Books of the year 2016 - Part 2

More industry figures comment on books read this year. Here are Finisar's Simon Poole's and Ciena's Loudon Blair's recommendations.

Simon Poole, director, new business ventures, Finisar Australia

The highlight of the year in fiction was reading The Shepherds’ Crown, the last of the Discworld novels from the wonderful Terry Pratchett. He, along with his cast of extraordinary characters, including the marvellous Tiffany Aching – a fabulous role model for teenage girls, held up a mirror to the foibles and strengths of our humanity, and will be sorely missed.

Farewell also to the fearless Christoph Hitchens; re-reading God is not Great reminded me of the strengths of his analysis and the importance of ethics and morals in our dealings with each other.

From a work perspective, The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble is one of the few books about innovation that tries to address the real issues which are, to my mind, around the implementation of the ideas rather than their generation. Recommended for anyone who has to manage innovation within an existing organisation with all its strengths and weaknesses.

Loudon Blair, senior director, corporate strategy office, Ciena

Three books read this year caused me to innocently stumble upon a recurring theme of how we are responding to rapid advances in communications technology.

As an adult, reading the 19th century classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, provided a fascinating insight into Carroll’s creative mind. I was especially intrigued by how he plays with the reader’s interpretation of the English language - how we can say one thing and be understood to have said something else. It is a reminder in these days of email misinterpretation and text shorthand to be clear about what we intend to communicate.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is a story of a shepherd boy seeking his personal legend and has multiple layers of interpretation. Coelho talks about how your personal legend is something that you have always wanted to accomplish. You know what it is when you are young because, at that age, everything is possible. But as you get older, you can lose track of your goal as some “mysterious force” convinces you that it is impossible to realize. However, Coelho says that when you really want something, “the universe conspires in helping you achieve it”.

I think there is a lot to be said for this idea that there is a universe of help out there to steer us towards our goals. As a society, we have never been more connected. Through the Internet and social networks, we have created a highly interactive and diverse networking universe which helps us attain our goals on a daily basis.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink explores the issue of motivation in the workplace. Pink discusses how, as society evolves, traditional motivational techniques that may have been useful in the past, can be counter-productive in the future.

His discussion on how our workplace is evolving from routine rule-based tasks to non-routine conceptual tasks sidetracked me on to a commonly explored concern today about how artificial intelligence and robotics may replace many of today’s jobs.

As an engineer working to develop the next generation of the Internet, this caused me to reflect on the responsibility and implications of the future we will create as technical innovators.