Five Hundred Browseworthy Books
on Understanding and Guiding Accelerating Change

Come early on Friday (4pm on), pick up discount coupons and our ACC2003 Booklist (linked below) at our conference registration desk in Tressider Lobby, and go peruse the following impressive selection of useful books, all available a few hundred yards away at Stanford Bookstore, the largest and best academic bookstore on the West Coast.

We have selected approximately 125 titles in each of our Science, Technology, Business, and Humanist conference themes, a total of 500 particularly insightful works, in a wide range of topical interests. We hope you find them helpful.

Science Titles

Technology Titles

Business Titles

Humanism Titles

Stanford Bookstore will also be running a Presenter's Bookstore, in Tressider Lobby on Saturday 12-6pm and Sunday 12-4pm, with selected works of our distinguished speakers.

Marcel Proust has said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

ASF's goal is to promote better observation, measurement, understanding and guidance of the accelerations that are constantly occurring in our increasingly technological world. With better social foresight, we may distinguish kinds of accelerations that are continually renewed (e.g., computation) and those that are more periodic (e.g., economy, specific technologies and business models), the kinds we prefer (productivity, connectivity, compassion, security) and those we seek to avoid (destabilization, discrimination, nonsustainability).

There are many insights to be gained. Both Robert Shiller's Irrational Exuberance and Michael Alexander's Stock Cycles both elegantly forsaw the post-2000 financial market depression, using compelling and independent arguments. Periodic major recorrections are fundamental to any accelerating economy, especially after the initial overpromotion of broadly disruptive new technologies (railroads, automobiles, internet). SFI Economist Brian Arthur (Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy) has said that the real phase of applied acceleration occurs after the bubble, when more mature and much less expensive infrastructure can be deployed, and the profusion of initial entrants can strongly consolidate into a few strategic survivors. MIT management professor Charles Fine (Clockspeed) discusses the strategic advantage (under the right conditions) of reengineering supply chain and engineering process for acceleration, and many others have written on increasing impact of the internet on acceleration in the service and knowledge economies.

Does your business have a plan both for monitoring external acceleration (environmental scanning, competitive intelligence) and building internal resilience/robustness to accelerating change? Which of these works might substantially improve your big picture scientific understanding, technological outlook, business strategy, or social wisdom this year? Which will help you to see our existing markets, technologies, and cultural phenomena "with new eyes"?

Other titles to suggest for the ACC2003 booklist?

Send them to mail{at}accelerating.org. Thank you.