Condemned To Repeat The Past?

Ramblings

from the a-little-history-lesson dept

Last week, I mentioned one of the lessons learned from Andy Kessler’s newest book, How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets. I’ve just finished reading it, and just in time, as well, since you can now check it out for free. While the hard copy version doesn’t come out until June, Kessler is releasing the book for free download off his site in e-book form. If you read his previous book, Running Money, you might even recognize a few short passages in the new book. In Running Money, Kessler goes through his own experience figuring out the mental model that guided his investment philosophy in technology — and part of that included a brief history lesson in the start of the industrial revolution. HWGH is basically an extended version of that history lesson, written in the same light tone — designed to be the basic, quick history manual that anyone in the tech world (in just about any capacity, from engineer to business to investing) should read. Indeed, we’re already seeing startups and companies making business decisions that seem like they’re following the same bad footsteps companies took only five years ago. Is it any surprise that some are repeating the mistakes of 200 years ago as well? One of the worst things in the tech and business world these days is that many people can’t view trends out past a quarter (or they simply extract one single trend, without recognizing how others impact them). Any intelligent business person needs to recognize how trends play out in the long term, and how they interact with each other. HWGH gives you plenty of trends from the past few centuries to help guide you into that longer term thinking.