Here are 100 books that Smart Cities fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always been fascinated by the magic that happens at the intersection of bits and atoms. Circuits, sensors, and algorithms, for better or worse, have permeated every part of our lives. It’s impossible to understand our environment now without understanding the subtle influence of the code that manages and monitors it.
With this textbook disguised as a novel, Goldratt tells a story that sneaks up on you, revealing how simple digital thinking—like tracking bottlenecks and using systems analysis—can revolutionize physical processes. It’s not just about manufacturing; it’s about seeing challenges as opportunities to improve again and again.
This is a story about inspiration and being ready to look at the world differently to make every process—from your own projects to global operations—run a little smoother.
*A Graphic Novel version of this title is now available: "The Goal: A Business Graphic Novel"
30th Anniversary Edition. Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry - even to your bosses - but not to your competitors. Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have always been fascinated by the magic that happens at the intersection of bits and atoms. Circuits, sensors, and algorithms, for better or worse, have permeated every part of our lives. It’s impossible to understand our environment now without understanding the subtle influence of the code that manages and monitors it.
Imagine a world where the objects around you—lamps, umbrellas, even your coffee mug—respond intelligently to your needs.
Rose’s enthusiasm is contagious as he guides us through his vision of a future filled with enchanted objects that seamlessly blend technology with our daily lives. His sometimes whimsical take on technology and innovation will leave you thinking, “What could I design with these technologies that feel like magic?”
I have always been fascinated by the magic that happens at the intersection of bits and atoms. Circuits, sensors, and algorithms, for better or worse, have permeated every part of our lives. It’s impossible to understand our environment now without understanding the subtle influence of the code that manages and monitors it.
This book was once a map of the future, but now it provides an insightful sketch of our present world, showing us how digital intelligence is sneaking into everything—from our thermostats to entire city grids.
Miller makes these concepts so accessible you may not realize the depth and implications of his message. He paints a vision of the world where the power to overcome complex, rapidly changing challenges is well within the reach of individuals and the communities they form.
How the Internet of Things will change your life: all you need to know, in plain English!
The Internet of Things (IoT) won't just connect people: It will connect "smart" homes, appliances, cars, offices, factories, cities... the world. You need to know what's coming: It might just transform your life.
Now, the world's #1 author of beginning technology books has written the perfect introduction to IoT for everyone. Michael Miller shows how connected smart devices will help people do more, do it smarter, do it faster. He also reveals the potential risks-to your privacy, your freedom, and maybe your life.…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I have always been fascinated by the magic that happens at the intersection of bits and atoms. Circuits, sensors, and algorithms, for better or worse, have permeated every part of our lives. It’s impossible to understand our environment now without understanding the subtle influence of the code that manages and monitors it.
Long considered a must-read text in the field, Chopra’s eloquence makes the complex world of supply chains not only clear but exciting, showing how technology brings logistics to life.
He breaks down how digital tools like tracking systems and automation integrate with the physical flow of goods to build unprecedented efficiency. With these fundamentals, you will learn how data-driven logistics can change industries, communities, and maybe even your career.
Gain the practical tools to solve supply chain problems.
Supply Chain Management: Strategy, Planning and Operation, 7th edition, Global Edition, by Sunil Chopra, introduces you to high-level strategy and concepts. A strategic framework guides you through all the key drivers of supply chain performance, including facilities, inventory, transportation, information, sourcing, and pricing. The 7th edition embeds compelling case study examples to illustrate how good supply chain management offers a competitive advantage and how poor supply chain management can damage an organisation's performance. With this text, you can gain a deeper understanding of supply chains and a firm grasp of the…
I’ve worked in and around the tech, science and startup world for the past 10 years, and hype has played various roles in my work and life. From working in advertising where my job was to build narratives around ideas and products, then in journalism where I was tasked with sorting hype from reality when deciding who and what to write about, to now being a researcher who looks into the very nature and power of narratives, ideologies, political economies and cultures around science and technology – hype has been a recurring topic which is so important in understanding and navigating the tech industry. I hope you find these books as enlightening as I have!
This is one of my favourite tech criticism books. I love how each of the book’s chapters takes a word commonly used in Silicon Valley (and the associated international startup communities) - such as "failure," "disruption," "drop-out," and "content" and dives into the "intellectual bedrock" at the heart of the discourse which surrounds them.
Daub is a Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford - so his critical eye and vast knowledge of intellectual history swiftly pull apart the pseudo-intellectualism so many in the startup community use to justify their success and problematic behaviour.
I particularly valued the fact that it’s short, punchy, and acts as a brilliant thought-starter to go deeper into the crucial ideologies which are hugely impacting our world today.
Adrian Daub's What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley's world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of "disruption," Daub locates the Valley's supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination.…
Since I was a little boy, I’ve been passionate about technology and its potential to help people. After 25 years working in high tech, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence with a career spanning Intel, Google DeepMind, and a few successful startups I co-founded, I’ve pivoted to helping people, particularly leaders, understand how AI will transform business, education, and society, and how they can use AI to create new value and solve problems for people. AI is about to change everything about everything, and these books will help readers understand what’s coming and prepare themselves for humanity’s journey into an age of abundant intelligence.
When Peter’s book was released the same month as mine, I was initially concerned it would be duplicative. As I eagerly read his book, I realized it was a companion piece to mine. We discuss many of the same topics, and examples in my book help to illustrate concepts in his and vice versa.
From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era.
In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
Just because most teachers love to read, their students may not feel the same way.
Teachers struggle with getting students to read and the rise in screen time and social media seems to make the challenge even tougher. Furthermore, is reading on a screen the same as reading on paper?
This book addresses reading on screens head on and provides a rich history of reading, and lays the groundwork for ways to get students to be more effective readers. I loved the facts relating to what catches student eyeballs.
Students are reading on screens more than ever-how can we teach them to be better digital readers?
Smartphones, laptops, tablets: college students are reading on-screen all the time, and digital devices shape students' understanding of and experiences with reading. In higher education, however, teachers rarely consider how digital reading experiences may have an impact on learning abilities, unless they're lamenting students' attention spans or the distractions available to students when they're learning online.
Skim, Dive, Surface offers a corrective to these conversations-an invitation to focus not on losses to student learning but on the spectrum of affordances available within digital…
By Andrée Ehresmann & Jean-Paul VanbremeerschAuthor
Why are we passionate about this?
An accident of professional life led us, Jean-Paul Vanbremeersch and Andrée Ehresmann, to meet in 1979. Jean-Paul was then a young physician who was also interested in problems of emergence and complexity. Andrée was a mathematician working in Analysis and, more recently, in Category Theory with Charles Ehresmann (her late husband). With Charles, she shared the idea that: “a category theory approach could open a wealth of possibilities to the understanding of complex processes of any kind.”This idea appealed to Jean-Paul who suggested that we both try applying it to problems of emergence, complexity, and cognition. It led to our 40 years old development of MES.
The last book on our list is a recent addition, distinguished by its illustrative format and contemporary content; in particular. Structured uniquely, it comprises three parts (plus a foreword).
The first section, titled "The Innovator’s Odyssey," narrates the journey of a young innovator designer grappling with bureaucratic hurdles in organizational settings. Amidst these challenges, he embarks on a quest for a "mathesis singularis"–a unique mathematical framework to aid innovation management. This quest leads him to discover our MES book.
The second part features an insightful interview with the author, offering valuable insights into the book's creation. Lastly, the third section includes a short Mathematical Appendix (for further exploration).
This book is about mathematics in the management of innovation, showing how recent advances in mathematics help us grasp and support innovation as a social activity of thinking and imagining together. It will make the reader rethink both innovation and mathematics by having them interplay in practical organizational settings.Told as fiction to make its argument more accessible, the book is nonetheless grounded in theoretical reflections and recent mathematical advances. In recounting the adventures of a committed and enthusiastic inventor-designer hampered by the increasing industrial bureaucratization of his world, it accounts for the fate of many innovation processes in large companies…
I’ve worked in and around the tech, science and startup world for the past 10 years, and hype has played various roles in my work and life. From working in advertising where my job was to build narratives around ideas and products, then in journalism where I was tasked with sorting hype from reality when deciding who and what to write about, to now being a researcher who looks into the very nature and power of narratives, ideologies, political economies and cultures around science and technology – hype has been a recurring topic which is so important in understanding and navigating the tech industry. I hope you find these books as enlightening as I have!
I loved this book because it not only picks apart the concept of "innovation" and helps you approach its usage across work, media, and everyday life but it also goes into exploring an alternative view – that of "maintenance."
It’s packed full of great examples, provides much-needed clear analysis of things we take for granted (like bridges!), and gives me hope for different ways of approaching how to talk about technology, innovation, and the future.
“Innovation” is the hottest buzzword in business. But what if our obsession with finding the next big thing has distracted us from the work that matters most?
“The most important book I’ve read in a long time . . . It explains so much about what is wrong with our technology, our economy, and the world, and gives a simple recipe for how to fix it: Focus on understanding what it takes for your products and services to last.”—Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media
It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether…
I have worked all my adult life trying to understand the implications of the insight that the economy depends on the environment for all its materials, energy, and assimilation of all its wastes. What began as academic curiosity developed into concern about the urgency of a transition to a post-growth economy, especially in rich countries. Justice requires that those most responsible for ecological overshoot reduce their demands on nature furthest and fastest so that those least responsible but suffering the worst consequences can also flourish. I hope you find the books I have chosen will help you take informed action to bring about the transition to a post-growth society.
My understanding of how the world works has been greatly influenced by my study of economics. However, economists often make overly optimistic assumptions about technology and resources that are not grounded in fact and experience.
Smil's book on how the world really works is a powerful antidote to the wishful thinking of those, not just economists, who believe that technology will solve the problems of overshoot, poverty, inequality, conflict, and whatever else may be ailing us.
I love Smil's grasp of physical, biological, and technological fundamentals and his ability to communicate his wisdom about how the world really works simply and with conviction.
'There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil' Bill Gates __________
We have never had so much information at our fingertips and yet most of us don't know how the world really works. This book explains seven of the most fundamental realities governing our survival and prosperity. From energy and food production, through our material world and its globalization, to risks, our environment and its future, How the World Really Works offers a much-needed reality check - because before we can tackle problems effectively, we must understand the facts.
