One book on his list:"Electric Universe" by David Bodanis (Crown, 2005).Read about the other four books on the list.
While we overestimate the effect of technological change in the short term, we underestimate its effect in the long. Consider electricity. This book recounts the inventing lives of Michael Faraday, Samuel Morse and Alan Turing--and reminds us that copper coils led to a wired world in just a few generations, with great business drama along the way. (At one point a worried Western Union hired Thomas Edison to reverse-engineer Alexander Graham Bell's invention, hoping to steal the patent to the phone.) We now take electricity for granted; business managers should see that the Web is also becoming second nature. We'll no longer say we're "going online" just as we no longer think of ourselves "accessing the electric grid" when we turn on a light.
--Marshal Zeringue
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