Revenge of the Tipping Point by Gladwell

REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT by Malcolm Gladwell discusses “Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering” twenty-five years after The Tipping Point was published. Gladwell writes that he re-immersed himself in “the world of social epidemics” and discovered a “new set of theories, stories, and arguments about the strange pathways that ideas and behavior follow through our world.” In terms of newer content, he focuses in part on "overstories" – the idea, like the upper portion or canopy in a forest, of a big picture perspective to better discern patterns and behavior changes. He also makes numerous references to the COVID pandemic and the notion of superspreaders. Throughout, he shares a variety of stories and circumstances from South Florida (where he says Miami is “ground zero for this extraordinary epidemic of [Medicare] criminality”) to the Harvard women’s rugby team (when he argues about how colleges use sports to manipulate group proportions) to frequent references to the opioid epidemic and the Sackler family. Gladwell incorporates charts, graphs and data as well as devoting more than ten percent of the book to endnotes and an index. REVENGE OF THE TIPPING POINT received a starred review from Kirkus. Interested readers may also want to turn to titles by the Heath brothers like Switch, Decisive, 2017’s The Power of Moments or 2022’s Making Numbers Count.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

FOUR BATTLEGROUNDS by Paul Scharre discusses “Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” particularly from a military standpoint. Scharre is a former U.S. Army Ranger who is currently vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington, DC based think tank. Although a weighty, almost 500 page text, a significant portion (almost half) is devoted to Notes, Illustration Credits, Abbreviations and Acknowledgments, plus an Index. In the rest, Scharre presents his arguments regarding how “AI is changing war, and … also changing surveillance, disinformation, and other aspects of global peace and security,” especially in regard to these four areas: data, computing power, AI talent, and institutions. He refers to the “deep learning revolution” and “power dynamics” (especially between the US and China) and describes the “dark side” - how “the dangers from AI today come from people using the technology maliciously or carelessly, causing harm to others.” All of Scharre’s many notes support a myriad of facts (e.g., “China already publishes more AI papers than the United States”) and an enlightening analysis of points of contention. FOUR BATTLEGROUNDS received a starred review from Library Journal. For another recent perspective related to AI, see also “ChatGPT Heralds an Intellectual Revolution” by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher in The Wall Street Journal.

Bezonomics by Brian Dumaine

BEZONOMICS by Brian Dumaine (an award-winning Fortune magazine writer) describes the various facets of Amazon’s business, including its online retail operations and focus of its Prime program, its cloud computing resources, and forays into businesses as diverse as media streaming, healthcare, and voice recognition technology (Alexa and Echo).  While discussing warehousing, robotics, and machine learning, Dumaine explores “How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning from It.”  He acknowledges three main principles – customer obsession (as evidenced by low prices, fast delivery, and big data manipulation), extreme innovation, and long-term investment – and asserts that Bezos “has created the next-generation corporation.” 

Early on in BEZONOMICS, Dumaine comments that “when a person creates one of the most valuable companies in the world and has more money than every other human on earth, their life doesn’t lend itself to a tidy story line.” Given all of the challenges with COVID (note the new advertising campaign, as one small example) just since this book went to press, that is certainly true. Dumaine writes, “my hope is that readers of this book will grow to understand this complexity and recognize the ways Amazon both helps or harms business and society.” He supports his research with over ten percent of the book devoted to notes and bibliographic source information. Readers will likely pause to contemplate the attention to detail (e.g., reference to Amazon-branded packing tape) and broader integration of Amazon into everyday life. In fact, Dumaine refers to a poll where Amazon was amongst the top institutions in which Americans believe – he says, “51 percent of American households attend church, 52 percent have Amazon Prime memberships.”  We also own the older, award-winning text titled The Everything Store by Brad Stone and given the size, management intensity, and far-reaching impact of this company, there will be many more analyses of Bezos and Amazon.