We were burning
by Bob Johnstone · first published 1999
100% recommend
Are the Japanese faceless clones who march in lockstep to the drums beaten by big business and the bureaucrats of MITI, Japan's miracle-working ministry of international trade and industry? Can Japanese workers, and by extrapolation their entire society, be characterized by deference to authority, devotion to group solidarity, and management by consensus? In We Were Burning, investigative journalist Bob Johnstone demolishes this misleading stereotype by introducing us to a new and very different kind of Japanese worker - a dynamic, iconoclastic, risk-taking entrepreneur.
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
Related books
2010–2026The Idea Factory
Jon Gernter
Recommended by 94 · mentioned by 12194 recommend · 121 mention94 recommend · 12194 recommend
2009–2026The art of doing science and engineering
Richard Hamming, Bret Victor
Recommended by 56 · mentioned by 8056 recommend · 80 mention56 recommend · 8056 recommend
2007–2026Dealers of Lightning
Michael A. Hiltzik
Recommended by 74 · mentioned by 9674 recommend · 96 mention74 recommend · 9674 recommend
…(or the earlier version In Praise of Hard Industries, there is little difference between them). And if you want a good story about specifically how innovation grows out of practice, see Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning about the Japanese development of the first blue-light laser diode.
on “Thomas Friedman Wrong? The Innovation Delusion” ↗Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning has a fascinating look at the development of the first blue laser diodes. http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron...
on “Dump your fluorescents and incandescents for this amazing new LED bulb” ↗…Dealers of Lightning about the heyday of computing research at Xerox PARC isn't universally praised (IIRC it's more or less Bob Metcalfe's version of the story) but it is very readable. Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning, about the golden age of Japanese consumer electronics (wich also covers many events and actors in the US and UK). David Kushner's Masters of Doom, about the heyday of Id Software. The First Computers—History…
on “The Birth of Unix with Brian Kernighan” ↗The history of the synthesiser market seems relevant here. From Bob Johnstone's /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... , pp. 230-231 http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... (or Search Inside for "Keith Emerson"): > For about ten…
on “Why buying a 3D printer sucks” ↗…companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
on “And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’” ↗Also covered in Chapter 3 of We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs And The Forging Of The Electronic Age by Bob Johnstone http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2135359.We_Were_Burning .
on “How RCA Lost the LCD (2012)” ↗…https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to... : > RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of the most important of the American corporate labs with similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... : it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry, in large part because of its roles in the development of the…
on “The Influence of Bell Labs” ↗Repasting something I coped in previously ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844295 ) , an excerpt from Bob Johnstone's /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... , pp. 230-231 http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... (or Search Inside for "Keith Emerson"): > For about ten…
on “Fifty years of Moog” ↗…Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the…
on “Why Bell Labs Worked” ↗