Jobsの伝記作者の新作は10月7日発売

Jobsつながりで、Jobsの伝記作者のWalter Isaacsonさんが新作を10月に出します。

（アマゾンでの紹介文）
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s biographical story of the pioneers of the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and a guide to how innovation really works.

What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

In his masterly saga, Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page.

This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It’s also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative.

For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators shows how they happen.

雑誌Vanity Fairの最新号に関連記事が載っていました。イノベーションの歴史から5つの教訓を引き出しています。
THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT
October 2014
5 Easy Theses
There’s so much talk about innovation these days that it’s become a buzzword, drained of clear meaning. So when writing a book about the Digital Revolution, I decided to focus on some specific examples of how innovation actually happened in the real world. How did the most imaginative innovators of our time turn ideas into realities? Why did some succeed and others fail? Here are five of the lessons.
By Walter Isaacson

1 Connect art and science.
2 Creativity comes from collaboration.
3 Collaboration works best in person.
4 Vision without execution is hallucination.
5 Man is a social animal.

動画でも話しているAda Lovelaceが最初のレッスンConnect art and scienceに登場しています。この当たりはAppleがやろうとしていることでもありますね。

1 Connect art and science.
“I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” Steve Jobs told me when I embarked on his biography. “Then I read something . . . about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It made him the most successful innovator of our time.

The patron saint of this art-technology intersection was Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Her father was the poet Lord Byron, her mother an amateur mathematician, and Ada combined both enterprises in what she dubbed “poetical science.” She became friends in the 1830s with Charles Babbage, who was devising a calculating machine called the Analytical Engine. On a tour of the British Midlands, Ada saw mechanical looms that used punched cards to produce beautiful patterns. Her father, a Luddite, had defended the followers of Ned Ludd, who were smashing these looms because they put weavers out of work. But Ada loved this wondrous combination of art and technology, which would one day be manifest in computers.

She laid out the principles of what would become, a century later, the computer age. The first was that machines would process not just numbers but anything that could be notated in symbols, such as words or music or pictures. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote. But she added the caveat that no matter how versatile machines became, they still would not be able to think. “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything,” she wrote. In other words, in the combining of arts and technology, the role of humans would be to supply creativity and imagination.

今回のVanity FairはDisruptersとして50人を紹介しています。最初の5位まではおなじみの顔ぶれです。メディアや

DISRUPTERS
1 ELON MUSK
TESLA MOTORS, SPACEX
2 LARRY PAGE AND SERGEY BRIN
GOOGLE
3 TIM COOK AND JONATHAN IVE
APPLE
4 JEFF BEZOS
AMAZON
5 MARK ZUCKERBERG
FACEBOOK

ちなみにソフトバンクの孫社長が28位にランクインしていて、has a Steve Jobs–like reputation in his native Japanと紹介されています。ランクインは今年が初めてのようで、Sprint買収で米国進出を果たしたので注目され始めたのでしょうか。

MASAYOSHI SON
SOFTBANK

$17.7bn
NET WORTH
LAST YEAR'S RANK New
AGE 57
COLLEGE UC Berkeley
MARRIED Yes
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN Leo

STAGE OF GLOBAL CONQUEST: After acquiring control of Sprint last year for $21.6 billion, Son, who has a Steve Jobs–like reputation in his native Japan, attempted to merge the struggling company with newly resurgent T-Mobile, but in August he was forced to abandon the deal in the face of opposition from anti-trust regulators. Son hired a new C.E.O., whom he described as “a street fighter,” and vowed to aggressively cut prices to compete with AT&T and Verizon.

DUBIOUS CLAIM TO FAME: Largest financial loss in history. Some $85 billion disappeared from his net worth in the wake of the dot-com crash. He’s since earned a good bit of that back, thanks largely to Alibaba. SoftBank’s $20 million investment in the Chinese Internet giant is now worth an estimated $58 billion.

本を読み慣れていない人はこういうメジャーな作家の本から入るのもいいのではないでしょうか。