Category: Book Reviews

The Tyranny of the Ideal

by peg2025-08-272025-08-26 No Comments

There’s a persistent belief that policy failures happen because politicians ignore expert advice. Healthcare reform gets watered down by special interests. Climate action stalls because fossil fuel lobbies block rational carbon pricing. Immigration reform collapses because extremists prevent sensible comprehensive solutions.

The real story is more unsettling: these policies are failing precisely because politicians are following expert advice. The most sophisticated policy frameworks, implemented exactly as designed, produce the most predictable disasters. Our smartest people aren’t being ignored—they’re being followed faithfully toward systemic failure.

The Intelligent Hand

by peg2025-08-212025-08-21 No Comments

Why Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman Explains Our Current Expertise Crisis

Why do expert predictions keep failing while practical adaptations keep succeeding?

I’ve been tracking this pattern across domains—AI researchers confident about artificial general intelligence while consultants quietly discover ChatGPT helps structure client presentations; fusion physicists announcing breakthroughs while the technology remains perpetually “almost ready”; policy experts debating digital transformation frameworks while small businesses just start using whatever tools solve Tuesday’s problems.

The disconnect isn’t accidental. It reveals something fundamental about how knowledge actually develops versus how we think it should. And Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman, published in 2008, provides the clearest framework I’ve found for understanding why this split keeps widening—and why it matters more than we realize.

Crabgrass Frontier

by peg2025-07-072025-08-25 No Comments

There’s a scene in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Judge Doom lays out his plan to dismantle the trolley system and replace it with freeways. It’s intended to be cartoonishly evil, but the idea feels all to familiar. The demise of the streetcar and the rise of the car-centric suburb have long been framed as a conspiracy: businessmen colluding to kill transit, sell tires, and pave the future. Like many myths, there’s a sliver of truth. But the full story is both more mundane and more revealing.

Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier quietly dismantles these comforting narratives. Published in 1985, it remains one of the clearest accounts of how American suburbia was not the outcome of technological inevitability or malicious forces in society, but a product of consumer preference (a desire to find privacy through space) and policy design, shaped by incentives, subsidies, zoning, and a particular vision of the good life. In Jackson’s telling, suburbia wasn’t chosen. It was made.

Rewired

by peg2025-06-302025-06-27 No Comments

Much of today’s business writing is reductionist, focused on clean cause-and-effect narratives. This isn’t a flaw; most of the time, what organisations need is tactical advice: if you have X, do Y. Rewired is a strong example of this genre, offering a practical guide to how contemporary organisations structure, run, and deliver technology.

But we’re not in a steady state. We’re at the end of an era shaped by firm-centric efficiency, and entering one defined by networked coordination, contested data, and shifting boundaries of control.

We’re living through a transition, away from the familiar paradigms of the last 30 years, and toward something still taking shape. In that context, advice grounded in what worked before may be increasingly ill-suited to what comes next. The book excels at guiding firms through internal change, but falters when the real challenge is how firms relate to everything outside them. Rewired is useful for what it is. But how useful that is, right now, is an open question.

Eye of the Master

by peg2025-04-302025-07-01 No Comments

There’s no shortage of books about artificial intelligence right now. Most fall into one of two camps: breathless optimism or existential dread. The Eye of the Master is something else entirely—a rare and rigorous exploration of how we got here.

This is one of the most illuminating books I’ve read on the current wave of AI. Pasquinelli doesn’t waste time on hype or speculation. Instead, he takes us back to the intellectual roots of machine learning—tracing how ideas from neuroscience, cybernetics, psychometrics, and even art history quietly shaped the architecture of neural networks and the metaphors we use to describe them.

Abundance

by peg2025-04-242025-04-18 No Comments

Klein, Ezra. Abundance. 1st ed. New York Amsterdam Antwerpen: Avid Reader Press, 2025. We’re in the middle of a crisis of constraint—affordable housing, aging infrastructure, fragmented […]

The Longevity Imperative

by peg2025-01-142025-07-01 No Comments

Scott, Andrew J. The Longevity Imperative: How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives. First U.S. edition. New York: Basic Books, 2024.

I’ve been following Prof. Scott’s work for some time and was glad when The Longevity Imperative was published as it provides an overview of the demographic change we’re in the midst of. While discussions about aging populations often frame demographic shifts as a crisis to be managed, particularly in policy and business forums, what’s refreshing about Prof. Scott’s work, and this book in particular, is that we can also frame this demographic shift as an opportunity.

The Way We Eat Now

by peg2024-12-272025-01-24 No Comments

Wilson, Bee, and Annabel Lee. The Way We Eat Now: Strategies for Eating in a World of Change. London: 4th Estate, 2019.

I discovered Bee Wilson through Consider the Fork, an excellent ‘history of how we cook and eat’⁠ that draws heavily on Kranzberg’s Laws.⁠ Recently, I came across The Way We Eat Now, first published in 2019. While Consider the Fork examines the evolution of kitchen technology, this book explores how our relationship with food—and related cultural practices—has changed over time.

Three (good) books on creativity

by peg2024-07-082025-07-12 No Comments

Creativity is an important and interesting topic. Unfortunately it’s a topic that seems to be dominated by hot takes, uninformed speculation, and personal anecdotes. This is even true for much academic work and articles in magazines published by the b.schools.

There’s a rich body of creativity research full of all sorts of interesting ideas, but it’s often ignored or glossed over. One factor contributing to this is the lack of a good introductory book for a general reader. For some time I’ve been referring folk interested in creativity research to Teaching creativity in the common core. The books limitation, though, is that it’s focused on secondary education which can be a distraction for some readers.

A new book, The creativity advantage by James Kaufman (one of the authors of Teaching creativity in the common core) neatly fills this hole. James provides us with an easy to read overview of research into creativity (in a somewhat quirky style, but which works) and delves into some of the benefits of creativity (beyond the obvious). The whole narrative is illustrated with anecdotes to help make the ideas concrete for the read. It’s now my go-to recommendation for a a good introductory book on creativity.

Decision Making in Uncertain Times

by peg2024-03-182024-04-16 No Comments

With (Australian) Robodebt and the (UK) Post Office in the news, now is a great time to reconsider how we govern our organisations and institutions. How is it that highly regarded executives and boards went so far astray?