Ford Library

FuquaNet, a newsletter for Fuqua alumni, has a column called “What’s on Your Nightstand?”  It lists books that Fuqua faculty and staff members have read.  Perhaps you might enjoy one or more of these during the upcoming holiday breaks.   Below are some of the titles mentioned, with the reviewers comments, that we have here at Ford Library (click on the link to place a hold or check availability):

Leadership & Management

• The Secret Language of Leadership: How Leaders Inspire Action through Narrative by Stephen Denning (Jossey Bass).   Given our role in the Career Management Center to deliver presentations on a regular basis, I am always looking for resources to improve the narrative process, and this looks to offer some great lessons and perspective.
• From Higher Aims to Hired Hands: The Social Transformation of American Business Schools and the Unfulfilled Promise of Management as a Profession by Rakesh Khurana (Princeton)

Globalization

• Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Penguin). Mountain climbing “bum” Mortenson is saved by poor Pakistani villagers and promises to return to build a school for girls. He succeeds and eventually builds more than fifty throughout Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s poorest regions.
• The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria (W.W. Norton) deals with a very timely topic, providing a compelling overview of the growth of “the rest of the world” and the diminished influence of the United States in shaping world events. As Zakaria puts it at the beginning of the book, “This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else.”
• The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (Oxford University Press).  This is a slim book with a compelling argument from the iconoclastic Oxford development economist and former World Bank executive; Africa is a special focus.
• In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce (Doubleday).  Luce, the former head of the Financial Times in India, has a great read on India, with all its maddening contradictions.
• Maximum City: Bombay, Lost and Found by Suketu Mehta (Vintage). India is like life with the volume turned all the way up. Mehta’s account of Bombay captures the vitality and unpredictability of modern, urban India. With most of the world’s population heading for the cities of the developing world, this book captures something of the world we are rapidly becoming.
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond (Penguin). Together with Diamond’s previous volume Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond explores why some societies triumph and others fail.  He weaves together clues from around the world and across disciplines to tell a compelling story.

Professional/Career Development

• The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By, by Scott Shane (Yale Press). As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about entrepreneurs and the act of new business creation, I am always eager to read other people’s points of view on the subject, even if I don’t share their views.
• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder (Bantam) a revealing history of the personal development of one of the greatest investors of all time – Warren Buffett. It traces his obsession from early childhood with making money and his fascination with investment securities. The book also describes his incredibly disciplined and studious approach to fundamental research, and his willingness to sit on the sidelines when markets were overheated and also jump in when they were oversold. It helps put into perspective the turmoil we are facing in today’s financial markets and the realization that, as in the past, we will come out of this.

Personal Development

• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (Yale University Press). Two faculty members from the University of Chicago discuss the new science of choice architecture that helps people to see their own biases and to make better decisions for themselves, their families and society. This book is not as engaging as Fuqua faculty Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, but is interesting nonetheless.
• The Open Mind: Exploring the 6 Patterns of Natural Intelligence by Dawna Markova (Red Wheel/Weiser). A researcher at the Organizational Learning Center at MIT discusses auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning styles and shows that people learn and communicate in one of six different ways.
• The Power of Intention: Learning to Co-Create Your World Your Way by Wayne W. Dyer (Audiobook version). Want to live a life that is less stressful and more joyous? Dr. Dyer describes how to surmount the barriers that get in the way—negative thinking, relying on the opinion of others, or retaining a controlling ego.
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb (Random House). In spite of what we may think, game-changing events are rare and unpredictable. He makes similar points in Fooled By Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, another great read.
• How to Talk So People Listen by Sonya Hamlin. This is a nicely structured book to think about ways to connect to the different categories of audiences, like Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y. As a side benefit, it provided me with an interesting social history of the U.S.

Health Care

• Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results by Michael Porter and Elizabeth Teisberg (Harvard Business School Press) is another very timely read. In typical Michael Porter style, the central premise of the book focuses on transforming the health care system into one where value-based competition drives it towards increased effectiveness and efficiency.
• How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman (audiobook version)—applies work on decision making and cognitive science to the physician’s decision-making process and the doctor-patient interaction.

Economy

• The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker by Steven Greenhouse (Knopf). New York Times labor correspondent presents outrageous stories of companies like Walmart and Caterpillar, which routinely cheat their workers for profit, leading to a decline in financial security for many Americans.
• The Age of Turbulence by Alan Greenspan (Penguin Press)
• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs (Penguin Books). This solutions-oriented academic is an exceptionally clear explainer of the world economic system and the importance of global trade. Given the radical changes over the last year, I’m looking forward to [also reading] his Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, which starts out: “The 21st century will overturn many of our basic assumptions about economic life.”

Green Capitalism

• Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green (Bloomsbury Press). Published in early 2008, this is a somewhat ill-timed, but well-written book by the Economist bureau chief who helped shape the public understanding of social entrepreneurship and the application of capitalist principles to the social sector.
• Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America by Thomas Friedman (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). Despite the title of Chapter 12: “If It Isn’t Boring, It Isn’t Green,” Friedman uses his exceptional communication gifts to integrate science, policy and business into a compelling argument that’s anything but boring.

Technology and Marketing

• The Big Switch: Rewiring the World , from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr (W.W. Norton). AC ended up beating out DC. Soon, we will look at the Internet just like electricity—it’s ubiquitous and we are always on.
• Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies: And Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard B. McKenzie (Springer). Of course, I want to learn about how economics can be applied to everyday life to gain insights, but my real goal is to learn how to write a popular book on Operations Management.
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam (Portfolio Hardcover). I picked this up on a whim at the bookstore, and frankly, it has already given me good teaching ideas.

This entry was posted by Amy on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 9:46 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Featured Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.