Books read in 2021: Part 1

Each year Gazettabyte asks industry figures to pick their reads of the year. Paul Brooks and Maxim Kuschnerov kick off this year's recommended reads. 

Dr. Paul Brooks, Optical Transport Director, VIAVI Solutions

Having spent a very happy time serving in the Royal Navy, I am always reading about all things connected with its history.

As a young midshipman, I managed to sleep through many of the history lessons at BRNC Dartmouth so I am using my spare time to catch up on the lessons I missed all those years ago.

One book which I have very much enjoyed this year has been Stephen Taylor’s Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail. 

While many books are written about major figures such as Nelson and Blake, the ordinary sailor with his robustness, loyalty and sense of duty was the key element in the success of the Royal Navy.

This well-researched book is a joy to read as it brings to life the heroic men. I must confess I did hum ‘Heart of Oak’ as I reached for my tot of rum as I read about the jolly Jack Tar on the Victory at Trafalgar!

For any student of history, and indeed anyone interested in social history, this is one for your Christmas list.

Dr. Maxim Kuschnerov, Director of the Optical & Quantum Communications Laboratory

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention, by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer, got good press last year, so when I saw it at the airport, it was a no brainer to get it. 

The book offers a radical approach to management, focusing on totally open feedback and the removal of most controls, whether it’s the lack of vacation policy (take as much as you want) or the absence of higher approvals for most business dealings. Salary adjustments are governed by external market references and not internal processes, which is generally not a bad thing.

Naturally, looking at this corporate culture through the glasses of a German dependency of a Chinese company makes for a big contrast and it would be hard to imagine a German company functioning without any kind of rules. But what the book achieves is to shift the normal operational bias towards a more modern view of team management and it helped me to make adjustments in everyday work, changing the way that I interpreted my role within my team.

This brings me straight to another, older, book by Erin Meyer, The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. It reads like a compressed tutorial of inter-cultural communication and decision making, although I have to admit it was almost more fun to naively learn all of this in the field than to have all the findings confirmed at a later point by the conclusions in this book.

I found it particularly interesting to see the historical context for some present cultural behaviour, by which I don’t mean the obvious teaching of Confucius for Chinese people but also current social traits in Europe dating back to the Roman Empire.

So when a Chinese colleague, who recently moved to Germany, described the German personality as a coconut after the first weeks of adjusting to life in Munich, it made me think that we should be providing this book as a compulsory read within the company, just to soften the blow.

Lastly, looking at how big data and analytics started to change our lives in many domains and found their way into sport in the classic Moneyball book, I believe that no other sport has been changed as drastically by a statistical approach to analytics as basketball.

Kirk Goldberry’s Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA explains the dramatic change in the game by findings that, in hindsight, are so obvious that one can only wonder how we all didn’t see it coming in the 1990s when the GOAT Michael Jordan redefined the art of playing ball. 

Goldberry explains the historical context for modern-day greats like LeBron James, James Harden and Steph Curry, while also giving a shout-out to my other personal favourite, Dirk Nowitzki, whose 2011 finals run will stay at the top of my sporting moments.

I just wish I could have told my 14-year-old self to stop practising baby hooks and post ups and go straight to 3-point drills.