Best Business Books : 2015: Home

What does it mean to be an American? What are American ideas and values? American Enterprise, the companion book to a major exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, aims to answer these questions about the American experience through an exploration of its economic and commercial history. It argues that by looking at the intersection of capitalism and democracy, we can see where we as a nation have come from and where we might be going in the future. Richly illustrated with images of objects from the museum's collections, American Enterprise includes an early Thomas Edison light bulb, a wheat thresher, a Barbie doll, a Google server, and many other goods and services that have shaped American culture. Historical and contemporary advertisements are also featured, emphasizing the evolution of the relationship between producers and consumers over time. Interspersed in the historical narrative are essays from today's industry leaders-including Sheila Bair, Adam Davidson, Bill Ford, Sally Greenberg, Fisk Johnson, Hank Paulson, Richard Trumka, and Pat Woertz-that pose provocative questions about the state of contemporary American business and society. American Enterprise is a multi-faceted survey of the nation's business heritage and corresponding social effects that is fundamental to an understanding of the lives of the American people, the history of the United States, and the nation's role in global affairs.

Americans today face no shortage of threats to their financial well-being, such as job and retirement insecurity, health care costs, and spiraling college tuition. While one might expect that these concerns would motivate people to become more politically engaged on the issues, this often doesn’t happen, and the resulting inaction carries consequences for political debates and public policy. Moving beyond previously studied barriers to political organization, American Insecurity sheds light on the public’s inaction over economic insecurities by showing that the rhetoric surrounding these issues is actually self-undermining. By their nature, the very arguments intended to mobilize individuals—asking them to devote money or time to politics—remind citizens of their economic fears and personal constraints, leading to undermobilization and nonparticipation. Adam Seth Levine explains why the set of people who become politically active on financial insecurity issues is therefore quite narrow. When money is needed, only those who care about the issues but are not personally affected become involved. When time is needed, participation is limited to those not personally affected or those who are personally affected but outside of the labor force with time to spare. The latter explains why it is relatively easy to mobilize retirees on topics that reflect personal financial concerns, such as Social Security and Medicare. In general, however, when political representation requires a large group to make their case, economic insecurity threats are uniquely disadvantaged. Scrutinizing the foundations of political behavior, American Insecurity offers a new perspective on collective participation.

The tumultuous era and remarkable personalities that unexpectedly birthed the Federal Reserve, from renowned financial writer Roger Lowenstein Until the election of Woodrow Wilson the United States—alone among developed nations—lacked a central bank. Ever since the Revolutionary War, Americans had desperately feared the consequences of centralizing the nation’s finances under government control. However, in the aftermath of a disastrous financial panic, Congress was persuaded—by a confluence of populist unrest, widespread mistrust of bankers, ideological divisions, and secretive lobbying—to approve the landmark 1913 Federal Reserve Act. Writing in a rich and untapped historical vein, Roger Lowenstein—acclaimed financial journalist and bestselling author of When Genius Failed and The End of Wall Street—reveals the drama-filled, unlikely story of how America created the Federal Reserve, thereby taking its first steps onto the world stage as a global financial power. America’s Bank showcases Lowenstein at his very finest: illuminating complex financial and political issues with striking clarity, infusing the debates of our past with all the gripping immediacy of today, and painting unforgettable portraits of Gilded Age bankers, presidents, and politicians. With America’s Bank, Lowenstein focuses on the four men at the heart of the drama to create the Federal Reserve. These are Paul Warburg, a refined, German-born financier, recently relocated to New York, who was horrified at America’s primitive finances; Rhode Island’s Nelson W. Aldrich, the reigning power broker in the U.S. Senate and an archetypal Gilded Age legislat∨ Carter Glass, the ambitious but little-known Virginia congressman who chaired the House Banking and Currency Committee at a crucial moment of political transition; and, of course, President Woodrow Wilson, who forced Glass to reconcile his deep-seated differences with bankers en route to landmark and controversial legislation which that finally gave America a central bank. Weaving a slice of American politics together with a storied financial collapse and intrigue at the highest levels of Washington and Wall Street, Lowenstein delivers a gripping historical narrative. America’s Bank reveals the improbable origins of the Federal Reserve in a way that will make readers wonder whether they are reading about one hundred years ago or about the still-seething conflicts that mark our discussions of banking and politics today. A powerful and intelligent story told by one of our most accomplished financial experts, America’s Bank puts readers into the cockpit at a time of financial turmoil and political transformation, bringing the beginnings of one of the country’s most crucial institutions to vivid and unforgettable life.  

Dubai's Burj Khalifa--the world's tallest building--looks nothing like Microsoft's Office Suite, and digital surround sound doesn't work like a citywide telecommunication grid. Yet these engineering feats have much in common.Applied Minds explores the unique visions and mental tools of engineers to reveal the enormous--and often understated--influence they wield in transforming problems into opportunities. The resulting account pairs the innovators of modern history--Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Steve Jobs--with everything from ATMs and the ZIP code system to the disposable diaper.An engineer himself, Guru Madhavan introduces a flexible intellectual tool kit called modular systems thinking as he explains the discipline's penchant for seeing structure where there is none. The creations that result from this process express the engineer's answers to the fundamental questions of design: usefulness, functionality, reliability, and user friendliness.Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment.Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.

There have been many books--on a large and small scale--about Steve Jobs, one of the most famous CEOs in history. But this book is different from all the others. Becoming Steve Jobs takes on and breaks down the existing myth and stereotypes about Steve Jobs. The conventional, one-dimensional view of Jobs is that he was half-genius, half-jerk from youth, an irascible and selfish leader who slighted friends and family alike. Becoming Steve Jobs answers the central question about the life and career of the Apple cofounder and CEO: How did a young man so reckless and arrogant that he was exiled from the company he founded become the most effective visionary business leader of our time, ultimately transforming the daily life of billions of people? Drawing on incredible and sometimes exclusive access, Schlender and Tetzeli tell a different story of a real human being who wrestled with his failings and learned to maximize his strengths over time. Their rich, compelling narrative is filled with stories never told before from the people who knew Jobs best, and who decided to open up to the authors, including his family, former inner circle executives, and top people at Apple, Pixar and Disney, most notably Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Eddy Cue, Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, Robert Iger and many others. In addition, Brent knew Jobs personally for 25 years and draws upon his many interviews with him, on and off the record, in writing the book. He and Rick humanize the man and explain, rather than simply describe, his behavior. Along the way, the book provides rich context about the technology revolution we all have lived through, and the ways in which Jobs changed our world. Schlender and Tetzeli make clear that Jobs's astounding success at Apple was far more complicated than simply picking the right products: he became more patient, he learned to trust his inner circle, and discovered the importance of growing the company incrementally rather than only shooting for dazzling game-changing products. A rich and revealing account that will change the way we view Jobs, Becoming Steve Jobs shows us how one of the most colorful and compelling figures of our times was able to combine his unchanging, relentless passion with a more mature management style to create one of the most valuable and beloved companies on the planet.

Adair Turner became chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority just as the global financial crisis struck in 2008, and he played a leading role in redesigning global financial regulation. In this eye-opening book, he sets the record straight about what really caused the crisis. It didn't happen because banks are too big to fail--our addiction to private debt is to blame. Between Debt and the Devil challenges the belief that we need credit growth to fuel economic growth, and that rising debt is okay as long as inflation remains low. In fact, most credit is not needed for economic growth--but it drives real estate booms and busts and leads to financial crisis and depression. Turner explains why public policy needs to manage the growth and allocation of credit creation, and why debt needs to be taxed as a form of economic pollution. Banks need far more capital, real estate lending must be restricted, and we need to tackle inequality and mitigate the relentless rise of real estate prices. Turner also debunks the big myth about fiat money--the erroneous notion that printing money will lead to harmful inflation. To escape the mess created by past policy errors, we sometimes need to monetize government debt and finance fiscal deficits with central-bank money. Between Debt and the Devil shows why we need to reject the assumptions that private credit is essential to growth and fiat money is inevitably dangerous. Each has its advantages, and each creates risks that public policy must consciously balance.

Business Ethics Through Movies: A Case Study Approach examines a wide range of ethical dilemmas, principles and moral reasoning that arise in contemporary business through a series of popular films and real-world case studies. Engages readers in learning about ethical theory by using movies and both national and international case studies in business as the vehicle for analysis and reflection Facilitates comprehension of ethical issues by showing how characters in films confront issues, make choices, and face the consequences Draws from a variety of actual cases in Business Ethics ? from the 1982 Tylenol poisoning and the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster to recent examples such as the Foster Farms salmonella outbreak and the chemical spill in West Virginia Reveals the important role that ethics plays in setting the moral foundation of a business or corporation Develops critical thinking skills through applying analytical checklists to ethical dilemmas raised in films and in actual cases in Business Ethics

Presents the empirical data of business cycles and the theories that economists have developed to explain and prevent them, and considers case studies of recessions and depressions in the United States and internationally. * Features four primary forecasting techniques and assesses the effectiveness of these methods in forecasting actual business cycles * Examines the reasons behind the lessening frequency of recessions in postwar America * Makes the subject of economic crises timely and relevant by addressing the recent global financial crisis and the European debt crisis * Reveals how the collapse of the housing market led to a credit crunch and a global economic slowdown

Corporate lobbyists are everywhere in Washington. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 represent business. The largest companies now have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them. How did American businesses become so invested in politics? And what does all their money buy? Drawing on extensive data and original interviews with corporate lobbyists, The Business of America is Lobbying provides a fascinating and detailed picture of what corporations do in Washington, why they do it, and why it matters. Prior to the 1970s, very few corporations had Washington offices. But a wave of new government regulations and declining economic conditions mobilized business leaders. Companies developed new political capacities, and managers soon began to see public policy as an opportunity, not just a threat. Ever since, corporate lobbying has become increasingly more pervasive, more proactive, and more particularistic. Lee Drutman argues that lobbyists drove this development, helping managers to see why politics mattered, and how proactive and aggressive engagement could help companies' bottom lines. All this lobbying doesn't guarantee influence. Politics is a messy and unpredictable bazaar, and it is more competitive than ever. But the growth of lobbying has driven several important changes that make business more powerful. The status quo is harder to dislodge; policy is more complex; and, as Congress increasingly becomes a farm league for K Street, more and more of Washington's policy expertise now resides in the private sector. These and other changes increasingly raise the costs of effective lobbying to a level only businesses can typically afford. Lively and engaging, rigorous and nuanced, The Business of America is Lobbying will change how we think about lobbying-and how we might reform it.

The 'sharing economy' is changing the rules of business. Why buy a hedge trimmer that you use twice a year? Why not borrow someone else's? Why leave your driveway empty all day while you're at work? Why not charge someone to park there while you're not using it? And if your business is selling hedge trimmers or parking – or anything else people can share – what do you do about it? Today, the sharing economy or 'collaborative consumption' lets people earn over $15 billion a year by renting and selling what they own: from cars and homes to money and time. And this is just the beginning. Fast-moving tech startups like Uber and Airbnb are disrupting huge sectors of the old economy, mobilising millions of micro-entrepreneurs in the process. Written by one of the business leaders of the movement, The Business of Sharing is an insider's guide to the sharing economy. From the boardroom of Sequoia Capital to 10 Downing Street, Stephany meets the powerbrokers pulling the strings in this new economy. And he meets the ordinary people cashing out. With colorful and revealing interviews with the sharing economy's top entrepreneurs and case studies of major brands, The Business of Sharing is the critically acclaimed guide to one of today's must-understand global trends.

Named one of Fortune Magazine's "5 Best Business Books" in 2015 See your offering through the buyer's eyes for more effective marketing Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this book provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes. Readers will learn how to segment their customer base, investigate each customer type, and apply a radically more relevant process of message selection, content creation, and distribution through the channels that earn the buyers' trust. Rather than relying on generic data or guesswork to determine what the buyer wants, the buyer persona approach allows companies to ask the buyer directly and obtain more precise and actionable guidance. Buyer personas are composite pictures of the people who buy solutions, services or products, crafted through a unique type of interview with the people the marketer wants to influence. This book provides step-by-step guidance toward implementing the buyer persona approach, with the advice of an internationally-respected expert. Learn who buys what, and why Understand your buyer's goals and how you can address them Tailor your marketing activities to your buyer's expectations See the purchase through the customer's eyes A recent services industry survey reports that 52 percent of their marketers have buyer personas, and another 28 percent expect to add them within the next two years - but only 14.6 percent know how to use them. To avoid letting such a valuable tool go to waste, access the expert perspective in Buyer Personas, and craft a more relevant marketing strategy.

In this book, one of the world's most renowned historians provides a concise and comprehensive history of capitalism in global perspective from its medieval origins to the 2008 financial crisis and beyond. From early commercial capitalism in the Arab world, China, and Europe, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialization, to today's globalized financial capitalism, Jürgen Kocka offers an unmatched, balanced account of capitalism, one that weighs its huge achievements against its great costs, crises, and failures. Based on intensive research, the book puts the rise of capitalist economies in social, political, and cultural context, and shows how their current problems and foreseeable future are connected to a long history. Sweeping in scope, the book describes how capitalist expansion was connected to colonialism; how industrialism brought unprecedented innovation, growth, and welfare but also increasing inequality; and how managerialism, financialization, and globalization later changed the face of capitalism. The book also addresses the idea of capitalism in the work of thinkers such as Marx, Weber, and Schumpeter, and chronicles how criticism of capitalism is as old as capitalism itself, fed by its persistent contradictions and recurrent emergencies. Authoritative and accessible, Capitalism provides an enlightening account of a force that has shaped the modern world like few others.

MAKE YOUR COMPANY A FORCE FOR GOOD You’re ambitious. You’re not afraid to take risks. You want to bring about positive social change. And while your peers have left a trail of failed start-ups in their wake, you want to initiate change from within an established company, where you can have a more far-reaching, even global impact. Welcome to the club—you’re a social intrapreneur. But even with your enviable skill set, your unwavering social conscience, and your determination to change the world, your path to success is filled with challenges. So how do you get started and maintain your momentum? Changing Your Company from the Inside Out provides the tools to empower you to jump-start initiatives that matter to you—and that should matter to your company. Drawing on lessons from social movements as well as on the work of successful intrapreneurs, Gerald Davis and Christopher White provide you with a guide for creating positive social change from within your own organization. You’ll learn how to answer four key questions: •When is the right time for change? Learn how to read your organization’s climate. •Why is this a compelling change? Use language and stories to connect your initiative to your organization’s mission, strategy, and values. •Who will make this innovation possible? Identify the decision makers you need to persuade and the potential resisters you need to steer around. •How can you mobilize your supporters to collaborate on your innovation? Use the online and offline tools and platforms that best support your initiative. This book is a road map for intrapreneurs seeking to reshape their companies into drivers of positive change. If you want to spearhead social innovation from withinyour company, use this book as your guide.

Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's visionary vice chairman and Warren Buffett's indispensable financial partner, has outperformed market indexes again and again, and he believes any investor can do the same. His notion of "elementary, worldly wisdom"--a set of interdisciplinary mental models involving economics, business, psychology, ethics, and management--allows him to keep his emotions out of his investments and avoid the common pitfalls of bad judgment. Munger's system has steered his investments for forty years and has guided generations of successful investors. This book presents the essential steps of Munger's investing strategy, condensed here for the first time from interviews, speeches, writings, and shareholder letters, and paired with commentary from fund managers, value investors, and business-case historians. Derived from Ben Graham's value-investing system, Munger's approach is straightforward enough that even novices can apply it to their portfolios. This book is not simply about stock picking, it's about cultivating mental models for your whole life, but especially for your investments.

Chicagonomics explores the history and development of classical liberalism as taught and explored at the University of Chicago. Ebenstein's tenth book in the history of economic and political thought, it deals specifically in the area of classical liberalism, examining the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and is the first comprehensive history of economics at the University of Chicago from the founding of the University in 1892 until the present. The reader will learn why Chicago had such influence, to what extent different schools of thought in economics existed at Chicago, the Chicago tradition, vision, and what Chicago economic perspectives have to say about current economic and social circumstances. Ebenstein enlightens the personal and intellectual relationships among leading figures in economics at the University of Chicago, including Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Aaron Director, and Friedrich Hayek. He recasts classical liberal thought from Adam Smith to the present.

Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely. Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active choice comes at a cost. In modern life the requirement to make active choices can often be overwhelming. So, across broad areas of our lives, from health plans to energy suppliers, many of us choose not to choose. By following our default options, we save ourselves the costs of making active choices. By setting those options, governments and corporations dictate the outcomes for when we decide by default. This is among the most significant ways in which they effect social change, yet we are just beginning to understand the power and impact of default rules. Many central questions remain unanswered: When should governments set such defaults, and when should they insist on active choices? How should such defaults be made? What makes some defaults successful while others fail? Cass R. Sunstein has long been at the forefront of developing public policy and regulation to use government power to encourage people to make better decisions. In this major new book, Choosing Not to Choose, he presents his most complete argument yet for how we should understand the value of choice, and when and how we should enable people to choose not to choose. The onset of big data gives corporations and governments the power to make ever more sophisticated decisions on our behalf, defaulting us to buy the goods we predictably want, or vote for the parties and policies we predictably support. As consumers we are starting to embrace the benefits this can bring. But should we? What will be the long-term effects of limiting our active choices on our agency? And can such personalized defaults be imported from the marketplace to politics and the law? Confronting the challenging future of data-driven decision-making, Sunstein presents a manifesto for how personalized defaults should be used to enhance, rather than restrict, our freedom and well-being.

If you had a 10 percent chance of having a fatal car accident, you'd take necessary precautions. If your finances had a 10 percent chance of suffering a severe loss, you'd reevaluate your assets. So if we know the world is warming and there's a 10 percent chance this might eventually lead to a catastrophe beyond anything we could imagine, why aren't we doing more about climate change right now? We insure our lives against an uncertain future--why not our planet? In Climate Shock, Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively, clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. A city might go underwater. A rogue nation might shoot particles into the Earth's atmosphere, geoengineering cooler temperatures. Zeroing in on the unknown extreme risks that may yet dwarf all else, the authors look at how economic forces that make sensible climate policies difficult to enact, make radical would-be fixes like geoengineering all the more probable. What we know about climate change is alarming enough. What we don't know about the extreme risks could be far more dangerous. Wagner and Weitzman help readers understand that we need to think about climate change in the same way that we think about insurance--as a risk management problem, only here on a global scale. Demonstrating that climate change can and should be dealt with--and what could happen if we don't do so--Climate Shock tackles the defining environmental and public policy issue of our time.

A New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller The importance of money in our lives is readily apparent to everyone--rich, poor, and in between. However grudgingly, most of us accept the expression "Money makes the world go round" as a universal truth. We are all aware of the power of money--how it influences our moods, compels us to take risks, and serves as the yardstick of success in societies around the world. Yet because we take the daily reality of money so completely for granted, we seldom question how and why it has come to play such a central role in our lives. In Coined: The Rich Life of Money And How Its History Has Shaped Us, author Kabir Sehgal casts aside our workaday assumptions about money and takes the reader on a global quest to uncover a deeper understanding of the relationship between money and humankind. More than a mere history of its subject, Coined probes the conceptual origins and evolution of money by examining it through the multiple lenses of disciplines as varied as biology, psychology, anthropology, and theology. Coined is not only a profoundly informative discussion of the concept of money, but it is also an endlessly fascinating and entertaining take on the nature of humanity and the inner workings of the mind.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, one economic modelemerged triumphant. Capitalism - spanning a spectrumfrom laissez faire to authoritarian - shapes the market economies of all the wealthiest and fastest-growing nations. But trouble is cracking its shiny veneer. In the U.S., Europe, and Japan, economic growth has slowed down. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; natural re sources are exploited for short-term profit; and good jobs are hard to find. With piercing clarity, Philip Kotler explains 14 major problems undermining capitalism, including persistent poverty, job creation in the face of automation, high debt burdens, the disproportionate influence of the wealthy on public policy, steep environmental costs, boom-bust economic cycles, and more. Amidst its dire assessment of what's ailing us, Confronting Capitalism delivers a heartening message: We can turn things around. Movements toward shared prosperity and a higher purpose are reinvigorating companies large and small, while proposals abound on government policies that offer protections without stagnation. Kotler identifies the best ideas, linking private and public initiatives into a force for positive change. Combining economic history, expert insight, business lessons, and recent data, this landmark book elucidates today's critical dilemmas and suggests solutions for returning to a healthier, more sustainable Capitalism - that works for all.

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, doubts have been raised about the future of capitalism. In this broad-ranging survey of financial capitalism from antiquity to the present, Larry Neal reveals the ways in which the financial innovations throughout history have increased trade and prosperity as well as improving standards of living. These innovations have, however, all too often led to financial crises as a result of the failure of effective coordination among banks, capital markets and governments. The book examines this key interrelationship between financial innovation, government regulation and financial crises across three thousand years, showing through past successes and failures the key factors that underpin any successful recovery and sustain economic growth. The result is both an essential introduction to financial capitalism and also a series of workable solutions that will help both to preserve the gains we have already achieved and to mitigate the dangers of future crises.

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. For many of us, modern memory is shaped less by a longing for the social customs and practices of the past or for family heirlooms handed down over generations and more by childhood encounters with ephemeral commercial goods and fleeting media moments in our age of fast capitalism. This phenomenon has given rise to communities of nostalgia whose members remain loyal to the toys, television, and music of their youth. They return to the theme parks and pastimes of their upbringing, hoping to reclaim that feeling of childhood wonder or teenage freedom. Consumed nostalgia took definite shape in the 1970s, spurred by an increase in the turnover of consumer goods, the commercialization of childhood, and the skillful marketing of nostalgia. Gary Cross immerses readers in this fascinating and often delightful history, unpacking the cultural dynamics that turn pop tunes into oldies and childhood toys into valuable commodities. He compares the limited appeal of heritage sites such as Colonial Williamsburg to the perpetually attractive power of a Disney theme park and reveals how consumed nostalgia shapes how we cope with accelerating change. Today nostalgia can be owned, collected, and easily accessed, making it less elusive and often more fun than in the past, but its commercialization has sometimes limited memory and complicated the positive goals of recollection. By unmasking the fascinating, idiosyncratic character of modern nostalgia, Cross helps us better understand the rituals of recall in an age of fast capitalism.

'Fifty years ago I used Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers to get students excited about economics. Today I would use John T. Harvey's Contending Perspectives in Economics. The book is beautifully written and full of insights into who economists are and why they think the way they do.'-Paul D. Bush, California State University, USThis accessible book provides a non-technical yet rigorous introduction to the various competing schools of thought in economics including Neoclassical, Marxist, Austrian, Post Keynesian, Institutionalist, New Institutionalist, and Feminist. The unique features of each approach are highlighted, complemented by discussions of methodology, world views, popular themes, and current activities. Importantly, the book also examines common criticisms and how each school responds. In the interest of preserving balance and accuracy, every chapter covering a heterodox school of thought has been vetted by an acknowledged expert in that particular field. Though written for use in undergraduate courses, this guide will no doubt offer a great deal to any scholar wishing to gain a fresh perspective and greater understanding of the variety and breadth of current economic thinking.

If you have ever wondered why SUVs replaced minivans, how one rap song turned the cognac industry upside down, or what gives Levi's jeans their iconic allure, look no further-in Cool, Steven Quartz and Anette Asp finally explain the fascinating science behind unexpected trends and enduring successes. We live in a world of conspicuous consumption, where the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the food we eat lead double lives: they don't merely satisfy our needs; they also communicate our values, identities, and aspirations. In Beverly Hills, tourists flock to the famous Rodeo Drive-not to shop, but simply to take photographs of themselves in front of luxury stores. And for one week in August, hundreds of thousands of HarleyDavidson fans from all over the world descend on the remote town of Sturgis, South Dakota, and engulf the otherwise sleepy hamlet in the deafening roar of motorcycle engines. Why do brands inspire such devotion? Quartz and Asp bring together groundbreaking findings in neuroscience, economics, and evolutionary biology to present a new understanding of why we consume and how our concepts of what is "cool"-be it designer jeans, smartphones, or craft beer-help drive the global economy. The authors highlight the underlying neurological and cultural processes that contribute to our often unconscious decision making, explaining how we're able to navigate the supermarket on autopilot for certain items and yet arrive at the checkout counter with a basket full of products picked up on the spur of the moment. And they explore the opposite side of the consumer equation-the "choice architects" who design store interiors and the "coolhunters" who scour Berlin and Tokyo on the lookout for the latest trends. Through a novel combination of cultural and economic history and in-depth studies of the brain, Cool puts forth a provocative theory of consumerism that reveals the crucial missing links in an understanding of our spending habits: our brain's status-seeking "social calculator" and an instinct to rebel that fuels our dislike of being subordinated by others. Quartz and Asp show how these ancient motivations make us natural-born consumers and how they sparked the emergence of "cool consumption"in the middle of the twentieth century, creating new lifestyle choices and routes to happiness. Examining how cool was reshaped in the 1990s by a changing society and the Internet, they unpack the social motivations behind today's hip, ethical consumption, arguing that we should embrace, rather than deny, the power of consumerism. Taking us from Norman Mailer to normcore, Cool is surprising at every turn, and will forever change the way you think about money, status, desire, happiness, and choice.

Corporate social responsibility has been defined as 'the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society'. Is Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) just window dressing or is it a contradiction in terms? In this Very Short Introduction, Jeremy Moon shows that CSR holds much morevalue than it first appears, and shows how it has come of age in recent years. Illustrating the sorts of CSR investments companies make, the ways in which they practice CSR, and the challenges this brings, Moon considers how the principles migrated from their US roots to become a global businessphenomenon. Exploring the place of CSR in different economic, social, political, and managerial contexts, this short guide considers the many positives, but also challenges, that CSR can present for companies, societies, and governments worldwide. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, andenthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chair of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however--the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.In The Courage to Act, Ben Bernanke pulls back the curtain on the tireless and ultimately successful efforts to prevent a mass economic failure. Working with two U.S. presidents and two Treasury secretaries, Dr. Bernanke and his colleagues used every Fed capability, no matter how arcane, to keep the U.S. economy afloat. From his arrival in Washington in 2002 and his experiences before the crisis, to the intense days and weeks of the crisis itself, and through the Great Recession that followed, Dr. Bernanke gives readers an unequaled perspective on the American economy. This narrative will reveal for the first time how the creativity and decisiveness of a few key leaders prevented an economic collapse of unimaginable scale.

Your cell phone provider tracks your location and knows who's with you. Your online and in-store purchasing patterns are recorded, and reveal if you're unemployed, sick, or pregnant. Your e-mails and texts expose your intimate and casual friends. Google knows what you're thinking because it saves your private searches. Facebook can determine your sexual orientation without you ever mentioning it. The powers that surveil us do more than simply store this information. Corporations use surveillance to manipulate not only the news articles and advertisements we each see, but also the prices we're offered. Governments use surveillance to discriminate, censor, chill free speech, and put people in danger worldwide. And both sides share this information with each other or, even worse, lose it to cybercriminals in huge data breaches. Much of this is voluntary: we cooperate with corporate surveillance because it promises us convenience, and we submit to government surveillance because it promises us protection. The result is a mass surveillance society of our own making. But have we given up more than we've gained? In Data and Goliath, security expert Bruce Schneier offers another path, one that values both security and privacy. He shows us exactly what we can do to reform our government surveillance programs and shake up surveillance-based business models, while also providing tips for you to protect your privacy every day. You'll never look at your phone, your computer, your credit cards, or even your car in the same way again.

DEALING WITH CHINA takes the reader behind closed doors to witness the creation and evolution and future of China's state-controlled capitalism. Hank Paulson has dealt with China unlike any other foreigner. As head of Goldman Sachs, Paulson had a pivotal role in opening up China to private enterprise. Then, as Treasury secretary, he created the Strategic Economic Dialogue with what is now the world's second-largest economy. He negotiated with China on needed economic reforms, while safeguarding the teetering U.S. financial system. Over his career, Paulson has worked with scores of top Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, China's most powerful man in decades. In DEALING WITH CHINA, Paulson draws on his unprecedented access to modern China's political and business elite, including its three most recent heads of state, to answer several key questions: How did China become an economic superpower so quickly? How does business really get done there? What are the best ways for Western business and political leaders to work with, compete with, and benefit from China? How can the U.S. negotiate with and influence China given its authoritarian rule, its massive environmental concerns, and its huge population's unrelenting demands for economic growth and security? Written in the same anecdote-rich, page-turning style as Paulson's bestselling memoir, On the Brink, DEALING WITH CHINA is certain to become the classic and definitive examination of how to engage China's leaders as they build their economic superpower.

A sharp and illuminating history of one of capitalism’s longest running tensions—the conflicts of interest among public company directors, managers, and shareholders—told through entertaining case studies and original letters from some of our most legendary and controversial investors and activists. Recent disputes between shareholders and major corporations, including Apple and DuPont, have made headlines. But the struggle between management and those who own stock has been going on for nearly a century. Mixing never-before-published and rare, original letters from Wall Street icons—including Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot, Carl Icahn, and Daniel Loeb—with masterful scholarship and professional insight, Dear Chairman traces the rise in shareholder activism from the 1920s to today, and provides an invaluable and unprecedented perspective on what it means to be a public company, including how they work and who is really in control. Jeff Gramm analyzes different eras and pivotal boardroom battles from the last century to understand the factors that have caused shareholders and management to collide. Throughout, he uses the letters to show how investors interact with directors and managers, how they think about their target companies, and how they plan to profit. Each is a fascinating example of capitalism at work told through the voices of its most colorful, influential participants. A hedge fund manager and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, Gramm has spent as much time evaluating CEOs and directors as he has trying to understand and value businesses. He has seen public companies that are poorly run, and some that willfully disenfranchise their shareholders. While he pays tribute to the ingenuity of public company investors, Gramm also exposes examples of shareholder activism at its very worst, when hedge funds engineer stealthy land-grabs at the expense of a company’s long term prospects. Ultimately, he provides a thorough, much-needed understanding of the public company/shareholder relationship for investors, managers, and everyone concerned with the future of capitalism.

Your Survival Guide to the Hades of Wall Street The Devil’s Financial Dictionary skewers the plutocrats and bureaucrats who gave us exploding mortgages, freakish risks, and banks too big to fail. And it distills the complexities, absurdities, and pomposities of Wall Street into plain truths and aphorisms anyone can understand. An indispensable survival guide to the hostile wilderness of today’s financial markets,The Devil’s Financial Dictionary delivers practical insights with a scorpion’s sting. It cuts through the fads and fakery of Wall Street and clears a safe path for investors between euphoria and despair. Staying out of financial purgatory has never been this fun.

Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology, has spawned a global social movement with utopian ambitions. The notion of a new currency, maintained by the computers of users around the world, has been the butt of many jokes, but that has not stopped it from growing into a technology worth billions of dollars, supported by the hordes of followers who have come to view it as the most important new idea since the creation of the internet. Believers from Beijing to Buenos Aires see the potential for a financial system free from banks and governments, and a new global money for the digital age. An unusual tale of group invention, Digital Gold tells the story of the colorful characters who have built Bitcoin, including a Finnish college student, an Argentinian millionaire, a Chinese entrepreneur, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Bitcoin's elusive creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the founder of the Silk Road online drug market, Ross Ulbricht. With Digital Gold, New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper offers a brilliant and engrossing account of this new technology—one filled with dramatic booms and busts that have led to untold riches for some and prison terms for others. But at each step of the way, Bitcoin has provided one of the most fascinating tests of how money works, who benefits from it, and what it might look like in the future.

The world of economics is changing. Years of turmoil in the global economy mean that nothing will ever be quite the same again. This is the starting point and theme of this radically revised Economist books classic, now available for the first time in America. Richard Davies, economics editor ofThe Economist, takes us on a journey through the paper's own analysis of the state of the world's economies, how we reached this point and what to expect in the next decade. He explores: what's gone wrong since 2008, why it's happened and how we can stop it happening again; the shifting focus of economics from banking to labor economics; the future hopes and challenges for the world economy. Along the way, we encounter the global economy laid bare, from banks, panics, and crashes to innovative new policies to improve how markets function; from discussions around jobs, pay, and inequality to the promise of innovation and productivity; from the implications of emerging markets and the globalisation of trade through to the sharing economy and the economics of Google and eBay. The result is a fascinating review of the global economy and the changing role of economics in the new world order.

In the wake of the financial crisis and the Great Recession, economics seems anything but a science. In this sharp, masterfully argued book, Dani Rodrik, a leading critic from within, takes a close look at economics to examine when it falls short and when it works, to give a surprisingly upbeat account of the discipline.Drawing on the history of the field and his deep experience as a practitioner, Rodrik argues that economics can be a powerful tool that improves the world--but only when economists abandon universal theories and focus on getting the context right. Economics Rules argues that the discipline's much-derided mathematical models are its true strength. Models are the tools that make economics a science.Too often, however, economists mistake a model for the model that applies everywhere and at all times. In six chapters that trace his discipline from Adam Smith to present-day work on globalization, Rodrik shows how diverse situations call for different models. Each model tells a partial story about how the world works. These stories offer wide-ranging, and sometimes contradictory, lessons--just as children's fables offer diverse morals.Whether the question concerns the rise of global inequality, the consequences of free trade, or the value of deficit spending, Rodrik explains how using the right models can deliver valuable new insights about social reality and public policy. Beyond the science, economics requires the craft to apply suitable models to the context.The 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers challenged many economists' deepest assumptions about free markets. Rodrik reveals that economists' model toolkit is much richer than these free-market models. With pragmatic model selection, economists can develop successful antipoverty programs in Mexico, growth strategies in Africa, and intelligent remedies for domestic inequality.At once a forceful critique and defense of the discipline, Economics Rules charts a path toward a more humble but more effective science.

Efficiently Inefficient describes the key trading strategies used by hedge funds and demystifies the secret world of active investing. Leading financial economist Lasse Heje Pedersen combines the latest research with real-world examples and interviews with top hedge fund managers to show how certain trading strategies make money—and why they sometimes don’t. Pedersen views markets as neither perfectly efficient nor completely inefficient. Rather, they are inefficient enough that money managers can be compensated for their costs through the profits of their trading strategies and efficient enough that the profits after costs do not encourage additional active investing. Understanding how to trade in this efficiently inefficient market provides a new, engaging way to learn finance. Pedersen analyzes how the market price of stocks and bonds can differ from the model price, leading to new perspectives on the relationship between trading results and finance theory. He explores several different areas in depth—fundamental tools for investment management, equity strategies, macro strategies, and arbitrage strategies—and he looks at such diverse topics as portfolio choice, risk management, equity valuation, and yield curve logic. The book’s strategies are illuminated further by interviews with leading hedge fund managers: Lee Ainslie, Cliff Asness, Jim Chanos, Ken Griffin, David Harding, John Paulson, Myron Scholes, and George Soros. Efficiently Inefficient effectively demonstrates how financial markets really work. Free problem sets are available online at http://www.lhpedersen.com

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley's most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs--a real-life Tony Stark--and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new "makers." Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, who sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk--one of the most unusual and striking figures in American business history--is a contemporary, visionary amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy. Thorough and insightful, Elon Musk brings to life a technology industry that is rapidly and dramatically changing by examining the life of one of its most powerful and influential titans.

Arguing that the decline in union membership and bargaining power is linked to rising income inequality, this important book traces the evolution of labor law in America from the first labor-law case in 1806 through the passage of right-to-work legislation in Michigan and Indiana in 2012. In doing so, it shares important insights into economic development, exploring both the nature of work in America and the part the legal system played--and continues to play--in shaping the lives of American workers. The book illustrates the intertwined history of labor law and politics, showing how these forces quashed unions in the 19th century, allowed them to flourish in the mid-20th century, and squelched them again in recent years. Readers will learn about the negative impact of union decline on American workers and how that decline has been influenced by political forces. They will see how the right-to-work and Tea Party movements have combined to prevent union organizing, to the detriment of the middle class. And they will better understand the current failure to reform labor law, despite a consensus that unions can protect workers without damaging market efficiencies.

The year 2015 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Berkshire Hathaway under Warren Buffett's leadership, a milestone worth commemorating. The tenure sets a record for chief executive not only in duration but in value creation and philosophizing. The fourth edition of The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America celebrates its twentieth anniversary. As the book Buffett autographs most, its popularity and longevity attest to the widespread appetite for this unique compilation of Buffett's thoughts that is at once comprehensive, non-repetitive, and digestible. New and experienced readers alike will gain an invaluable informal education by perusing this classic arrangement of Warren's best writings.
The fourth edition's new material includes: Warren's 50th anniversary retrospective, in what Bill Gates called Warren's best letter ever, on conglomerates and Berkshire's future without Buffett; Charlie Munger's 50th anniversary essay on ''The Berkshire System''; Warren's definitive defense of Berkshire's no-dividend practice; and Warren's best advice on investing, whether in apartments, farms, or businesses.

Originally conceived as part of a unifying vision for Europe, the euro is now viewed as a millstone around the neck of a continent crippled by vast debts, sluggish economies, and growing populist dissent. In Europe's Orphan, leading economic commentator Martin Sandbu presents a compelling defense of the euro. He argues that rather than blaming the euro for the political and economic failures in Europe since the global financial crisis, the responsibility lies firmly on the authorities of the eurozone and its member countries. The eurozone's self-inflicted financial calamities and economic decline resulted from a toxic cocktail of unforced policy errors by bankers, politicians, and bureaucrats; the unhealthy coziness between finance and governments; and, above all, an extreme unwillingness to restructure debt. Sandbu traces the origins of monetary union back to the desire for greater European unity after the Second World War. But the euro's creation coincided with a credit bubble that governments chose not to rein in. Once the crisis hit, a battle of both ideas and interests led to the failure to aggressively restructure sovereign and bank debt. Ideologically informed choices set in motion dynamics that encouraged more economic mistakes and heightened political tensions within the eurozone. Sandbu concludes that the prevailing view that monetary union can only work with fiscal and political union is wrong and dangerous--and risks sending the continent into further political paralysis and economic stagnation. Contending that the euro has been wrongfully scapegoated for the eurozone's troubles, Europe's Orphan charts what actually must be done for the continent to achieve an economic and political recovery.

Why did the Eurozone end up with an unemployment rate more than twice than that of the United States and six years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Was crisis in the Eurozone inevitable? What caused the prolonged economic failure experienced by the majority of the world's low- andmiddle-income countries at the end of the 20th century?Failed analyzes and ties together some of the most important economic developments of recent years with the common theme that they have been widely misunderstood and in some cases almost completely ignored. A central argument of Failed is that there are always viable alternatives to prolongedeconomic failure. Author Mark Weisbrot shows that political agendas are often the root cause of avoidable financial crises and drawing on lessons learned from previous crises, recessions, and subsequent recovers can prevent further failures in the future.

Today, there are over 200,000,000 women business owners around the world. Many of these entrepreneurs are not doing business as usual, nor are they simply leaning in. Rather, they are tapping into feminine capitalthe unique skills and sensibilities that they have cultivated as womento create enviable successes. Drawing on four decades of award-winning research, Feminine Capital reveals how women are harnessing different approaches to doing business. Barbara Orser and Catherine Elliott detail the pillars of feminine capital and offer new insight into the ways that gender can influence entrepreneurial decision-making. They find that leveraging feminine capital can help women to create distinctive brands, build new markets, and drive profitsall while leveling the playing field in business. In doing so, women are changing our social and economic landscape, one venture at a time. Dispelling myths and misperceptions that can undermine women-owned ventures, this book takes a fresh look at how female entrepreneurs can leverage their skills, knowledge, and values. Case studies of women entrepreneurs bring key concepts and lessons to life, while learning aids, diagnostic tools, and checklists help readers to construct innovative business models, refine start-up plans, and hone growth strategies.

How the very things we create to protect ourselves, like money market funds or anti-lock brakes, end up being the biggest threats to our safety and wellbeing. We have learned a staggering amount about human nature and disaster -- yet we keep having car crashes, floods, and financial crises. Partly this is because the success we have at making life safer enables us to take bigger risks. As our cities, transport systems, and financial markets become more interconnected and complex, so does the potential for catastrophe. How do we stay safe? Should we? What if our attempts are exposing us even more to the very risks we are avoiding? Would acceptance of danger make us more secure? Is there such a thing as foolproof? In FOOLPROOF, Greg Ip presents a macro theory of human nature and disaster that explains how we can keep ourselves safe in our increasingly dangerous world.

Growing international trade has helped lift living standards around the world, and yet free trade is always under attack. Critics complain that trade forces painful economic adjustments, such as plant closings and layoffs of workers, and charge that the World Trade Organization serves the interests of corporations, undercuts domestic environmental regulations, and erodes America's sovereignty. Why has global trade--and trade agreements such as NAFTA--become so controversial? Does free trade deserve its bad reputation? In Free Trade under Fire, Douglas Irwin sweeps aside the misconceptions that litter the debate over trade and gives the reader a clear understanding of the issues involved. This fourth edition has been thoroughly updated to include the most recent policy developments and the latest research findings on the impact of trade.

A clear, comprehensive introduction to the study of game theory. In the Fourth Edition, new real-world examples and compelling end-of-chapter exercises engage students with game theory.

"Anyone who comes to pitch on Shark Tank should read this book first!” --Barbara Corcoran, ABC's Shark Tank "I have seen literally thousands of companies trying to raise capital and know that a great pitch deck is critical. This book gives you the playbook for creating yours.” --Naval Ravikant, cofounder and CEO, AngelList "I raised twice the amount of money I set out to in a mere five weeks. I’m naming my firstborn child after the Evans.” --Slava Menn, cofounder and CEO, Fortified Bicycle HOW DO YOU LAUNCH THE VENTURE OF YOUR DREAMS? Get Backed isn’t just about startup fundraising. It’s a handbook for anyone who has an idea and needs to build relationships to get it off the ground. Over the last 3 years, entrepreneurs Evan Loomis and Evan Baehr have raised $45 million for their own ventures, including the second largest round on the fundraising platform AngelList. In Get Backed, they show you exactly what they and dozens of others did to raise money--even the mistakes they made--while sharing the secrets of the world’s best storytellers, fundraisers, and startup accelerators. They’ll also teach you how to use "the friendship loop”, a step-by-step process that can be used to initiate and build relationships with anyone, from investors to potential cofounders. And, most of all, they’ll help you create a pitch deck, building on the real-life examples of 15 ventures that have raised over $150 million. What’s in the book? * The original pitch decks and fundraising strategies of 15 ventures that raised over $150 million * Email scripts that will get you a meeting with angel investors, venture capitalists, and potential board members * Pitching exercises developed by startup talent beds like Stanford University’s d.school and Techstars * A breakdown of the 10 essential pitch deck slides, how to create them, and what questions you should answer with each * An overview of the 5 main funding sources for startups, the pros and cons of each, and who the big players are * A crash-course in visual and presentation design that will make any deck beautiful * Templates for 4 stories every entrepreneur should know how to tell * The story of one entrepreneur who showed up in Silicon Valley with no network and six months later had investments from Fred Anderson, Bono, and Peter Thiel Get Backed will show you exactly what it takes to get funded and will give you the tools to make any idea a reality.

William Ury, coauthor of the international bestseller Getting to Yes, returns with another groundbreaking book, this time asking: how can we expect to get to yes with others if we haven't first gotten to yes with ourselves? Renowned negotiation expert William Ury has taught tens of thousands of people from all walks of life--managers, lawyers, factory workers, coal miners, schoolteachers, diplomats, and government officials--how to become better negotiators. Over the years, Ury has discovered that the greatest obstacle to successful agreements and satisfying relationships is not the other side, as difficult as they can be. The biggest obstacle is actually our own selves--our natural tendency to react in ways that do not serve our true interests. But this obstacle can also become our biggest opportunity, Ury argues. If we learn to understand and influence ourselves first, we lay the groundwork for understanding and influencing others. In this prequel to Getting to Yes, Ury offers a seven-step method to help you reach agreement with yourself first, dramatically improving your ability to negotiate with others. Practical and effective, Getting to Yes with Yourself helps readers reach good agreements with others, develop healthy relationships, make their businesses more productive, and live far more satisfying lives.

You’ve read the classic on win-win negotiating,Getting to Yes ... but so havethey, the folks you are now negotiating with. How can you get a leg up ... and win? "Win-win” negotiation is an appealing idea on an intellectual level: Find the best way to convince the other side to accept a mutually beneficial outcome, and then everyone gets their fair share. The reality, though, is that people want more than their fair share; they want to win. Tell your boss that you’ve concocted a deal that gets your company a piece of the pie, and the reaction is likely to be: "Maybe we need to find someone harder-nosed than you who knows how towin. We want the whole pie, not just a slice.” However, to return to an earlier era before "win-win” negotiation was in fashion and seek simply to dominate or bully opponents into submission would be a step in the wrong direction--and a public relations disaster. By showing how to win at win-win negotiating, Lawrence Susskind provides the operational advice you need to satisfy the interests of your back table--the people to whom you report. He also shows you how to deal with irrational people, whose vocabulary seems limited to "no,” or with the proverbial 900-pound gorilla. He explains how to find trades that create much more value than either you or your opponent thought possible. His brilliant concept of "the trading zone”--the space where you can create deals that are "good for them but great for you,” while still maintaining trust and keeping relationships intact--is a fresh way to re-think your approach to negotiating. The outcome is often the best of both possible worlds: You claim a disproportionate share of the value you’ve created while your opponents still look good to the people to whom they report. Whether the venue is business, a family dispute, international relations, or a tradeoff that has to be made between the environment and jobs, Susskind provides a breakthrough in how to both think about, and engage in, productive negotiations.

The Great Race recounts the story of a century-long battle between automakers for market share, profit, and technological dominance-and a race to build the car of the future. The world's great manufacturing juggernaut-the $2 trillion automotive industry-is in the throes of a revolution. Its future will include cars Henry Ford and Karl Benz could scarcely have imagined. They will drive themselves, won't consume oil, and will come in radical shapes and sizes. But the path to that future is fraught. The top contenders are two traditional manufacturing giants, the United States and Japan, and a newcomer, China. Team America has a powerful and little known weapon in its arsenal: a small group of technology buffs and regulators from California. The story of why and how these men and women could shape the future-how you move, how you work, how you live on earth-is an unexpected tale filled with unforgettable characters: a scorned chemistry professor, a South African visionary who went for broke, an ambitious Chinese expat, a quixotic Japanese nuclear engineer, and a string of billion-dollar wagers by governments and corporations. Tillemann's account is incisive and riveting. It explains how America bounced back in this global contest and what it will take to command the industrial future.

One of Asia's best-respected writers on business and economy, Hong Kong-based author Mark L. Clifford provides a behind-the-scenes look at what companies in China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand are doing to build businesses that will lessen the environmental impact of Asia's extraordinary economic growth. Dirty air, foul water, and hellishly overcrowded cities are threatening to choke the region's impressive prosperity. Recognizing a business opportunity in solving social problems, Asian businesses have developed innovative responses to the region's environmental crises. From solar and wind power technologies to green buildings, electric cars, water services, and sustainable tropical forestry, Asian corporations are upending old business models in their home countries and throughout the world. Companies have the money, the technology, and the people to act--yet, as Clifford emphasizes, support from the government (in the form of more effective, market-friendly policies) and the engagement of civil society are crucial for a region-wide shift to greener business practices. Clifford paints detailed profiles of what some of these companies are doing and includes a unique appendix that encapsulates the environmental business practices of more than fifty companies mentioned in the book.

What does it take to succeed? This question has fueled a long-running debate. Some have argued that humans are fundamentally competitive, and that pursuing self-interest is the best way to get ahead. Others claim that humans are born to cooperate and that we are most successful when we collaborate with others. In FRIEND AND FOE, researchers Galinsky and Schweitzer explain why this debate misses the mark. Rather than being hardwired to compete or cooperate, we have evolved to do both. In every relationship, from co-workers to friends to spouses to siblings we are both friends and foes. It is only by learning how to strike the right balance between these two forces that we can improve our long-term relationships and get more of what we want. Here, Galinsky and Schweitzer draw on original, cutting edge research from their own labs and from across the social sciences as well as vivid real-world examples to show how to maximize success in work and in life by deftly navigating the tension between cooperation and competition. They offer insights and advice ranging from: how to gain power and keep it, how to build trust and repair trust once it's broken, how to diffuse workplace conflict and bias, how to find the right comparisons to motivate us and make us happier, and how to succeed in negotiations - ensuring that we achieve our own goals and satisfy those of our counterparts. Along the way, they pose and offer surprising answers to a number of perplexing puzzles: when does too much talent undermine success; why can acting less competently gain you status and authority, where do many gender differences in the workplace really come from, how can you use deception to build trust, and why do you want to go last on American Idol and in many interview situations, but make the first offer when negotiating the sale of a new car. We perform at our very best when we hold cooperation and competition in the right balance. This book is a guide for navigating our social and professional worlds by learning when to cooperate as a friend and when to compete as a foe--and how to be better at both.

In The Great Divide, Joseph E. Stiglitz expands on the diagnosis he offered in his best-selling book The Price of Inequality and suggests ways to counter America's growing problem. With his signature blend of clarity and passion, Stiglitz argues that inequality is a choice--the cumulative result of unjust policies and misguided priorities.Gathering his writings for popular outlets including Vanity Fair and the New York Times, Stiglitz exposes in full America's inequality: its dimensions, its causes, and its consequences for the nation and for the world. From Reagan-era to the Great Recession and its long aftermath, Stiglitz delves into the irresponsible policies--deregulation, tax cuts, and tax breaks for the 1 percent--that are leaving many Americans farther and farther beyond and turning the American dream into an ever more unachievable myth. With formidable yet accessible economic insight, he urges us to embrace real solutions: increasing taxes on corporations and the wealthy; offering more help to the children of the poor; investing in education, science, and infrastructure; helping out homeowners instead of banks; and, most importantly, doing more to restore the economy to full employment. Stiglitz also draws lessons from Scandinavia, Singapore, and Japan, and he argues against the tide of unnecessary, destructive austerity that is sweeping across Europe.Ultimately, Stiglitz believes our choice is not between growth and fairness; with the right policies, we can choose both. His complaint is not so much about capitalism as such, but how twenty-first-century capitalism has been perverted. His is a call to confront America's economic inequality as the political and moral issue that it is. If we reinvest in people and pursue the other policies that he describes, America can live up to the shared dream of a more prosperous, more equal society.

The two great financial crises of the past century are the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Recession, which began in 2008. Both occurred against the backdrop of sharp credit booms, dubious banking practices, and a fragile and unstable global financial system. When markets went into cardiac arrest in 2008, policymakers invoked the lessons of the Great Depression in attempting to avert the worst. While their response prevented a financial collapse and catastrophic depression like that of the 1930s, unemployment in the U.S. and Europe still rose to excruciating high levels. Pain and suffering were widespread. The question, given this, is why didn't policymakers do better? Hall of Mirrors, Barry Eichengreen's monumental twinned history of the two crises, provides the farthest-reaching answer to this question to date. Alternating back and forth between the two crises and between North America and Europe, Eichengreen shows how fear of another Depression following the collapse of Lehman Brothers shaped policy responses on both continents, with both positive and negative results. Since bank failures were a prominent feature of the Great Depression, policymakers moved quickly to strengthen troubled banks. But because derivatives markets were not important in the 1930s, they missed problems in the so-called shadow banking system. Having done too little to support spending in the 1930s, governments also ramped up public spending this time around. But the response was indiscriminate and quickly came back to haunt overly indebted governments, particularly in Southern Europe. Moreover, because politicians overpromised, and because their measures failed to stave off a major recession, a backlash quickly developed against activist governments and central banks. Policymakers then prematurely succumbed to the temptation to return to normal policies before normal conditions had returned. The result has been a grindingly slow recovery in the United States and endless recession in Europe. Hall of Mirrors is both a major work of economic history and an essential exploration of how we avoided making only some of the same mistakes twice. It shows not just how the "lessons" of Great Depression history continue to shape society's response to contemporary economic problems, but also how the experience of the Great Recession will permanently change how we think about the Great Depression.

We are well aware of the rise of the 1% as the rapid growth of economic inequality has put the majority of the world's wealth in the pockets of fewer and fewer. One much-discussed solution to this imbalance is to significantly increase the rate at which we tax the wealthy. But with an enormous amount of the world's wealth hidden in tax havens--in countries like Switzerland, Luxembourg, and the Cayman Islands--this wealth cannot be fully accounted for and taxed fairly. No one, from economists to bankers to politicians, has been able to quantify exactly how much of the world's assets are currently hidden--until now. Gabriel Zucman is the first economist to offer reliable insight into the actual extent of the world's money held in tax havens. And it's staggering. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations, Zucman offers an inventive and sophisticated approach to quantifying how big the problem is, how tax havens work and are organized, and how we can begin to approach a solution. His research reveals that tax havens are a quickly growing danger to the world economy. In the past five years, the amount of wealth in tax havens has increased over 25%--there has never been as much money held offshore as there is today. This hidden wealth accounts for at least $7.6 trillion, equivalent to 8% of the global financial assets of households. Fighting the notion that any attempts to vanquish tax havens are futile, since some countries will always offer more advantageous tax rates than others, as well the counter-argument that since the financial crisis tax havens have disappeared, Zucman shows how both sides are actually very wrong. In The Hidden Wealth of Nations he offers an ambitious agenda for reform, focused on ways in which countries can change the incentives of tax havens. Only by first understanding the enormity of the secret wealth can we begin to estimate the kind of actions that would force tax havens to give up their practices. Zucman's work has quickly become the gold standard for quantifying the amount of the world's assets held in havens. In this concise book, he lays out in approachable language how the international banking system works and the dangerous extent to which the large-scale evasion of taxes is undermining the global market as a whole. If we are to find a way to solve the problem of increasing inequality, The Hidden Wealth of Nations is essential reading.

Long before the age of "Big Data" or the rise of today's "self-quantifiers," American capitalism embraced "risk"--and proceeded to number our days. Life insurers led the way, developing numerical practices for measuring individuals and groups, predicting their fates, and intervening in their futures. Emanating from the gilded boardrooms of Lower Manhattan and making their way into drawing rooms and tenement apartments across the nation, these practices soon came to change the futures they purported to divine. How Our Days Became Numbered tells a story of corporate culture remaking American culture--a story of intellectuals and professionals in and around insurance companies who reimagined Americans' lives through numbers and taught ordinary Americans to do the same. Making individuals statistical did not happen easily. Legislative battles raged over the propriety of discriminating by race or of smoothing away the effects of capitalism's fluctuations on individuals. Meanwhile, debates within companies set doctors against actuaries and agents, resulting in elaborate, secretive systems of surveillance and calculation. Dan Bouk reveals how, in a little over half a century, insurers laid the groundwork for the much-quantified, risk-infused world that we live in today. To understand how the financial world shapes modern bodies, how risk assessments can perpetuate inequalities of race or sex, and how the quantification and claims of risk on each of us continue to grow, we must take seriously the history of those who view our lives as a series of probabilities to be managed.

In less than a decade, the Internet went from being a series of loosely connected networks used by universities and the military to the powerful commercial engine it is today. This book describes how many of the key innovations that made this possible came from entrepreneurs and iconoclasts who were outside the mainstream--and how the commercialization of the Internet was by no means a foregone conclusion at its outset. Shane Greenstein traces the evolution of the Internet from government ownership to privatization to the commercial Internet we know today. This is a story of innovation from the edges. Greenstein shows how mainstream service providers that had traditionally been leaders in the old-market economy became threatened by innovations from industry outsiders who saw economic opportunities where others didn't--and how these mainstream firms had no choice but to innovate themselves. New models were tried: some succeeded, some failed. Commercial markets turned innovations into valuable products and services as the Internet evolved in those markets. New business processes had to be created from scratch as a network originally intended for research and military defense had to deal with network interconnectivity, the needs of commercial users, and a host of challenges with implementing innovative new services. How the Internet Became Commercial demonstrates how, without any central authority, a unique and vibrant interplay between government and private industry transformed the Internet.

The United States has two separate banking systems todayâe"one serving the well-to-do and another exploiting everyone else. How the Other Half Banks contributes to the growing conversation on American inequality by highlighting one of its prime causes: unequal credit. Mehrsa Baradaran examines how a significant portion of the population, deserted by banks, is forced to wander through a Wild West of payday lenders and check-cashing services to cover emergency expenses and pay for necessitiesâe"all thanks to deregulation that began in the 1970s and continues decades later. In an age of corporate megabanks with trillions of dollars in assets, it is easy to forget that Americaâe(tm)s banking system was originally created as a public service. Banks have always relied on credit from the federal government, provided on favorable terms so that they could issue low-interest loans. But as banks grew in size and political influence, they shed their social contract with the American people, demanding to be treated as a private industry free from any public-serving responsibility. They abandoned less profitable, low-income customers in favor of wealthier clients and high-yield investments. Fringe lenders stepped in to fill the void. This two-tier banking system has become even more unequal since the 2008 financial crisis. Baradaran proposes a solution: reenlisting the U.S. Post Office in its historic function of providing bank services. The post office played an important but largely forgotten role in the creation of American democracy, and it could be deployed again to level the field of financial opportunity.

As a technology pioneer at MIT and as the leader of three successful start-ups, Kevin Ashton experienced firsthand the all-consuming challenge of creating something new. Now, in a tour-de-force narrative twenty years in the making, Ashton leads us on a journey through humanity's greatest creations to uncover the surprising truth behind who creates and how they do it. From the crystallographer's laboratory where the secrets of DNA were first revealed by a long forgotten woman, to the electromagnetic chamber where the stealth bomber was born on a twenty-five-cent bet, to the Ohio bicycle shop where the Wright brothers set out to "fly a horse," Ashton showcases the seemingly unremarkable individuals, gradual steps, multiple failures, and countless ordinary and usually uncredited acts that lead to our most astounding breakthroughs. Creators, he shows, apply in particular ways the everyday, ordinary thinking of which we are all capable, taking thousands of small steps and working in an endless loop of problem and solution. He examines why innovators meet resistance and how they overcome it, why most organizations stifle creative people, and how the most creative organizations work. Drawing on examples from art, science, business, and invention, from Mozart to the Muppets, Archimedes to Apple, Kandinsky to a can of Coke, How to Fly a Horse is a passionate and immensely rewarding exploration of how "new" comes to be.

The failure of economists to anticipate the global financial crisis and mitigate the impact of the ensuing recession has spurred a public outcry. Economists are under fire, but questions concerning exactly how to redeem the discipline remain unanswered. In this provocative book, renowned economist Meghnad Desai investigates the evolution of economics and maps its trajectory against the occurrence of major political events to provide a definitive answer.   Desai underscores the contribution of hubris to economists' calamitous lack of foresight, and he makes a persuasive case for the profession to re-engage with the history of economic thought. He dismisses the notion that one over-arching paradigm can resolve all economic eventualities while urging that an array of already-available theories and approaches be considered anew for the insights they may provide toward preventing future economic catastrophes. With an accessible style and keen common sense, Desai offers a fresh perspective on some of the most important economic issues of our time.

Alpha still exists! But that doesn't mean it is easy to find, or even worth the pursuit. Larry Swedroe, author of the bestselling series of "The Only Guide" investment books, and co-author Andrew Berkin bring you the quantitatively chilling tale of "The Incredible Shrinking Alpha." As aficionados of classic science fiction, Swedroe and Berkin saw similarities between the monumental struggle of Scott Carey, novelist Richard Matheson's Incredible Shrinking Man, and that of every individual investor trying to beat the market. Swedroe and Berkin explain in academic yet simple terms what is happening to the alpha for which so many investors yearn. Offering compelling data from decades of academic research, Swedroe and Berkin present the hard truth as they know it - it's not worth the time or effort spent battling to win those few extra cake crumbs. Instead, focus on the things you can control and discover what life has to offer beyond the quest for alpha.

Inequality is one of our most urgent social problems. Curbed in the decades after World War II, it has recently returned with a vengeance. We all know the scale of the problemâe"talk about the 99% and the 1% is entrenched in public debateâe"but there has been little discussion of what we can do but despair. According to the distinguished economist Anthony Atkinson, however, we can do much more than skeptics imagine. Atkinson has long been at the forefront of research on inequality, and brings his theoretical and practical experience to bear on its diverse problems. He presents a comprehensive set of policies that could bring about a genuine shift in the distribution of income in developed countries. The problem, Atkinson shows, is not simply that the rich are getting richer. We are also failing to tackle poverty, and the economy is rapidly changing to leave the majority of people behind. To reduce inequality, we have to go beyond placing new taxes on the wealthy to fund existing programs. We need fresh ideas. Atkinson thus recommends ambitious new policies in five areas: technology, employment, social security, the sharing of capital, and taxation. He defends these against the common arguments and excuses for inaction: that intervention will shrink the economy, that globalization makes action impossible, and that new policies cannot be afforded. More than just a program for change, Atkinsonâe(tm)s book is a voice of hope and informed optimism about the possibilities for political action.

We turn on the lights in our house from a desk in an office miles away. Our refrigerator alerts us to buy milk on the way home. A package of cookies on the supermarket shelf suggests that we buy it, based on past purchases. The cookies themselves are on the shelf because of a "smart" supply chain. When we get home, the thermostat has already adjusted the temperature so that it's toasty or bracing, whichever we prefer. This is the Internet of Things -- a networked world of connected devices, objects, and people. In this book, Samuel Greengard offers a guided tour through this emerging world and how it will change the way we live and work. Greengard explains that the Internet of Things (IoT) is still in its early stages. Smart phones, cloud computing, RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology, sensors, and miniaturization are converging to make possible a new generation of embedded and immersive technology. Greengard traces the origins of the IoT from the early days of personal computers and the Internet and examines how it creates the conceptual and practical framework for a connected world. He explores the industrial Internet and machine-to-machine communication, the basis for smart manufacturing and end-to-end supply chain visibility; the growing array of smart consumer devices and services -- from Fitbit fitness wristbands to mobile apps for banking; the practical and technical challenges of building the IoT; and the risks of a connected world, including a widening digital divide and threats to privacy and security. Finally, he considers the long-term impact of the IoT on society, narrating an eye-opening "Day in the Life" of IoT connections circa 2025.

In this revised, updated, and expanded edition of his New York Times bestseller, Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Shiller, who warned of both the tech and housing bubbles, now cautions that signs of irrational exuberance among investors have only increased since the 2008–9 financial crisis. With high stock and bond prices in the United States, and rising housing prices in many countries, the post-subprime boom may well turn out to be another illustration of Shiller’s influential argument that psychologically driven volatility is an inherent characteristic of all asset markets. In other words, Irrational Exuberance is as relevant as ever. But Irrational Exuberance is about something far more important than the current situation in any given market because the book explains the forces that move all markets up and down. It shows how investor euphoria can drive asset prices up to dizzying and unsustainable heights, and how, at other times, investor discouragement can push prices down to very low levels. Previous editions covered the stock and housing markets—and famously predicted their crashes. This new edition expands its coverage to include the bond market, so that the book now addresses all of the major investment markets. This edition also includes updated data throughout, as well as Shiller’s 2013 Nobel Prize lecture, which puts the book in broader context. In addition to diagnosing the causes of asset bubbles, Irrational Exuberance recommends urgent policy changes to lessen their likelihood and severity—and suggests ways that individuals can decrease their risk before the next bubble bursts. No one whose future depends on a retirement account, a house, or other investments can afford not to read it. For more information, including new developments and regular data updates, please go to www.irrationalexuberance.com

A fun, playful look at the importance of first impressions-in design and in life-from acclaimed book designer Chip Kidd. First impressions are everything. They dictate whether something stands out, how we engage with it, whether we buy it, and how we feel. In Judge This, renowned designer Chip Kidd takes us through his day as he takes in first impressions of all kinds. We follow this visual journey as Kidd encounters and engages with everyday design, breaking down the good, the bad, the absurd, and the brilliant as only someone with a critical, trained eye can. From the design of your morning paper to the subway ticket machine to the books you browse to the smartphone you use to the packaging for the chocolate bar you buy as an afternoon treat, Kidd reveals the hidden secrets behind each of the design choices, with a healthy dose of humor, expertise, and of course, judgment as he goes. Judge This is a design love story, exposing the often invisible beauty and betrayal in simple design choices-ones most of us never even think to notice. And with each object, Kidd proves that first impressions, whether we realize it or not, have a huge impact on the way we perceive the world.

Too many leadership failures. Too many career derailments. Too many toxic workplaces filled with disengaged, distrustful employees. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the author of Power, offers an incisive dissection of the multibillion-dollar leadership industry and presents ways to fix its many problems. In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer pulls back the curtain, showing how leadership really works and why so many leadership development efforts fail. In this forthright and persuasive critique, Pfeffer argues that much of the oft-repeated wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science. In an age when transparency is considered a virtue, Pfeffer makes the case that strategic misrepresentation isn't as harmful as you think, that breached agreements are a part of business, that immodesty is frequently a path to success, and that relying on the magnanimity of your boss is a bad bet. Using research findings from social psychology, sociology, and sociobiology, and filled with practical, actionable advice, Leadership BS encourages readers to finally stop accepting sugar-laced but toxic potions as cures and to understand the realities of organizations and human behavior. To make real change, Pfeffer argues, we need to get beyond the half-truths and self-serving stories that are so prominent in the mythology of leadership. In calling BS on so much conventional wisdom, Leadership BS offers both a provocative, scientific examination of how leadership actually works—and how it doesn't—and a prescription for leaders future and present.

An accessible and thorough review of the international financial markets Life in the Financial Markets?How They Really Work And Why They Matter To You offers the financial services professional, and anyone interested in knowing more about the profession, an entertaining and comprehensive analysis of the financial markets and the financial services industry. Written by Daniel Lacalle'a noted portfolio manager with EcoFin and well-known media personality'the book goes beyond a simple summary and offers solid advice on the future of the global financial markets. This great resource also includes a review of effective strategies and forecasts the trends that represent potential opportunities for investors. The book reviews the recent history of the financial crisis and includes information on hot topics such as derivatives and high frequency trading. An in-depth section on investment banking is written from the perspective of a successful practitioner and provides clarity on several complex and overly politicized elements of the banking system. The author gives an expert's perspective on the debt markets, monetary policies, and quantitative easing, and helps explain the various issues surrounding sovereign debt, the Euro crisis, and austerity versus growth policies. Comprehensive in scope, this resource also offers an analysis of investment styles, from hedge funds to "long only" investments, as well as an in-depth look at corporate communication and its impact on markets and investments. Offers an engaging and comprehensive analysis of the financial services industry Includes information on the workings of the global financial system following the economic crisis Contains a review of complex banking systems Analyzes the various investment styles and answers the most common questions pertaining to investing

In one lifetime, GDP, or Gross Domestic Product, has ballooned from a narrow economic tool into a global article of faith. It is our universal yardstick of progress. As The Little Big Number demonstrates, this spells trouble. While economies and cultures measure their performance by it, GDP ignores central facts such as quality, costs, or purpose. It only measures output: more cars, more accidents; more lawyers, more trials; more extraction, more pollution--all count as success. Sustainability and quality of life are overlooked. Losses don't count. GDP promotes a form of stupid growth and ignores real development. How and why did we get to this point? Dirk Philipsen uncovers a submerged history dating back to the 1600s, climaxing with the Great Depression and World War II, when the first version of GDP arrived at the forefront of politics. Transcending ideologies and national differences, GDP was subsequently transformed from a narrow metric to the purpose of economic activity. Today, increasing GDP is the highest goal of politics. In accessible and compelling prose, Philipsen shows how it affects all of us. But the world can no longer afford GDP rule. A finite planet cannot sustain blind and indefinite expansion. If we consider future generations equal to our own, replacing the GDP regime is the ethical imperative of our times. More is not better. As Philipsen demonstrates, the history of GDP reveals unique opportunities to fashion smarter goals and measures. The Little Big Number explores a possible roadmap for a future that advances quality of life rather than indiscriminate growth.

Short-listed for the 2015 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book of 2015 A Times of London Book of the Week Best Narrative Business Book of 2015 by Strategy+Business In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one percent. What went so wrong? Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway. With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in Ontario. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business school grad, Jim Balsillie. Together, they engineered a pioneering pocket email device that became the tool of choice for presidents and CEOs. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world's fastest growing company internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google's entry in to mobile phones. Expertly told by acclaimed journalists, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.

Robots are poised to transform today's society as completely as the Internet did twenty years ago. Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff argues that we must decide to design ourselves into our future, or risk being excluded from it altogether. In the past decade, Google introduced us to driverless cars; Apple debuted Siri, a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets; and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the Web. Robots have become an integral part of society on the battlefield and the road; in business, education, and health care. Cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that in the coming years, these robots will act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immensely powerful machines, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, when the intelligent machine was born. Will we control these systems, or will they control us? In Machines of Loving Grace, John Markoff offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. In recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, posing an ethical quandary. If humans delegate decisions to machines, who will be responsible for the consequences? As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s and 1960s, to the modern-day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding robotics economy around Boston, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work. We are on the brink of the next stage of the computer revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform modern life. Yet it remains for us to determine whether this new world will be a utopia. Moreover, it is now incumbent upon the designers of these robots to draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine. After nearly forty years covering the tech industry, Markoff offers an unmatched perspective on the most drastic technology-driven societal shifts since the introduction of the Internet. Machines of Loving Grace draws on an extensive array of research and interviews to present an eye-opening history of one of the most pressing questions of our time, and urges us to remember that we still have the opportunity to design ourselves into the future—before it's too late.

A practical guide to navigating workplace conflicts by better understanding the power dynamics at play in every interaction Conflicts at work are as inevitable as they are frustrating. In Making Conflict Work, Peter Coleman and Robert Ferguson's leading experts in the field of conflict resolution address the key role of power in workplace tension. Whether you're butting heads with your boss or addressing a direct report's complaint, your relative position of power affects how you approach conflict. Coleman and Ferguson explain how power dynamics function, with step-by-step guidance to determining your standing in a conflict and identifying and applying the strategies that will lead to the best resolution. Drawing on the authors' years of research and consulting experience, the book gives readers effective strategies for negotiating disputes at all levels of an organization. Making Conflict Work includes self-assessment exercises and action plans to guide managers, mediators, consultants, and attorneys through any conflict. This powerful approach can turn workplace tensions into catalysts for creativity, innovation, and meaningful change.

The first edition of Charles Kindleberger's brilliant, panoramic history, published in 1978, summarized the pattern of market developments and the five stages in the evolution of a financial crisis. Robert Z. Aliber probes the sequence of four waves of crises that have involved more than forty countries since the early 1980s and shows that implosions of their banking systems do not follow from the decisions of 'bad actors' but instead are symptomatic of a dysfunctional international monetary arrangement. With an updated Foreword from Robert M. Solow and a new Afterword from Lord Robert Skidelsky, this seventh edition exemplifies the continued importance of Kindleberger's work and Aliber's ongoing examination of financial crises around the world.  

Applied econometrics, known to aficionados as 'metrics, is the original data science. 'Metrics encompasses the statistical methods economists use to untangle cause and effect in human affairs. Through accessible discussion and with a dose of kung fu–themed humor, Mastering 'Metrics presents the essential tools of econometric research and demonstrates why econometrics is exciting and useful. The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five--random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences--are illustrated through well-crafted real-world examples (vetted for awesomeness by Kung Fu Panda's Jade Palace). Does health insurance make you healthier? Randomized experiments provide answers. Are expensive private colleges and selective public high schools better than more pedestrian institutions? Regression analysis and a regression discontinuity design reveal the surprising truth. When private banks teeter, and depositors take their money and run, should central banks step in to save them? Differences-in-differences analysis of a Depression-era banking crisis offers a response. Could arresting O. J. Simpson have saved his ex-wife's life? Instrumental variables methods instruct law enforcement authorities in how best to respond to domestic abuse. Wielding econometric tools with skill and confidence, Mastering 'Metrics uses data and statistics to illuminate the path from cause to effect. Shows why econometrics is important Explains econometric research through humorous and accessible discussion Outlines empirical methods central to modern econometric practice Works through interesting and relevant real-world examples

Can money buy happiness? Is income a reliable measure for life satisfaction? In the West after World War II, happiness seemed inextricably connected to prosperity. Beginning in the 1960s, however, other values began to gain ground: peace, political participation, civil rights, environmentalism. "Happiness economics" -- a somewhat incongruous-sounding branch of what has been called "the dismal science" -- has taken up the puzzle of what makes people happy, conducting elaborate surveys in which people are asked to quantify their satisfaction with "life in general." In this book, three economists explore the happiness-prosperity connection, investigating how economists measure life satisfaction and well-being. The authors examine the evolution of happiness research, considering the famous "Easterlin Paradox," which found that people's average life satisfaction didn't seem to depend on their income. But they question whether happiness research can measure what needs to be measured. They argue that we should not assess people's well-being on a "happiness scale," because that necessarily obscures true social progress. Instead, rising income should be understood as increasing opportunities and alleviating scarcity. Economic growth helps societies to sustain freedom and to finance social welfare programs. In this respect, high income may not buy happiness with life in general, but it gives individuals the opportunity to be healthier, better educated, better clothed, and better fed, to live longer, and to live well.

Economic historians have made great progress in unraveling the causes of the Great Depression, but not until Scott Sumner came along has anyone explained the multitude of twists and turns the economy took. In The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression, Sumner offers his magnum opus--the first book to comprehensively explain both monetary and non-monetary causes of that cataclysm.    Drawing on financial market data and contemporaneous news stories, Sumner shows that the Great Depression is ultimately a story of incredibly bad policymaking--by central bankers, legislators, and two presidents--especially mistakes related to monetary policy and wage rates. He also shows that macroeconomic thought has long been captive to a false narrative that continues to misguide policymakers in their quixotic quest to promote robust and sustainable economic growth.   The Midas Paradox is a landmark treatise that solves mysteries that have long perplexed economic historians, and corrects misconceptions about the true causes, consequences, and cures of macroeconomic instability. Like Milton Friedman and Anna J. Schwartz's A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, it is one of those rare books destined to shape all future research on the subject.

A New York Times reporter reveals what business leaders around the country are already discovering: Meditation may be the key to fostering a happier, more productive workplace. For the past few years, mindfulness has begun to transform the American workplace. Many of our largest companies, such as General Mills, Ford, Target, and Google, have built extensive programs to foster mindful practices among their workers. Mindful Work is the first book to explain how all sorts of businesses and any kind of worker can benefit from meditation, yoga, and other mindful techniques. As a business reporter for the New York Times who has also practiced meditation for two decades, David Gelles is uniquely qualified to chart the growing nexus between these two realms. As he proves, mindfulness lowers stress, increases mental focus, and alleviates depression among workers. He also offers real-world examples of how mindfulness has benefited companies that have adopted it -- from the millions of dollars Aetna has saved in health-care costs to the ways Patagonia has combined leadership in its market with a pervasively mindful outlook. Gelles's revelatory book picks up where bestsellers like Thrive and 10% Happier leave off, by detailing how mindfulness works in and for the companies that adopt it, revealing the profound impact mindfulness can have on the world of work. Mindful Work goes beyond other books on the subject by providing evidence for the practical benefits of mindfulness and showing readers how to become more mindful themselves.

"The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world." -Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times Book Review Scientific and philosophical concepts can change the way we solve problems by helping us to think more effectively about our behavior and our world. Surprisingly, despite their utility, many of these tools remain unknown to most of us. In Mindware, the world-renowned psychologist Richard E. Nisbett presents these ideas in clear and accessible detail. Nisbett has made a distinguished career of studying and teaching such powerful problem-solving concepts as the law of large numbers, statistical regression, cost-benefit analysis, sunk costs and opportunity costs, and causation and correlation, probing the best methods for teaching others how to use them effectively in their daily lives. In this groundbreaking book, Nisbett shows us how to frame common problems in such a way that these scientific and statistical principles can be applied to them. The result is an enlightening and practical guide to the most essential tools of reasoning ever developed-tools that can easily be used to make better professional, business, and personal decisions.

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans--predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth--and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments.Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber.Laced with antic stories of Thaler's spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining.

A revealing, no-holds-barred portrait of Eileen Ford—the legendary entrepreneur who transformed the business of modeling and helped invent the celebrity supermodel. Eileen Ford, working with her husband, Jerry, created the twentieth century's largest and most successful modeling agency, representing some of the fashion world's most famous names—Suzy Parker, Carmen Dell'Orefice, Lauren Hutton, Rene Russo, Christie Brinkley, Jerry Hall, Christy Turlington, and Naomi Campbell. Her relentless ambition turned the business of modeling into one of the most glamorous and desired professions, helping to convert her stable of beautiful faces into millionaire superstars. Model Woman chronicles the Ford Modeling Agency's meteoric rise to the top of the fashion and beauty business, and paints a vibrant portrait of the uncompromising woman at its helm in all her glittering, tyrannical brilliance. Outspoken and controversial, Ford was never afraid to offend in defense of her stringent standards. When she chose, she could deliver hauteur in the grand tradition of fashion's battle-axes, from Coco Chanel to Diana Vreeland—just ask John Casablancas or Janice Dickinson. But she was also a shrewd businesswoman with a keen eye for talent and a passion for serving her clients. Drawing on more than four years of intensive interviews with Ford and her intimates, associates, and rivals, as well as exclusive access to agency documents and memorabilia, Robert Lacey weaves an unforgettable tale of a determined entrepreneur and the empire she built—a story of beauty, ambition, business, and popular culture as powerful and complex as the woman at its center.

Americans are stuck. We live with travel delays on congested roads, shipping delays on clogged railways, and delays on repairs, project approvals, and funding due to gridlocked leadership. These delays affect us all, whether you are a daily commuter, a frequent flyer, an entrepreneur, an online shopper, a job-seeker, or a community leader. If people can't move, if goods are delayed, and if information networks can't connect, then economic opportunity deteriorates and social inequity grows. We have been stuck for too long, writes Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author Rosabeth Moss Kanter. In Move, Kanter visits cities and states across the country to tackle our challenges—and reveal solutions—on the roads and rails, and in our cities, skies, and the halls of Washington, D.C. We meet a visionary engineer and public servant spearheading an underwater tunnel in Miami to streamline port operations and redirect constant traffic from the city center. We see mayors partnering with large corporations and nimble entrepreneurs to unveil parking apps, bike-sharing programs, and seamless Wi-Fi networks in greener, more vibrant, more connected cities. And we learn about much-needed efforts—such as dynamic tolls on highways and fees based on vehicle miles traveled—to reduce our dependence on the outmoded gasoline tax in our new electric car age. It all adds up to a new vision for American mobility, where local leaders shape initiatives without waiting for Congress to act, and ambitious companies partner with governments to tackle projects that serve the public good, create jobs, and improve quality of life while providing healthy sources of investment. With unique insight and unrivaled expertise, Kanter gives us a sweeping look across America, revealing the innovative projects, vital leaders, and bold solutions that are moving our transportation infrastructure toward a cleaner, faster, and more prosperous future.

Natural capital is what nature provides to us for free. Renewables--like species--keep on coming, provided we do not drive them towards extinction. Non-renewables--like oil and gas--can only be used once. Together, they are the foundation that ensures our survival and well-being, and the basis of all economic activity. In the face of the global, local, and national destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems, economist Dieter Helm here offers a crucial set of strategies for establishing natural capital policy that is balanced, economically sustainable, and politically viable.   Helm shows why the commonly held view that environmental protection poses obstacles to economic progress is false, and he explains why the environment must be at the very core of economic planning. He presents the first real attempt to calibrate, measure, and value natural capital from an economic perspective and goes on to outline a stable new framework for sustainable growth. Bristling with ideas of immediate global relevance, Helm's book shifts the parameters of current environmental debate. As inspiring as his trailblazing The Carbon Crunch, this volume will be essential reading for anyone concerned with reversing the headlong destruction of our environment.

In one way or another, Donald Trump has been a topic of conversation in America for almost forty years. No one in the world of business-not Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Warren Buffett-has been as famous as Trump for as long. First associated with high-profile real estate development in 1970s Manhattan, his name has since become synonymous with success defined by wealth and luxury.What does one make of a grown man who, when he argues with women, stoops to insulting their appearance and habitually courts controversy? What if the same man were among the most prominent people in the world, and a privately generous person who once handed a dying child a $50,000 check so that he could enjoy the last months of his life? Add to the picture a kind of resilience that has allowed him to stage countless comebacks and truly a boundless level of optimism, and you get a figure so compelling that he cannot be dismissed simply because of his personality.Drawing upon exclusive interviews and detailed research, Michael D'Antonio presents the full story of Donald Trump, a man who, for all of his excesses, is perfectly adapted to our world.

Have you ever felt you’re not getting through to the person you’re talking to, or not coming across the way you intend? You’re not alone. That’s the bad news. But thereis something we can do about it. Heidi Grant Halvorson, social psychologist and bestselling author, explains why we’re often misunderstood and how we can fix that. Most of us assume that other people see us as we see ourselves, and that they see us as we truly are. But neither is true. Our everyday interactions are colored by subtle biases that distort how others see us--and also shape our perceptions of them. You can learn to clarify the message you’re sending once you understand the lenses that shape perception: *Trust. Are you friend or foe? *Power. How much influence do you have over me? *Ego. Do you make me feel insecure? Based on decades of research in psychology and social science, Halvorson explains how these lenses affect our interactions--and how to manage them. Once you understand the science of perception, you’ll communicate more clearly, send the messages you intend to send, and improve your personal relationships. You’ll also become a fairer and more accurate judge of others. Halvorson even offers an evidence-based action plan for repairing a damaged reputation. This book is not about making a good impression, although it will certainly help you do that. It’s about coming across as you intend. It’s about the authenticity we all strive for.

Whenever I tell people about my job as a financial advisor, the conversation inevitably turns to how hopeless they feel when it comes to dealing with money. More than once, they've begged, "Just tell me what to do." It's no surprise that even my most successful friends feel confused or paralyzed. Even if they have a shelfful of personal finance books, they don't have time to make sense of all the information available. They don't just want good advice, they want the best advice--so rather than do the "wrong thing," they do nothing. Their 401(k) and bank statements pile up, unexamined or maybe even unopened. What they don't realize is that bad calls about money aren't failures; they're just what happens when emotional creatures have to make decisions about the future with limited information. What I tell them is that we need to scrap striving for perfection and instead commit to a process of guessing and making adjustments when things go off track. Of course we're going to make the best guesses we can--but we're not going to obsess over getting them exactly right. The fact is, in a single page you can prioritize what you really want in life and figure out how to get there. That's because a great financial plan has nothing to do with what the markets are doing, what your real estate agent is pitching, or the hot stock your brother-in-law told you about. It has everything to do with what's most important to you. By now you may be wondering, "What about the details? How much do I need to invest each year, and how do I allocate it? How much life insurance do I need?" Don't worry: I'll cover those topics and many more, sharing strategies that will take the complexity out of them. The most important thing is getting clarity about the big picture so you can cope with the unexpected. Maybe you'll lose the job you thought was secure; you'll take a financial risk that doesn't pan out; you'll have twins when you were only budgeting for one. In other words: Life will happen. But no matter what happens, this book will help you bridge the gap between where you are now and where you want to go.

The finance sector of Western economies is too large and attracts too many of the smartest college graduates. Financialization over the past three decades has created a structure that lacks resilience and supports absurd volumes of trading. The finance sector devotes too little attention to the search for new investment opportunities and the stewardship of existing ones, and far too much to secondary-market dealing in existing assets. Regulation has contributed more to the problems than the solutions. Why? What is finance for? John Kay, with wide practical and academic experience in the world of finance, understands the operation of the financial sector better than most. He believes in good banks and effective asset managers, but good banks and effective asset managers are not what he sees. In a dazzling and revelatory tour of the financial world as it has emerged from the wreckage of the 2008 crisis, Kay does not flinch in his criticism: we do need some of the things that Citigroup and Goldman Sachs do, but we do not need Citigroup and Goldman to do them. And many of the things done by Citigroup and Goldman do not need to be done at all. The finance sector needs to be reminded of its primary purpose: to manage other people’s money for the benefit of businesses and households. It is an aberration when the some of the finest mathematical and scientific minds are tasked with devising algorithms for the sole purpose of exploiting the weakness of other algorithms for computerized trading in securities. To travel further down that road leads to ruin.

The rise of the Indian information technology industry is a remarkable economic success story. Software and services exports from India amounted to less than $100 million in 1990, and today come close to $100 billion. But, as Dinesh Sharma explains in The Outsourcer, Indian IT's success has a long prehistory; it did not begin with software support, or with American firms' eager recruitment of cheap and plentiful programming labor, or with India's economic liberalization of the 1990s. The foundations of India's IT revolution were laid long ago, even before the country's independence from British rule in 1947, as leading Indian scientists established research institutes that became centers for the development of computer science and technology. The "miracle" of Indian IT is actually a story about the long work of converting skills and knowledge into capital and wealth. With The Outsourcer, Sharma offers the first comprehensive history of the forces that drove India's IT success. Sharma describes India's early development of computer technology, part of the country's efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency, and shows that excessive state control stifled IT industry growth before economic policy changed in 1991. He traces the rise and fall (and return) of IBM in India and the emergence of pioneering indigenous hardware and software firms. He describes the satellite communication links and state-sponsored, tax-free technology parks that made software-related outsourcing by foreign firms viable, and the tsunami of outsourcing operations at the beginning of the new millennium. It is the convergence of many factors, from the tradition of technical education to the rise of entrepreneurship to advances in communication technology, that have made the spectacular growth of India's IT industry possible.

Americans are taught to believe that upward mobility is possible for anyone who is willing to work hard, regardless of their social status, yet it is often those from affluent backgrounds who land the best jobs. Pedigree takes readers behind the closed doors of top-tier investment banks, consulting firms, and law firms to reveal the truth about who really gets hired for the nation’s highest-paying entry-level jobs, who doesn’t, and why. Drawing on scores of in-depth interviews as well as firsthand observation of hiring practices at some of America’s most prestigious firms, Lauren Rivera shows how, at every step of the hiring process, the ways that employers define and evaluate merit are strongly skewed to favor job applicants from economically privileged backgrounds. She reveals how decision makers draw from ideas about talent—what it is, what best signals it, and who does (and does not) have it—that are deeply rooted in social class. Displaying the “right stuff” that elite employers are looking for entails considerable amounts of economic, social, and cultural resources on the part of the applicants and their parents. Challenging our most cherished beliefs about college as a great equalizer and the job market as a level playing field, Pedigree exposes the class biases built into American notions about the best and the brightest, and shows how social status plays a significant role in determining who reaches the top of the economic ladder.

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception. Rather than being essentially benign and always creating the greater good, markets are inherently filled with tricks and traps and will "phish" us as "phools." Phishing for Phools therefore strikes a radically new direction in economics, based on the intuitive idea that markets both give and take away. Akerlof and Shiller bring this idea to life through dozens of stories that show how phishing affects everyone, in almost every walk of life. We spend our money up to the limit, and then worry about how to pay the next month's bills. The financial system soars, then crashes. We are attracted, more than we know, by advertising. Our political system is distorted by money. We pay too much for gym memberships, cars, houses, and credit cards. Drug companies ingeniously market pharmaceuticals that do us little good, and sometimes are downright dangerous. Phishing for Phools explores the central role of manipulation and deception in fascinating detail in each of these areas and many more. It thereby explains a paradox: why, at a time when we are better off than ever before in history, all too many of us are leading lives of quiet desperation. At the same time, the book tells stories of individuals who have stood against economic trickery--and how it can be reduced through greater knowledge, reform, and regulation.

A story of innovation, commerce, and duplicity in one of the world's most competitive and consequential fields of technology A super-battery would change the world. It would undermine Russia's Vladimir Putin, endanger Saudi Arabia's ruling family, threaten OPEC, and transform China into one of the cleanest industrializing nations on the planet. There would be impossible new wealth for one lucky country - the place where that battery was invented. For the rest of us, there would be less worry about climate change and less spent on oil and gasoline. So what was holding back this new day? To find out, Steve LeVine was granted two years of unprecedented access to Argonne National laboratory, a secure federal research center outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists - most foreign born - were not alone. With so much at stake, researchers in some twenty countries were in the same pursuit - Japan and south Korea, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, and of course the United States and China. It was a war - a battery war. Not since Tracy Kidder's classic The Soul of a New Machinehas a writer so successfully captured the drama of technological competition at a great turning point. The Powerhouseis a thrilling account of the next technological age, a chronicle of aspiration and disappointment, competition and ambition. 'Steve LeVine is a masterful storyteller and The Powerhouseis a thrilling read about an innovator's quest to transform our planet and our lives. His goal, a revolutionary battery, has the potential to change everything.' Peter H. Diamandis, chairman of the X-Prize Foundation and author of Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think 'Gripping and mind-opening. Filled with astonishing research, The Powerhousereads like a thriller. It's fabulous.' Amy Chua, Yale Law professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Triple Package 'Steve LeVine has written a fast-paced, engaging account of one of this young century's great quests: the search for a technology that will unleash a dramatic transformation of the world with blockbuster new industries and culture-changing products. It's an amazing story, gripping in its surprising narrative and crowded with fascinating characters.'Marcus Brauchli, former Executive Editor, The Washington Postand former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century Jeremiah G. Hamilton was a well-known figure on Wall Street. Cornelius Vanderbilt, America's first tycoon, came to respect, grudgingly, his one-time opponent. The day after Vanderbilt's death on January 4, 1877, an almost full-page obituary on the front of the National Republican acknowledged that, in the context of his Wall Street share transactions, "There was only one man who ever fought the Commodore to the end, and that was Jeremiah Hamilton." What Vanderbilt's obituary failed to mention, perhaps as contemporaries already knew it well, was that Hamilton was African American. Hamilton, although his origins were lowly, possibly slave, was reportedly the richest colored man in the United States, possessing a fortune of $2 million, or in excess of two hundred and $50 million in today's currency. In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger than life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily white business world, he married a white woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally set his white contemporaries teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them. An important contribution to American history, Hamilton's life offers a way into considering, from the unusual perspective of a black man, subjects that are usually seen as being quintessentially white, totally segregated from the African American past.

In a time of market volatility and economic uncertainty, when high-frequency traders and hedge fund managers seem to tower over the average investor, Burton G. Malkiel's classic and gimmick-free investment guide is now more necessary than ever. Rather than tricks, what you'll find here is a time-tested and thoroughly research-based strategy for your portfolio. Whether you're considering your first 401(k) contribution or contemplating retirement, this fully updated edition of A Random Walk Down Wall Street should be the first book on your reading list.In A Random Walk Down Wall Street you'll learn the basic terminology of "The Street" and how to navigate it with the help of a user-friendly, long-range investment strategy that really works. Drawing on his own varied experience as an economist, financial adviser, and successful investor, Malkiel shows why, despite recent advice to the contrary from so-called experts in the wake of the financial crisis, an individual who buys over time and holds a low-cost, internationally diversified index of securities is still likely to exceed the performance of portfolios carefully picked by professionals using sophisticated analytical techniques. In this new edition, Malkiel has provided valuable new material throughout the book on exchange-traded funds and investment opportunities in emerging markets, and in a brand-new, timely chapter, Malkiel authoritatively assesses the pitfalls and prospects of the latest investing trend, "smart beta."On top of all this, the book's classic life-cycle guide to investing, which tailors strategies to investors of any age, will help you plan confidently for the future. You'll learn how to analyze the potential returns, not only for basic stocks and bonds but for the full range of investment opportunities--from money-market accounts and real estate investment trusts to insurance, home ownership, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles. Individual investors of every level of experience and risk tolerance will find throughout the book the critical facts and step-by-step guidance they need to protect and grow their hard-earned dollars.With the prevailing wisdom changing on an almost daily basis, Malkiel's reassuring and vastly informative volume remains the best investment guide money can buy.

A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption. Bill Browder's journey started on the South Side of Chicago and moved through Stanford Business School to the dog-eat-dog world of hedge fund investing in the 1990s. It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union's collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia. In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder's offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund's companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder's attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear. Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei's name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.

Will ecommerce destroy retail as we know it or is it just a speed bump for retailers? In Retail Revolution the authors take a comprehensive, deep dive into several retail segments in order to develop a more nuanced approach to understanding the significant changes occurring in retail. The authors also lay out several strategies that retailers can use to guide their actions as they attempt to survive the grinding downward spiral being created by ecommerce.

Inequality is a choice.The United States bills itself as the land of opportunity, a place where anyone can achieve success and a better life through hard work and determination. But the facts tell a different story--the U.S. today lags behind most other developed nations in measures of inequality and economic mobility. For decades, wages have stagnated for the majority of workers while economic gains have disproportionately gone to the top one percent. Education, housing, and health care--essential ingredients for individual success--are growing ever more expensive. Deeply rooted structural discrimination continues to hold down women and people of color, and more than one-fifth of all American children now live in poverty. These trends are on track to become even worse in the future.Some economists claim that today's bleak conditions are inevitable consequences of market outcomes, globalization, and technological progress. If we want greater equality, they argue, we have to sacrifice growth. This is simply not true. American inequality is the result of misguided structural rules that actually constrict economic growth. We have stripped away worker protections and family support systems, created a tax system that rewards short-term gains over long-term investment, offered a de facto public safety net to too-big-to-fail financial institutions, and chosen monetary and fiscal policies that promote wealth over full employment.

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from forty-five to seventy-two years. Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end? Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can't be repeated. He contends that the nation's productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. Gordon warns that the younger generation may be the first in American history that fails to exceed their parents' standard of living, and that rather than depend on the great advances of the past, we must find new solutions to overcome the challenges facing us. A critical voice in the debates over economic stagnation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

ANew York Times Science Bestseller What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? We might imagine--and hope--that today’s industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new innovations of a new era. InRise of the Robots, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that this is absolutely not the case. As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making "good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries--education and health care--that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. InRise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work, and we must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity.Rise of the Robots is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what accelerating technology means for their own economic prospects--not to mention those of their children--as well as for society as a whole.

<b>Follow a pioneer′s journey from factory floor to CEO</b> <p><i>Road to Power</i> is the story of how Mary Barra drove herself to the pinnacle of a company that steers the nation′s wealth. Beginning as a rare female electrical engineer and daughter of a General Motors die maker, Barra spent more than thirty years building her career before becoming the first woman to ever lead a global automaker. With $155 billion in sales and 200,000 employees, GM is widely considered to be a proxy for the U.S. economy, making Barra′s position arguably the most important corporate role a woman has ever held. This book describes the personal character, choices, and leadership style that enabled her to break through the glass ceiling.</p> <p>When 52-year-old Mary Barra was named CEO of General Motors in 2013, only people outside of the company were surprised. She had done everything from working on the factory floor to overseeing manufacturing, from improving union relations to paring down bureaucracy, and from running human resources to helping drag the company back from its 2009 bankruptcy. This book details each step of her career, and the lessons she learned along the way.</p> <ul> <li>Learn how Mary Barra′s willingness to take on diverse assignments helped steer her career trajectory</li> <li>Examine the fine details of Barra′s management style and her ability to relate to colleagues</li> <li>Discover the qualities and experiences Barra had that drove her to lead this male-dominated profession</li> <li>Study the valuable lessons Barra learned at each stage in her professional life, and why they stuck with her throughout her journey to the top</li> </ul> <p>Barra is most certainly a pioneer for women in business, but she′s also a living lesson as to how far the right outlook, skills, and drive can take you in your career. <i>Road to Power</i> explores the talent and the mindset that got her all the way to the top.</p>

Economics is the nexus and engine that runs society, affecting societal well-being, raising standards of living when economies prosper or lowering citizens through class structures when economies perform poorly. Our society only has to witness the booms and busts of the past decade to see how economics profoundly affects the cores of societies around the world. From a household budget to international trade, economics ranges from the micro- to the macro-level. It relates to a breadth of social science disciplines that help describe the content of the proposed encyclopedia, which will explicitly approach economics through varied disciplinary lenses. Although there are encyclopedias of covering economics (especially classic economic theory and history), the SAGE Encyclopedia of Economics and Society emphasizes the contemporary world, contemporary issues, and society.  Features: 4 volumes with approximately 800 signed articles ranging from 1,000 to 5,000 words each are presented in a choice of print or electronic editions Organized A-to-Z with a thematic Reader's Guide in the front matter groups related entries Articles conclude with References & Future Readings to guide students to the next step on their research journeys Cross-references between and among articles combine with a thorough Index and the Reader's Guide to enhance search-and-browse in the electronic version Pedagogical elements include a Chronology of Economics and Society, Resource Guide, and Glossary This academic, multi-author reference work will serve as a general, non-technical resource for students and researchers within social science programs who seek to better understand economics through a contemporary lens.

From the author of Aftershock and The Work of Nations, his most important book to date--a myth-shattering breakdown of how the economic system that helped make America so strong is now failing us, and what it will take to fix it. Perhaps no one is better acquainted with the intersection of economics and politics than Robert B. Reich, and now he reveals how power and influence have created a new American oligarchy, a shrinking middle class, and the greatest income inequality and wealth disparity in eighty years. He makes clear how centrally problematic our veneration of the "free market" is, and how it has masked the power of moneyed interests to tilt the market to their benefit. Reich exposes the falsehoods that have been bolstered by the corruption of our democracy by huge corporations and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street: that all workers are paid what they're "worth," that a higher minimum wage equals fewer jobs, and that corporations must serve shareholders before employees. He shows that the critical choices ahead are not about the size of government but about who government is for: that we must choose not between a free market and "big" government but between a market organized for broadly based prosperity and one designed to deliver the most gains to the top. Ever the pragmatist, ever the optimist, Reich sees hope for reversing our slide toward inequality and diminished opportunity when we shore up the countervailing power of everyone else. Passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, Saving Capitalism is a revelatory indictment of our economic status quo and an empowering call to civic action.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created by Congress to serve the American Dream of homeownership. By the end of the century, they had become extremely profitable and powerful companies, instrumental in putting millions of Americans in their homes. So why does the government now want them dead? In 2008, the U.S. Treasury put Fannie and Freddie into a life-support state known as "conservatorship" to prevent their failure--and worldwide economic chaos. The two companies, which were always controversial, have become a battleground. Today, Fannie and Freddie are profitable again but still in conservatorship. Their profits are being redirected toward reducing the federal deficit, which leaves them with no buffer should they suffer losses again. China and Japan are big owners of Fannie and Freddie securities, and they want to ensure the safety of their investments--which helps explain why the government is at an impasse about what to do. But the current state of limbo is unsustainable. Based on comprehensive reporting and dozens of interviews, Shaky Ground by bestselling author Bethany McLean, chronicles the story of Fannie and Freddie seven years after the meltdown, and tells us why homeownership finance is now one of the biggest unsolved issues in today's global

From award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett comes a brilliant examination of how our tendency to create functional departments-silos-hinders our work...and how some people and organizations can break those silos down to unleash innovation. One of the characteristics of industrial age enterprises is that they are organized around functional departments. This organizational structure results in both limited information and restricted thinking. The Silo Effect asks these basic questions: why do humans working in modern institutions collectively act in ways that sometimes seem stupid? Why do normally clever people fail to see risks and opportunities that later seem blindingly obvious? Why, as psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it, are we sometimes so "blind to our own blindness"? Gillian Tett, journalist and senior editor for the Financial Times, answers these questions by plumbing her background as an anthropologist and her experience reporting on the financial crisis in 2008. In The Silo Effect, she shares eight different tales of the silo syndrome, spanning Bloomberg's City Hall in New York, the Bank of England in London, Cleveland Clinic hospital in Ohio, UBS bank in Switzerland, Facebook in San Francisco, Sony in Tokyo, the BlueMountain hedge fund, and the Chicago police. Some of these narratives illustrate how foolishly people can behave when they are mastered by silos. Others, however, show how institutions and individuals can master their silos instead. These are stories of failure and success. From ideas about how to organize office spaces and lead teams of people with disparate expertise, Tett lays bare the silo effect and explains how people organize themselves, interact with each other, and imagine the world can take hold of an organization and lead from institutional blindness to 20/20 vision.

Seven years after the financial crisis of 2008, financiers remain villains in the public mind. Most Americans believe that their irresponsible actions and complex financial products wrecked the economy and destroyed people’s savings, and that bankers never adequately paid for their crimes. But asEconomist journalist Andrew Palmer argues inSmart Money, this much maligned industry is not only capable of doing great good for society, but offers the most powerful means we have for solving some of our most intractable social problems. From Babylon to the present, the history of finance has always been one of powerful innovation. Now a new generation of financial entrepreneurs is working to revive this tradition of useful innovation, and Palmer shows why we need their ideas today more than ever. Traveling to the centers of finance across the world, Palmer introduces us to peer-to-peer lenders who are financing entrepreneurs the big banks won’t bet on, creating opportunities where none existed. He explores the world of social-impact bonds, which fund programs for the impoverished and homeless, simultaneously easing the burden on national governments and producing better results. And he explores the idea of human-capital contracts, whereby investors fund the educations of cash-strapped young people in return for a percentage of their future earnings. In this far-ranging tour of the extraordinarily creative financial ideas of today and of the future,Smart Money offers an inspiring look at the new era of financial innovation that promises to benefit us all.

Did you know that baseball players whose names begin with the letter "D" are more likely to die young? Or that Asian Americans are most susceptible to heart attacks on the fourth day of the month? Or that drinking a full pot of coffee every morning will add years to your life, but one cup a day increases the risk of pancreatic cancer? All of these "facts" have been argued with a straight face by credentialed researchers and backed up with reams of data and convincing statistics. As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing. Today, data is so plentiful that researchers spend precious little time distinguishing between good, meaningful indicators and total rubbish. Not only do others use data to fool us, we fool ourselves. With the breakout success of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, the once humdrum subject of statistics has never been hotter. Drawing on breakthrough research in behavioral economics by luminaries like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely and taking to task some of the conclusions of Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt, Standard Deviations demystifies the science behind statistics and makes it easy to spot the fraud all around.

Between 1968 and 1976, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs launched three companies that would define the world of high technology, create more than a trillion dollars in value, and transform our lives. How did they realize these incredible achievements? Strategy Rules examines these three individuals collectively for the first time—their successes and failures, comonalities and differences—revealing the business strategies and practices they pioneered while building their firms. Eminent business professors David Yoffie and Michael Cusumano have studied these three leaders and their companies for nearly thirty years, while teaching business strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management. In this enlightening guide, they show how Gates, Grove, and Jobs became masters of strategy. As CEOs, each approached strategy and execution in remarkably similar ways—yet markedly differently from their erstwhile competitors—keeping their focus on five rules: Look Forward, Reason Back: They determined where they want their companies to be in the future and could "reason back" to identify the moves that would take them there. Make Big Bets, Without Betting the Company: All three men made enormous strategic bets but rarely took gambles that put the financial viability of their companies at undue risk. Build Platforms and Ecosystems: Technology leaders have to create industry platforms that enable other firms to create complementary products and services that make the platforms increasingly valuable. Exploit Leverage and Power: Gates, Grove, and Jobs often turned opponents’ strengths into weaknesses and used enormous resources (once they had them) to dominate competitors. Shape the Company around Your Personal Anchor: From Gates’ understanding of software to Grove’s devotion to process discipline and Jobs’ obsession with design, all three built their companies around their personal strengths while compensating for their weaknesses. Strategy Rules brings together the best practices in strategic management and high-tech entrepreneurship, providing unique insights for start-up executives as well as the heads of modern multinationals.

Rebecca L. Spang, who revolutionized our understanding of the restaurant, has written a new history of money. It uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignatsâe"a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as âeoecirculating landâe#157;âe"to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice, intentions and outcomes, as other human inventions. But Spangâe(tm)s book is also a new history of the French Revolution, one in which radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals and the realities of daily life. Money played a critical role in creating this gulf. Wed to the idea that liberty required economic deregulation as well as political freedom, revolutionary legislators extended the notion of free trade to include âeoefreedom of money.âe#157; The consequences were disastrous. Backed neither by the weight of tradition nor by the state that issued them, the assignats could not be a functioning currency. Ever reluctant to interfere in the workings of the market, lawmakers thought changes to the material form of the assignats should suffice to enhance their credibility. Their hopes were disappointed, and the Revolution spiraled out of control. Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution restores economics, in the broadest sense, to its rightful place at the heart of the Revolution and hence to that of modern politics.

From one of the world's most highly regarded social scientists, a transformative book on the habits of mind that lead to the best predictions   Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?   In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people--including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer--who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They've beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They've even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters."   In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn't require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future--whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life--and is destined to become a modern classic.

This is an Evening Standard Book of the Year 2015. Joris Luyendijk, an investigative journalist, knew as much about banking as the average person: almost nothing. Bankers, he thought, were ruthless, competitive, bonus-obsessed sharks, irrelevant to his life. And then he was assigned to investigate the financial sector. Joris immersed himself in the City for a few years, speaking to over 200 people - from the competitive investment bankers and elite hedge-fund managers to downtrodden back-office staff, reviled HR managers and those made redundant in the regular 'culls'. Breaking the strictly imposed code of secrecy and silence, these insiders talked to Joris about what they actually do all day, how they see themselves and what makes them tick. They opened up about the toxic hiring and firing culture. They confessed to being overwhelmed by technological and mathematical opacity. They admitted that when Lehman Brothers went down in 2008 they hoarded food, put their money in gold and prepared to evacuate their children to the countryside. They agreed that nothing has changed since the crash. Joris had a chilling realisation. What if the bankers themselves aren't the real enemy? What if the truth about global finance is more sinister than that?

In his powerful new book, bestselling author and world-renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith examines the environmental and psychological triggers that can derail us at work and in life. Do you ever find that you are not the patient, compassionate problem solver you believe yourself to be? Are you surprised at how irritated or flustered the normally unflappable you becomes in the presence of a specific colleague at work? Have you ever felt your temper accelerate from zero to sixty when another driver cuts you off in traffic? As Marshall Goldsmith points out, our reactions don't occur in a vacuum. They are usually the result of unappreciated triggers in our environment--the people and situations that lure us into behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to the colleague, partner, parent, or friend we imagine ourselves to be. These triggers are constant and relentless and omnipresent. The smell of bacon wafts up from the kitchen, and we forget our doctor's advice on lowering our cholesterol. Our phone chirps, and we glance instinctively at the glaring screen instead of looking into the eyes of the person we are with. So often the environment seems to be outside our control. Even if that is true, as Goldsmith points out, we have a choice in how we respond. In Triggers, his most powerful and insightful book yet, Goldsmith shows how we can overcome the trigger points in our lives, and enact meaningful and lasting change. Change, no matter how urgent and clear the need, is hard. Knowing what to do does not ensure that we will actually do it. We are superior planners, says Goldsmith, but become inferior doers as our environment exerts its influence through the course of our day. We forget our intentions. We become tired, even depleted, and allow our discipline to drain down like water in a leaky bucket. In Triggers, Goldsmith offers a simple "magic bullet" solution in the form of daily self-monitoring, hinging around what he calls "active" questions. These are questions that measure our effort, not our results. There's a difference between achieving and trying; we can't always achieve a desired result, but anyone can try. In the course of Triggers, Goldsmith details the six "engaging questions" that can help us take responsibility for our efforts to improve and help us recognize when we fall short. Filled with revealing and illuminating stories from his work with some of the most successful chief executives and power brokers in the business world, Goldsmith offers a personal playbook on how to achieve change in our lives, make it stick, and become the person we want to be.

"An eye-opening call to action from someone who rethought the whole notion of 'having it all,' Unfinished Business could change how many of us approach our most important business: living."--People When Anne-Marie Slaughter accepted her dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department in 2009, she was confident she could juggle the demands of her position in Washington, D.C., with the responsibilities of her family life in suburban New Jersey. Her husband and two young sons encouraged her to pursue the job; she had a tremendously supportive boss, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; and she had been moving up on a high-profile career track since law school. But then life intervened. Parenting needs caused her to make a decision to leave the State Department and return to an academic career that gave her more time for her family. The reactions to her choice to leave Washington because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate, and became one of the most-read pieces in the magazine's history. Since that time, Anne-Marie Slaughter has pushed forward, breaking free of her long-standing assumptions about work, life, and family. Though many solutions have been proposed for how women can continue to break the glass ceiling or rise above the "motherhood penalty," women at the top and the bottom of the income scale are further and further apart. Now, in her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means, and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive. With moving personal stories, individual action plans, and a broad outline for change, Anne-Marie Slaughter reveals a future in which all of us can finally finish the business of equality for women and men, work and family. Praise for Unfinished Business "Another clarion call from Slaughter . . . Her case for revaluing and better compensating caregiving is compelling. . . . [Slaughter] makes it a point in her book to speak beyond the elite."--Jill Abramson, The Washington Post "Slaughter's important contribution is to use her considerable platform to call for cultural change, itself profoundly necessary. . . . It should go right into the hands of (still mostly male) decision-makers."--Los Angeles Times "Slaughter should be applauded for devising a 'new vocabulary' to identify a broad, misclassified social phenomenon. And she is razor-sharp on outlining the cultural shifts necessary to give caregiving its due."--The Economist "A meaningful correction to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In . . . For Slaughter, it is organizations--not women--that need to change."--Slate "After reading Unfinished Business, I'm confident that you will be left with Anne-Marie's hope and optimism that we can change our points of view and policies so that both men and women can fully participate in their families and use their full talents on the job."--Hillary Rodham Clinton "Slaughter's gift for illuminating large issues through everyday human stories is what makes this book so necessary for anyone who wants to be both a leader at work and a fully engaged parent."--Arianna Huffington

In Universal Man, noted biographer and historian Richard Davenport-Hines revives our understanding of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the twentieth century’s most charismatic and revolutionary economist. Keynes helped FDR launch the New Deal, saved Britain from financial crisis twice over the course of two World Wars, and instructed Western nations on how to protect themselves from revolutionary unrest, economic instability, high unemployment, and social dissolution. Isaiah Berlin called Keynes “the cleverest man I ever knew”—both “superior and intellectually awe-inspiring.” Eric Hobsbawm, the twentieth century’s preeminent historian, considered him as influential as Lenin, Stalin, Roosevelt, Hitler, Churchill, Gandhi, and Mao. Keynes was nothing less than the Adam Smith of his time: his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936, became the most important economics book of the twentieth century, as important as Smith’s Wealth of Nations in inaugurating an economic era. Keynes’s brilliant ideas made possible 35 years of prosperity after the Second World War, the most sustained period of rapid expansion in history. And now, and in the wake of the 2008 global economic collapse, he is once again shaping our world. Every day, we are likely to hear about “Keynesian economics” or the “Keynesian Revolution,” terms that testify to his continuing influence on both economic theory and government policies. Indeed, with the thorough discrediting of his opponents—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and other supporters of the notion that capitalism is self-regulating, and needs no government intervention—nations across the world are turning to Keynes’s signature innovations: above all that governments must involve themselves in their economies to stave off financial collapse. Previous biographies have explored Keynes economic thought at great length and often in the jargon of the discipline. Universal Man is the first accessible biography of Keynes, and reveals Keynes as much more than an economist. Like many Englishmen of his class and era, Keynes compartmentalized his life. Accordingly, Davenport-Hines views Keynes through multiple windows, as a youthful prodigy, a powerful government official, an influential public man, a bisexual living in the shadow of Oscar Wilde’s persecution, a devotee of the arts, and an international statesman of great renown. Delving into Keynes’s experiences and thought, Davenport-Hines shows us a man who was equally at ease socialising with the Bloomsbury Group as he was persuading heads of state to adopt his policies. Exploring the desires and experiences that compelled Keynes to innovate, Davenport-Hines is the first to argue that Keynesian economics has an aesthetic basis. In this book we come to understand not just the most enduringly influential economist of the modern era, but one of the most gifted and vital men of our times: a disciplined logician with a capacity for glee who persuaded people, seduced them, subverted old ideas, and installed new ones; a man whose high brilliance did not give people vertigo, but clarified and lengthened their perspectives. Engaging, learned, and sparkling with wit and insight, Universal Man is the perfect match for its subject.

The 2008 financial collapse, the expansion of corporate and private wealth, the influence of money in politics--many of Wall Street's contemporary trends can be traced back to the work of fourteen critical figures who wrote, and occasionally broke, the rules of American finance. Edward Morris plots in absorbing detail Wall Street's transformation from a clubby enclave of financiers to a symbol of vast economic power. His book begins with J. Pierpont Morgan, who ruled the American banking system at the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with Sandy Weill, whose collapsing Citigroup required the largest taxpayer bailout in history. In between, Wall Streeters relates the triumphs and missteps of twelve other financial visionaries. From Charles Merrill, who founded Merrill Lynch and introduced the small investor to the American stock market; to Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king; to Jack Bogle, whose index funds redefined the mutual fund business; to Myron Scholes, who laid the groundwork for derivative securities; and to Benjamin Graham, who wrote the book on securities analysis. Anyone interested in the modern institution of American finance will devour this history of some of its most important players.

A simple guide to a smarter strategy for the individual investor A Wealth of Common Sense sheds a refreshing light on investing, and shows you how a simplicity-based framework can lead to better investment decisions. The financial market is a complex system, but that doesn't mean it requires a complex strategy; in fact, this false premise is the driving force behind many investors' market "mistakes." Information is important, but understanding and perspective are the keys to better decision-making. This book describes the proper way to view the markets and your portfolio, and show you the simple strategies that make investing more profitable, less confusing, and less time-consuming. Without the burden of short-term performance benchmarks, individual investors have the advantage of focusing on the long view, and the freedom to construct the kind of portfolio that will serve their investment goals best. This book proves how complex strategies essentially waste these advantages, and provides an alternative game plan for those ready to simplify. Complexity is often used as a mechanism for talking investors into unnecessary purchases, when all most need is a deeper understanding of conventional options. This book explains which issues you actually should pay attention to, and which ones are simply used for an illusion of intelligence and control. Keep up with-or beat-professional money managers Exploit stock market volatility to your utmost advantage Learn where advisors and consultants fit into smart strategy Build a portfolio that makes sense for your particular situation You don't have to outsmart the market if you can simply outperform it. Cut through the confusion and noise and focus on what actually matters. A Wealth of Common Sense clears the air, and gives you the insight you need to become a smarter, more successful investor.

WHAT MAKES A LEADER? CAN YOU REALLY LEARN TO LEAD? You might believe that leaders are born, not made. Perhaps you think that you need to hold an important job to be a leader--that you need permission to lead. Leadership is one of the most important aspects of our society. Yet there is enormous disagreement and confusion about what leadership means and whether it can really be learned. As Harvard Business School professor Robert Steven Kaplan explains in this powerful new book, leadership qualities are not something you either have or you don’t. Leadership is not a destination or a state of being. Leadership is about what you do, rather than who you are, and it starts with an ownership mind-set. For Kaplan, learning to lead involves three key elements: * Thinking like an owner * A willingness to act on your beliefs * A relentless focus on adding value to others Kaplan compellingly argues that great organizations are built around a nucleus of people who think and act with an ownership mind-set. He believes that leadership is not a role reserved only for those blessed with the right attributes or situated in the right positions of power. Leadership is accessible to each of us--today. It requires a process of hard work, willingness to ask questions, and openness to learning. This book aims to demystify leadership and outlines a specific regimen that will empower you to build your leadership skills. Kaplan tells real-life stories from his own experience of working with various types of leaders seeking to improve their effectiveness and make their organizations more successful. He asks probing questions, provides exercises, and suggests concrete follow-up steps that will help you develop your skills, create new habits, and move you toward reaching your unique leadership potential. What You Really Need to Lead will help you develop your capacity to lead by unlocking your power to think and act like an owner.

A Nobel laureate reveals the often surprising rules that govern a vast array of activities -- both mundane and life-changing -- in which money may play little or no role. If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of "goods," like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google? This is the territory of matching markets, where "sellers" and "buyers" must choose each other, and price isn't the only factor determining who gets what. Alvin E. Roth is one of the world's leading experts on matching markets. He has even designed several of them, including the exchange that places medical students in residencies and the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients. In Who Gets What -- And Why, Roth reveals the matching markets hidden around us and shows how to recognize a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions.

Perhaps no economist was more vindicated by the global financial crisis than Hyman P. Minsky (1919-96). Although a handful of economists raised alarms as early as 2000, Minsky's warnings began a half-century earlier, with writings that set out a compelling theory of financial instability. Yet even today he remains largely outside mainstream economics; few people have a good grasp of his writings, and fewer still understand their full importance. Why Minsky Matters makes the maverick economist's critically valuable insights accessible to general readers for the first time. L. Randall Wray shows that by understanding Minsky we will not only see the next crisis coming but we might be able to act quickly enough to prevent it. As Wray explains, Minsky's most important idea is that "stability is destabilizing": to the degree that the economy achieves what looks to be robust and stable growth, it is setting up the conditions in which a crash becomes ever more likely. Before the financial crisis, mainstream economists pointed to much evidence that the economy was more stable, but their predictions were completely wrong because they disregarded Minsky's insight. Wray also introduces Minsky's significant work on money and banking, poverty and unemployment, and the evolution of capitalism, as well as his proposals for reforming the financial system and promoting economic stability. A much-needed introduction to an economist whose ideas are more relevant than ever, Why Minsky Matters is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why economic crises are becoming more frequent and severe--and what we can do about it.

Imagine designing the best company on earth to work for . . . What would that company be like? How would you build and sustain it? As a leader, you need to know. In the past, businesses made people conform to the organization’s needs. But the old paradigm has shifted. Now leaders must transform their organizations so that they attract the right people, keep them, and inspire them to do their best work. How do you create a culture people want to belong to? In this powerful and necessary follow-up to the classicWhy Should Anyone Be Led by You?, leadership and organizational sages Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones identify and illuminate the six key organizational attributes to do just that. In separate chapters, they delve deeply into each one: 1. Let people be themselves 2. Practice radical honesty 3. Magnify people’s strengths 4. Stand for authenticity (more than shareholder value) 5. Make work meaningful 6. Make simple rules With vivid stories and examples from global companies, the authors illustrate the kind of strong, attractive workplace culture that leads to sustained high performance. They also provide ways of assessing how your company is doing and describe the tensions and trade-offs that leaders must manage as they transform their organizations. Why Should Anyone Work Here? is the question all contemporary organizational leaders must constantly ask themselves if they want to survive and thrive in the new world. This book will help them answer that question.

Why are group decisions so hard? Since the beginning of human history, people have made decisions in groups—first in families and villages, and now as part of companies, governments, school boards, religious organizations, or any one of countless other groups. And having more than one person to help decide is good because the group benefits from the collective knowledge of all of its members, and this results in better decisions. Right? Back to reality. We’ve all been involved in group decisions—and they’re hard. And they often turn out badly. Why? Many blame bad decisions on “groupthink” without a clear idea of what that term really means. Now,Nudge coauthor Cass Sunstein and leading decision-making scholar Reid Hastie shed light on the specifics of why and how group decisions go wrong—and offer tactics and lessons to help leaders avoid the pitfalls and reach better outcomes. In the first part of the book, they explain in clear and fascinating detail the distinct problems groups run into: • They oftenamplify, rather than correct, individual errors in judgment • They fall victim tocascade effects, as members follow what others say or do • They becomepolarized, adopting more extreme positions than the ones they began with • They emphasizewhat everybody knows instead of focusing on critical information that only a few people know In the second part of the book, the authors turn to straightforward methods and advice for making groups smarter. These approaches include silencing the leader so that the views of other group members can surface, rethinking rewards and incentives to encourage people to reveal their own knowledge, thoughtfully assigning roles that are aligned with people’s unique strengths, and more. With examples from a broad range of organizations—from Google to the CIA—and written in an engaging and witty style,Wiser will not only enlighten you; it will help your team and your organization make better decisions—decisions that lead to greater success.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER From the visionary head of Google's innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work-and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed. "We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing." So says Laszlo Bock, head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge. This insight is the heart of WORK RULES!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto that offers lessons including: Take away managers' power over employees Learn from your best employees-and your worst Hire only people who are smarter than you are, no matter how long it takes to find them Pay unfairly (it's more fair!) Don't trust your gut: Use data to predict and shape the future Default to open-be transparent and welcome feedback If you're comfortable with the amount of freedom you've given your employees, you haven't gone far enough. Drawing on the latest research in behavioral economics and a profound grasp of human psychology, WORK RULES! also provides teaching examples from a range of industries-including lauded companies that happen to be hideous places to work and little-known companies that achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees. Bock takes us inside one of history's most explosively successful businesses to reveal why Google is consistently rated one of the best places to work in the world, distilling 15 years of intensive worker R&D into principles that are easy to put into action, whether you're a team of one or a team of thousands. WORK RULES! shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken your joy in what you do.

So much of success in business depends on writing well. From résumés to reports, proposals to presentations, Writing Well for Business Success will help you communicate your ideas clearly, quickly and effectively. It will help you: Distill your message into a well-targeted statementAce the elements of styleWrite what you want to say in emails, business plans and moreMaster the tricks of editing yourselfPresented in author Sandra Lambs lighthearted and easy accessible style, this little book is an essential desk reference guide for the modern working world.

Executives from The Second City--the world's premier comedy theater and school of improvisation--reveal improvisational techniques that can help any organization develop innovators, encourage adaptable leaders, and build transformational businesses. For more than fifty years, The Second City comedy theater in Chicago has been a training ground for some of the best comic minds in the industry--including John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, and Tina Fey. But it also provides one-of-a-kind leadership training to cutting-edge companies, nonprofits, and public sector organizations--all aimed at increasing creativity, collaboration, and teamwork. The rules for leadership and teamwork have changed, and the skills that got professionals ahead a generation ago don't work anymore. Now The Second City provides a new toolkit individuals and organizations can use to thrive in a world increasingly shaped by speed, social communication, and decentralization. Based on eight principles of improvisation, Yes, And helps to develop these skills and foster them in high-potential leaders and their teams, including:  Mastering the ability to co-create in an ensemble Fostering a "yes, and" approach to work Embracing failure to accelerate high performance Leading by listening and by learning to follow Innovating by making something out of nothing Yes, And is a must-read for professionals and organizations, helping to develop the invaluable leadership skills needed to succeed today.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win--or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important--or more difficult--to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment--how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is--a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories--Be Big,Be Fast,Be First,Be the Orchestrator, or simplyBe Viable--depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: * What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? * When can we--and whenshould we--shape the game to our advantage? * How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? * How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.