities are worth savoring.

Lee Vinsel is a pro-follow on twitter, and his essays Design Thinking is Kind of Like Syphilis — It’s Contagious and Rots Your Brains and You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype are some of the best STS scholarship I've read in ages: insightful, deeply sourced, provocative, funny, and sharp enough to cut. The Innovation Delusion is a mistitled collection of anecdotes that doesn't quite rise to meet the needs of a research program.


Eroded century old C-hook. Failure of a similar hook caused the destructive 2019 Camp Fire. Source

A better title for this book is The Maintenance Correction. Vinsel and Russell are two of the organizers behind The Maintainers mailing list, an interdisciplinary conversation on the practice of maintenance. This book is built on three pillars. First, American society is valorizes innovation-speak, a specific brand of public relations used by cool Silicon Valley information technology firms, which is distinct from "real innovation". Second, there is a massive and painful structural deficit in maintenance across this country, at scales from regional electrical grids to water systems and bridges to houses to our own teeth and joints. And third, maintenance and care workers, including IT helpdesks, nurses, and people who take out the trash both on our streets and on our social media networks, are underpaid and disrespected. It's hard to argue with these pillars individually, but they don't quite come together as a thesis.

The narrative wanders through little vignettes. Here's the famous IDEO lab, home of expensive design thinking consultants, which can't point to how design thinking makes anything better. Here's the Strong Town network, founded by a libertarian town planner helping municipalities get their infrastructure commitments under control. Here are tech start ups attaching sensors to complex machines to figure out when a pump goes out of true, preventing a $250k repair job. Here are people all across America without the time or money to fix little problems around the home or on the body, who will eventually face expensive and potentially fatal situations because of it.

Some of the book is quite alarming. While I'm sure most people are familiar with the jokes of Trump's Infrastructure Week and the much less funny D- grade for US infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the financial cost of deferred maintenance for civic water, power, and road systems is frighteningly high, an off-books expense that would sink local budgets if properly accounted for. Similarly, while functional companies recognize that maintaining capital systems saves money, a culture of quarterly profits and rapid turnover can mean that undone maintenance is someone else's problem, at least until your stuff breaks and starts killing people (hello PG&E, hello ERCOT). Short-termism and a looter's attitude towards capital is at the heart of what this book cares about, and is hardly mentioned, which seems a major oversight.

As a scholarly book and one summarizing several years of The Maintainers conference and conversations, I would have liked some thoughts on best practices for doing research on maintenance, on making this invisible labor visible. So much of what the authors deem as great maintenance is bound up in the local and specific, noting the sound of a machine as it goes out of balance, or the signs that a roof is leaking before the joists rot away. Following workers ethnographically and technological systems in detail is surprisingly hard. Perhaps methods are not worth fetishizing, but a book is a moment for a research movement to make a stand, to say "this is the state of our art", and The Innovation Delusion doesn't do that. Meanwhile certain innovation-centric academic departments I may have formerly been affiliated with are throwing out almost-identical-but-cleverly-renamed research programs every year.

And finally, there is a lot of room to dismantle innovation-speak. Some areas which I know about just from reading tech news, and which are not mentioned in the book follow. We can laugh at Juicero, Theranos, and WeWork, but I have no idea how salad chain Sweetgreen is pivoting to being a tech company. Unicorn tech darlings like Uber and AirBNB are successful because they shift the cost of maintenance off their books and onto their users. Driving for Uber may seem profitable, until you account for all the wear you're putting on your car. Similarly, renting out a spare room on AirBNB regularly means being a hotel maid and washing a lot more sheets. Avoiding maintenance costs is core to how these tech companies make money; well, that and massively breaking local laws. On the other side of the tech equation, cloud services like AWS allow companies to avoid the tricky matter of running, maintaining, and upgrading their own datacenters by renting computing resources from Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. I'm not experienced enough to know when Cloud vs on-prem makes sense, but having worked as a software developer for two years now, if you're not actively refactoring and paying down your technical debt, you're accruing interest on something which will come back to hurt you.

At the end of the day, The Innovation Delusion is okay, but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Guadalcanal was one of the turning point battles of World War 2, along with El Alamein and Stalingrad. Over the course of long months in 1942 and 1943, American Marines, sailors, soldiers, and airmen ground down the cream of the Imperial Japanese military that had run rampant over the Pacific after Pearl Harbor.

Wheelan ably remixes older beats, drawing heavily from standard memoirs like Leckie's With the Old Breed and Hara's Japanese Destroyer Captain to describe the chaos of the campaign. Guadalcanal, at the base of the Solomon Islands, would threaten sea lanes between the United States and Australia in the hands of the Japanese. A hastily organized Marine landing force captured the airbase under construction, naming it Henderson Field after a Marine pilot killed at the Battle of Midway. But thousands of Japanese troops still remained on the island, and in the first Battle of the Savo Islands, an American fleet was comprehensively defeated by the superior night fighting skills of the Japanese Navy.

The campaign settled into a brutal equilibrium. By day, the planes of the Cactus Air Force controlled the seas around Guadalcanal. But the night belonged to the Japanese, who shelled and bombed the Americans while landing more troops. At the Battle of Bloody Ridge, Edson's Marine Raiders held off an assault which would have overwhelmed the airfield, and as the months wore on, American strength increased while Japanese strength decreased, culminating in the mass starvation of Japanese forces on the island and an eventual retreat.

Guadalcanal was a war of commanders, machines, and ultimately ordinary fighting men. On the first account, the two sides were most unevenly matched. Admiral Ghormley, the initial American overall commander lacked aggressiveness and failed to contend the battle. But General Vandergrift of the Marines, Ghormley's successor Admiral Halsey, and Nimitz and King in strategic roles, were much more successful. While Japanese commanders scored impressive tactical victories, the divided IJN/IJA command structure was slow to recognize the importance of Guadalcanal or focus on the strategic airfield at the heart of the campaign. Japanese machinery was superior to the the American equipment, especially the Long Lance torpedo and Zero fighter, though American ships and airplanes were adequate. The Japanese and Marines were fearsome and dedicated fighters in close combat, with the Marine advantage in firepower overmatching more archaic Japanese tactics of bayonet charges that had worked on Chinese and colonial armies before. But ultimately, the American side adapted to the developing battle, while the Japanese expensively reinforced failure. A comparison of stalemates is illuminating. Multiple actions of the Matanikau River showed the American offensives did not always work, and while each attack killed hundreds of Marines and soldiers to little gain, Japanese attacks on the perimeter ended in thousands of casualties and left entire units ineffective for further action.

Almost 70 years on, there's little about Guadalcanal that hasn't been said already. Wheelan's book ably synthesizes the existing secondary literature.

In World War II, the Allies buried the Axis under a torrent of technological products. This is the story of that production miracle, as seen through the biographies of two key leaders. Bill Knudsen was a Danish immigrant who at General Motors pioneered flexible mass production and annual models of automobiles. Henry Kaiser was an entrepreneur who made his fortune on the West Coast, first building roads and then leading mega-scale projects like the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams.

In 1940, America was one of the most productive countries in the world, but industry had been hit hard by the Great Depression, and almost none of that capacity was geared towards military ends. The Army was without tanks, the Air Force was third tier at best, and while the Navy had capital ships, it was deficient in escorts and transports. In the last war, American soldiers had fought with French and British equipment. While Wilson had ordered a mass mobilization, production hang-ups and logistical snafus meant that very little of what was ordered ever saw a battlefield. If that happened again, there would be no way to defeat the Axis.

Knudsen was appointed Chairman of the Office of Production Management, and in the time between the invasion of Poland and Pearl Harbor, when American involvement in the war was distinctly unpopular, began the tricky work of converting commercial production over to military use. Knudsen used his immense standing in industry and his detailed knowledge of production to begin producing machine tools and setting up new factories. From fitful beginnings, Knudsen unleashed an avalanche of material: hundreds of thousands of tanks and aircraft, along with billions of shells and all the other necessary components of war.

Kaiser turned his mega-project style to building transports, churning out hundreds of Liberty cargo ships, along with oilers and escort carriers. Applying mass production to ships cut the build time down from 200 days to 25 at full swing. As part of a contest, one yard turned out a complete ship in 4 days! But Kaiser's publicity seeking style made him enemies, including Bill Knudsen. And when Liberty ships began cracking up, Kaiser's reputation took the blame, even though the fault was a combination of design and steel quality, rather than manufacturing defects.

Herman is a conservative intellectual, with longtime associations with the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, and this book is a paean to big business. Celebrating industry is a fair frame, but Herman can't help himself from taking swipes at FDR, the New Deal, or organized labor whenever he can. My politics are basically entirely opposed to Herman's, but the story that he tells is engaging enough that I can give his obligatory right wing gruntings a pass. Wages of Destruction is worth reading, but Freedom's Forge is fun reading. It's just important to keep in mind that contrary to Herman's great man focused vision, the American people paid for the war, where the big contractors got a cost+8% contract and useful capital installations afterwards; workers milled, stamped, riveted, and welded the ships, planes, tanks, and guns; and ultimately an army of citizen-soldiers used these weapons to win the war.

H.M.S. Surprise clears the decks for action and gives the people what they want, a straight-forward ripping sea yarn with lots and lots of action. Aubrey has got a proper ship, the elderly frigate Surprise, where he served as a midshipman. While a trick of the pen has erased his fortune for capturing the Spanish treasure fleet at the end of the last book, since England and Spain were not yet at war, any command is a good one, and a swift frigate is better than most.

Jack has to rescue Dr. Maturin from Port Mahon, where he has been captured as a spy and is being tortured by Napoleon's intelligence service, and then it is off to India, carrying a royal envoy to a sultanate in Malaysia. There's lyrical descriptions of the open sea, Maturin does his naturalist thing along Brazil (leading to one of the best lines in the books, "Jack, you have debauched my sloth!"), and then to Bombay, where the adventuress Diana Villers is living with the wealthy Mr. Canning.

On the return journey, there is some great action, as Aubrey leads a fleet of Indiamen against a French flotilla containing a ship of line, a deadly ruse relying on the bravery of civilian merchants to delay and then overwhelm the French with numbers while at a great individual inferiority.

And then Maturin fights a duel with Canning over Diana, and has to operate on himself to take the ball out! But all's well that ends well.

A Desolation Called Peace is simpler and better than the first book. A few months after the coup that saw a new emperor, and Mahit returned home, the war against the aliens is going poorly. The enemy has superior drive technology, something which lets their ships disappear into a swirl of visual distortion, and the six legions sent to fight them are being cut apart in a slow battle of attrition. When the fleet finally spot an one of their elusive foes, a ship of three rotating rings emitting horrific noises which cause people to vomit, supreme commander Nine Hibiscus calls for a negotiator from the homeworld.

That negotiator is former diplomatic assistant Three Seagrass, who decides this will be an adventure and a chance to see Mahit again, since the war is just past Lsel Station. Mahit has been dealing with her own political problems at home, with the government trying to decide if she's a loose end to be tied up, or a tool that still has use in advancing their agenda of getting the Empire caught in an endless quagmire of war.

The basic plot is therefore an attempt to make first contact with aliens who don't seem to understand the concept of language, with a race against factions which would prefer to see the negotiation fail. A wounded Empire is a dangerous thing, and even though its outmatched in space, the Empire has plenty of planetkilling nuclear weapons.

The points of view expand to include Nine Hibiscus, fleet commander, and Eight Antidote, the 11 year old heir to the throne, who is precociously working behind the scenes to learn the duty of an emperor and forbid genocide. First contact is pretty standard for scifi, and Martine's aliens are serviceable, but the straightforward scientific puzzle lets her characters shine under stress, where they spent too much of the first book stumbling through someone else's intrigue.

Second books are tricky. The first book in a series you can pause the plot to do some world-building, and in the third book threads should be wrapped up, but a good second book should not only unwind the story, but test the characters in some way. Thunderhead is decent, but doesn't show any movement in its protagonists.

Citra, now Scythe Anastasia, is the leading light of the old guard, Scythes who believe that taking a life should be a sober business for all concerned. Rowan, now the illegal Scythe Lucifer, is enacting a one man murder spree on Scythes who he believes have fallen to corruption. This business is more fraught than expected, because it turns out that the arch-new wave Scythe, Goddard, surprisingly survived the holocaust at the end of the last book and has a plan to remake human society in his image, with Scythes as the alpha predators at the top.

While the old characters are pacing through the plot, two new characters come in. Greyson is a young man with dreams of serving the AI that rules humanity, and who is dispatched into a secret mission into the Unsavory underground of controlled dissent. And the Thunderhead itself is the last character, each chapter beginning with a short essay on its responsibilities and limits of power. Because while the Thunderhead is near-godlike, that's the difference between one trillion to the one-trillionth power, and actual infinity. Furthermore, strict legal and architectural limits prevent the Thunderhead from interfering or communicating with Scythes, which means that it is significantly hampered in its mission of guiding humanity.

Everything builds towards an appropriately satisfying action-set pieces on a sinking artificial island, and a cliffhanger of an ending that could see Citra and Rowan pop up again in a few days to a few centuries, but this is mostly a book of stasis.