This book is just not for me

 

"Why I dislike this book?" I always ask myself while reading this book. "Youthquake 4.0 : A Whole Generation and the New Industrial Revolution", a book by Rocky Scopelliti, a futurologist, trying to look into the future by taking in account of two global forces: Millennials and the fourth industrial revolution characterized by distributed trust in the form of blockchain, big data, and A.I. Ironic that the book talks about trust equals to reputation but I don't know much about the author himself.

The first thing that strikes me is just how many graphs are there in the book. Charts after charts, histograms after histograms, I just feel like being bombarded with statistics. I am sure that the author did his homework. With all the graphs and statistics, I am sure that the points the author wants pass to the readers are no doubt well researched. He has points but just fails in the "passing" part.

 

That's pretty common pitfall of a scientist. Whenever scientists try to convince the wide audience, they just think that by showing more data will do. What makes thing worst is the lack of metaphors. Despite the simple language used, the author makes sure that none of the trendiest technological jargons is missed out. To me it just seems like it talks about many things, but at the same time nothing at all. 

Then I realize that this book might not really aimed for a wide audience. To quote: "The insights in this book are for the individuals, leaders and policymakers seeking to unlock opportunities by developing specific adaption or transformation strategies from the interplay between Millennial mind and the emerging technologies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution." To put simply, this book's target audience is the managers! One must keep this in mind only then the book makes sense. In fact the book does present itself like Power Point slides compiled into a book, slides interweaved with graphs and histograms. Plus, each chapter is completed with a bullet point summary, exactly like a Power Point presentation, which further affirms that this is a book for manager. The entire book just feels like those boring high level meeting that I have during the work.

So why I dislike this book? Simply, it is just not my cup of tea. May be, just may be one day in the future my point of view will change or may be when I myself become a manager, I might eventually like this book. But come to think about it, the actual main reason why I dislike it is that, I feel like I am being "forced" to read it by upper management. Manager bought it as a "gift" for us, we have to read it, and we have to do a presentation about it. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it as a gift. But to me, reading is my hobby, so I prefer to choose my type of books to read.