Ford Library

Brooks, David. The road to character. Random House, 2015.

It has been 15 years since Jim Collins wrote Good to Great, possibly the most influential business book of all time. The book reported on Collins’ own research about how to turn a good company into one that produced great results over a sustained period of time. One of his key findings was that the personal character of company leadership mattered. Great companies had leaders who were humble but acted with iron will. Celebrity CEO’s were rarely linked with great companies.

Journalist and bestselling author David Brooks agrees that character matters. In his new book, The Road to Character, Brooks observes that there has been a shift in American culture from one that encouraged people to think humbly to one of relentless self-promotion. Modern society admires those who compete, achieve and brand themselves, but overlooks those whose quieter lives serve a larger moral purpose.

As a columnist and TV news pundit, Brooks is especially susceptible to celebrity culture. Successful at developing professional skills, he senses his own shallowness and need for admiration, his lack of integrity. His way of developing a strong inner character is not to follow someone’s 7-point program, but to observe the lives of remarkable people and to understand their wisdom.

In his new book, Brooks illustrates the lives of 8 well-known people who have been down the difficult “road to character” and shows how character building works in the real world. Flawed but humbly aware of their faults, these remarkable people struggle with their internal weaknesses until they overcome them. In the end they build a solid moral core. Brooks explains that personal growth occurs when people meet those they admire and make difficult changes to emulate their lives.

Character can be developed at any point in life, but it is a lengthy process. This noteworthy book is recommended for anyone who wants to live a good moral life.

This book is also available as an audiobook on OverDrive, an eBook on OverDrive, and on the Business Bestsellers Kindles in the Ford Library.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Kiel, Fred. Return on Character : the real reason leaders and their companies win. Harvard Business Review Press, 2015.

In June, Fuqua faculty published their recommendations for summer reading, an eclectic list of 36 classic books and current bestsellers, as diverse as are the members of our faculty. One book on the list was not yet available at Duke libraries, Return on Character by Fred Kiel. At first, I thought this recommendation was a mistake because a similar title, Road to Character by David Brooks, was a runaway best seller. But Kiel’s book was an intentional choice by Assoc. Dean Shane Dikolli.

Former practicing psychologist and current advisor to executive leaders, Fred Kiel wrote Return on Character to chart the connections between strong character, principled behavior and sustainable business results. In 2006, he began a research project involving 212 CEO’s, interviewing and surveying the leaders and the people who worked for them. These results were compared to the financial performances of their businesses.

After 7 years of research, Kiel concludes that CEO character matters — there is a consistent relationship between character driven leaders and better business results. In addition, he finds that an individual can develop his/her character well into adulthood. For leaders who want to improve their character, Kiel recommends practicing the habits that shape character. These habits include always telling the truth, no matter how difficult; accepting and forgiving mistakes; and helping others to thrive. Developing habits like these causes profound personal change over time.

Kiel outlines his 6-step program for personal growth and change for individuals and goes on to explain how to infuse character attributes like integrity and compassion throughout an organization. Yet skeptical readers may doubt that egotistical CEOs want to change their self-focused values. It is also unlikely that most people can get to the root of their character “in a few weeks” using the brief tools outlined in chapter 7. Even the most motivated individuals may require therapy or expert coaching to overcome pride and self-deception, to ultimately gain the personal insight needed for change at the deepest level.

Nonetheless, Kiel’s guide to inner growth would benefit anyone aspiring to give his/her best at work and to leave the world a better place, especially corporate and nonprofit leaders, who are exceptionally influential at work and within the larger world. The qualities that Kiel identifies — integrity, responsibility, compassion and forgiveness — are important for leaders at all levels of organizations. Recommended.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Alifirenka, Caitlin and Martin Ganda. I will always write back : how one letter changed two lives. Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Daytime MBA 2014 alumnus Martin Ganda is president and co-founder of Seeds Of Africa Foundation, a scholarship fund for promising yet impoverished students in Zimbabwe, a resource to enable them to achieve their academic dreams. Martin’s organization is a way of giving back, as he spent his early years as an impoverished boy in rural Zimbabwe. When he reaches school age, Martin’s mother makes clear that education is his only road out of poverty. He excels as a student yet his opportunities are few. Eight years later, he is matched with a pen pal, a 12 year old girl from Pennsylvania, and his destiny changes.

I Will Always Write Back, is Martin’s new book, the story of how he and his co-author Caitlin Alifirenka began their correspondence as a school assignment, and then continued for 6 years, developing a close friendship. Written in two voices, alternating between Caitlin and Martin, the story begins in Zimbabwe, where Martin and his family share a four room house with another family, 12 people in all. He attends school in a crowded classroom, four students to a desk meant for one. Each day the teacher brings in four textbooks to share with all students.

Martin’s environment is desperately poor, but his correspondence with Caitlin shows him how life could be different. He stays focused on academic achievement and receives top grades on national exams. He earns a scholarship at the best private school in Zimbabwe, a residential school that leads to a university.

Meanwhile Caitlin’s life focuses on her friends, crushes on boys and shopping at the mall, although the shallowness may be a deliberate choice to highlight the contrast. Caitlin sends Martin a photograph and asks him for one in return. For Martin a photograph is prohibitively expensive, but his mother sacrifices the only family photo she owns, taken when Martin scored highest on a national placement test in school. Then Caitlin sends him a dollar, which in Zimbabwe is enough to buy family groceries for two weeks. After she sends him a Reebok T-shirt, Martin carries luggage at the bus station for tips for two months to buy her a pair of earrings.

After a few years, Caitlin begins to understand Martin’s hardship and the issue of poverty in general. As conditions in Zimbabwe deteriorate, she sends him her earnings from babysitting. With her mother’s help, she sends large boxes of clothing and supplies. A few years later, Caitlin’s mother helps Martin through the U.S. college application process, working with university administrators at many schools until she secures a full scholarship for him to Villanova.

There are many to admire in this book, especially Martin Ganda. He, his mother and Caitlin’s mother all set high goals and are determined to meet them. They work hard despite significant obstacles and in the end are rewarded with success. Life is significantly better for Martin and his family at the end of the book. This inspiring work is recommended for all readers.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Money: It is the root of all evil but it also makes the world go round. People with a lot of money are uncomfortable talking about it, but those who have inherited it understand that having money without some purpose is soul sapping. Three new books in the Ford Library show how money changes ourselves and our world.

Sullivan, Paul. The thin green line : the money secrets of the super wealthy. Simon & Schuster, 2015.

According to business journalist Paul Sullivan, the thin green line is the difference between being rich (having a large income) and being wealthy (having more money than you need to live as you wish). He explains that someone who earns a high salary but spends it all in an extravagant lifestyle is not as well off as someone who lives in financial comfort and security, regardless of income. His book advises people on how to weigh the options in spending, saving, investing, paying taxes and giving money away (to children and to charities) — making financial choices that help people feel wealthy and secure.

This book is also available as an audiobook on Overdrive.

Vigna, Paul and Michael J. Casey. The age of cryptocurrency : how Bitcoin and digital money are challenging the global economic order. St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

Two Wall Street Journalists explain cryptocurrency as an open-source computer protocol, a new digital foundation for conducting business. Best known is six year old bitcoin, which has the potential to radically change the banking sector, allowing users to bypass traditional institutions, with their high fees, powerful elites and political corruption. Bitcoin eliminates the financial middleman in business transactions, reduces costs and increases transparency. Bitcoin also allows people without access to banks at all – women in developing countries, for example — to engage in commerce to improve their standard of living. While unlikely to replace traditional banking entirely, an unregulated and decentralized financial system is destined to be another option in the world’s payment infrastructure.

This book is also available as an eBook on OverDrive and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

Sehgal, Kabir. Coined : the rich life of money and how its history has shaped us. Grand Central Publishing, 2015.

In 2008 author Kabir Sehgal worked on J.P.Morgan’s emerging markets desk in New York when the global financial crisis hit. As a personal project, he decided to learn about the root causes of the financial crisis, which led him to the work of well-known behavioral economists to help explain why money makes us act in bizarre and irrational ways. Sehgal’s research resulted in a new book, where he explains why we use money as a form of exchange; what physical forms money has taken through the ages; and how we use money as a symbol of value. The chapter on religion and money is especially enlightening.

This book is also available as an eBook on OverDrive and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Spier, Guy. The Education of a value investor : my transformative quest for wealth, wisdom, and enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Aquamarine Fund founder Guy Spier wants university educators to search their souls for the role they play in the greed, superficiality and bad judgment among the bankers, brokers and capitalists on Wall Street. In his new book, The Education of a Value Investor, Spier writes that his own privileged education (Oxford and Harvard Business School) trained him to respond to other people’s approval rather than to an internal moral compass. Spier’s book is about his own personal journey to wisdom and maturity.

Spier begins his story as a newly minted MBA, who accepts a position as vice president at a shady brokerage house, D.H. Blair, where Spier’s Ivy League credentials dress up sketchy deals to sell to investors. The competitive environment at the firm motivates employees to push the legal and ethical boundaries to be successful. Even at the elite firms like Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan, bankers distort the truth to further their own self-interest. From this experience, Spier learns that a person’s environment causes one to slowly change over time.

After Spier leaves D.H.Blair, he finds it difficult to find another position in the financial sector. He reeducates himself by reading classic business books and by modeling Warren Buffett’s investment and life choices. He asks himself, “What would Warren Buffett do?” Then one day his father and a small circle of friends and business associates give him $15 million to manage. Spier founds the Aquamarine Fund and manages his fund as Warren Buffett would do, finding “companies that are cheap, have an expanding ‘moat’ around them, and that are awash in cash.” A charity lunch with Warren Buffett becomes the turning point in his life.

The Education of a Value Investor is an engrossing book. Guy Spier tells his story openly, in an easy conversational style. He writes about attention deficit disorder and the non-rational part of his brain that lead him to make bad decisions. He speaks frankly about his own flaws, including arrogance, pride and envy. He discusses the behavioral changes that he makes in his life to compensate for his emotional challenges, including relocating away from the temptations of New York and London. He shares his strategies for managing his personal vulnerabilities as well as his investments. In the end, he concludes that nothing matters as much as bringing the right people into your life.

This story of personal growth is recommended for most readers. However, Spier seems reluctant to take responsibility for his early career choice and casts the blame on his elite education. As an MBA student at Harvard, he attends Buffett’s presentation to students but barely hears the man who would later become his mentor, because he is distracted by a woman in the audience. And while it is true that some graduates of prestigious universities end up on Wall Street, compromising their ethics, not all do. Some students read their own moral compasses long before they graduate.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

The 4th of July is often the hottest period of the summer. This year it is bound to be a roaster. Over this holiday week, Fuqua staff traditionally borrow multitudinous movies on DVD/BluRay to watch comfortably indoors in air conditioning while the food sweats on the grill outside. Movies are great, but readers, the library has more to offer than that. Remember books? Here are 3 unusual titles to add a little fireworks to the holiday.

Ariely, Dan. Irrationally yours : on missing socks, pick-up lines and other existential puzzles. HarperCollins, 2015.

Fuqua faculty member Dan Ariely writes a column “Ask Ariely” for the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Like any advice columnist, Ariely helps his readers solve personal problems and make good decisions. He analyzes his readers’ own puzzling behavior and the actions of co-workers, family and friends. In Irrationally Yours, Ariely expands his answers to questions published in the Journal since 2012, presenting issues such as why people complain; how to select the best stall in a public restroom; and whether it is worth the money to buy an expensive car.

Heti, Sheila, Heidi Julavits & 639 others. Women in clothes. Blue Rider Press, 2014.

Months ago, I ordered the new book Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton and 639 others, thinking it was a book about the fashion industry. It is not. Instead it is an accumulation of writing by women about their clothing choices and personal style. More than 600 women participated in this work, which describes how the clothes we wear express our values and reveal our inner selves. Hundreds of brief personal stories and photographs lend an authenticity to this delightful work.

Kuhn, Reed. Fightnomics : the hidden numbers and science in mixed martial arts… Graybeard Publishing, 2013.

Strategy consultant and Fuqua 2006 MBA alumnus Reed Kuhn specialized in strategy and decision sciences while at Duke. He has been hooked on professional mixed martial arts (MMA) since he began watching the Ultimate Fighter series on television as a teenager. He recently published a new book, FightNomics, which uses the tools of decision sciences to test common assumptions about the sport. Kuhn’s data analysis advances a deeper understanding of the sport, and can be used to develop fight strategies or to predict outcomes.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

The Ford Library adds 100 books to the collection each month. It takes teamwork to build a library collection – specialists who select, purchase, catalog and process the materials. Sometimes Fuqua staff members from other departments help by recommending titles that our students want to read. Willie Green from the Admissions Office recommends more titles than any other staff member outside the library and he has great taste!

Here are some of the books that Willie has recommended in the last 60 days:

Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs By David B. Yoffie

Print collection and OverDrive ebook

Yes, And: How Improvisation Reverses “No, But” Thinking and Improves Creativity and Collaboration–Lessons from The Second City By Kelly Leonard

Print collection, OverDrive ebook, OverDrive audiobook

Money: Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom By Tony Robbins

Print collection and OverDrive audiobook

Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock

Print collection, Audio CD, OverDrive audiobook, OverDrive ebook

Exist No More: The Art of Squeezing The Most Out of Life by Detavio Samuels

Print collection

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Print collection, OverDrive audiobook

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Osnos, Evan. Age of ambition : chasing fortune, truth, and faith in the new China. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

One week from today, a group of 104 Fuqua students will depart from Durham for Fuqua’s China GATE, a unique opportunity for an academic/cultural experience in Asia’s vibrant superpower.  Among the group are Fuqua staff members Chris Shull (Accounting)  and world traveler Linda McCormick from the Ford Library.   Everyone who signed up for the trip has been preparing for months.  And the Ford Library helped, by purchasing  a collection of books that can help voyagers get the most out of their experience.

One of the best new books is Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos, Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker from 2008-13 and resident of China since 2005.  He has been observing the profound changes in everyday life for Chinese people resulting from the sweeping transformation in the economic sector.  Osnos uses the stories of everyday people to explain how life for the average Chinese person is changing.

Central to the story is the Chinese Communist Party, ruling the world’s largest authoritarian state for over 65 years.  Forty years ago, an individual had no choice in where to live or what to do for work; whom to marry or how many children to bear.  People had no opportunity to build a business or to travel outside of China.  When all of this began to change beginning in the 1980’s, tremendous risks and opportunities were created.  People began to imagine a better life for themselves.  They took steps to realize their aspirations.  Ambition was no longer a negative quality.

Osnos uses irony as he observes the inconsistencies that come with rapid change.  Chinese culture is deeply influenced by the group and the ideas of freedom and individuality take time to assimilate.  A favorite portrait in the book is a young woman who leaves her village for better opportunities in the city.  She begins a successful online dating website, a revolutionary idea as the traditional way to find a spouse is through the services of a village matchmaker. The goal of her business to avoid the pitfalls of matchmaking, and to offer to young clients a personal choice in potential mates.  Yet the entrepreneur becomes known as “China’s No. 1 Matchmaker.”  Her company is called Beautiful Destiny, while the idea of destiny is the antithesis of choice.

While the Party supports the economic progress that new freedoms have provided, it is reluctant to accommodate liberty as a potential threat to its survival.  Censorship and propaganda are two tools used to retain power yet in the age of the internet, ordinary people are connected in new ways, making it difficult to control information.  And as Chinese people prosper, they want to know more about the world around them.

This remarkable book is recommended for most readers.  If you are going on the China GATE trip, the insights in The Age of Ambition will bring more meaning to your personal observations.  And if you are staying in the U.S., the book is a readable sojourn into one of the most fascinating countries on the globe.

This book is also available as an eBook on OverDrive as well as on the Business Best Seller Kindles in the Ford Library.

Bon voyage and take care.  Wishing you the trip of a lifetime.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Carlson, Nicholas. Marissa Mayer and the fight to save Yahoo! Twelve, 2015. Also available as a downloadable audiobook, eBook, and on Kindle. 

In the late 1990’s Yahoo was the place to work in Silicon Valley.  Yahoo attracted the best engineers.   The corporate culture was friendly, innovative and irreverent.   For customers, Yahoo was an easy to use interactive platform for email, chat rooms, shopping, travel and games.  For most users, Yahoo was the internet.

But in 2000, Yahoo’s good fortune began to change as advertising revenues declined and competition with startups like Google intensified.  Leadership changes designed to turn Yahoo into a next generation media company failed.  Frequent CEO changes produced additional corporate mistakes and missed opportunities.  In 2012 Marissa Mayer was hired from Google to end the long period of decline by transforming the company.

In Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!, business journalist Nicholas Carlson tells the complicated story of Yahoo and its famous CEO.  After graduating from Stanford in 1999,  Mayer accepts a position at Google as a coder to surround herself with smart people who would challenge her to grow.   Less than a year later, Mayer finds her niche, guiding the development of Google’s user interface and setting the agenda on the products that Google would make.

Like many others at Google, Mayer is smart and ambitious.  Some say she takes credit for the work of others.  She is confident, dismissive, self-promoting and insensitive to the feelings of others. But so are many other technology company icons, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and their behavior does not generate the same resentment.   In 2011 Mayer conflicts openly with other executives and is removed from the top spot at Google Search, the company’s most important product, and is moved to Google Maps.  She decides to leave.

When Mayer gets to Yahoo in 2012 the company is in bad shape.  The firm does not have a clear identity: Is Yahoo a media company or an internet products company?   Revenues are declining.  Employees are demoralized by layoffs and unmotivated due to lack of strategic direction.  Mayer is tough and intense, taking the lead on product reviews.   To improve transparency, she sets up weekly town meetings with Yahoo employees.  She replaces  company leadership, not always successfully.  Despite her efforts, she has yet to engineer a turnaround.  Fortunately, Yahoo has a strong presence in Asia, including a stake in Alibaba, which generates a fortune in cash when the Chinese e-commerce company goes public in 2014.

Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! contains an unflattering portrait of Roy Bostock, Yahoo chairman 2008-12.  Bostock has been a member of the Fuqua Board of Visitors and Duke Board of Trustees.  He and his wife Merilee are also generous donors to the university and in appreciation, Duke’s Bostock Library is named after them.  This book is recommended.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.

Eggers, Dave. The Circle : a novel. Alfred A. Knopf / McSweeney’s Books, 2013. also available in online audiobook and online e-book formats.

On his list of the best business books of 2014, leadership expert/author James O’Toole names a novel as one of the best books about organizational culture for the year.  The novel is The Circle by Dave Eggers, author of several best selling novels and memoirs.  It is rare that a work of fiction is cited as a leading business book — with the notable exception of The Goal by the late Eliyahu Goldratt, required reading at Fuqua and many other top MBA programs.

My initial reading of Eggers’ The Circle was disappointing.  The characters were superficially drawn and did not connect to me as a reader.  The dialog seemed stiff and some of the content was repetitive.  Yet the book was a quick read for 500 pages and made thoughtful points about social media, connectedness and privacy.

Two weeks later, I reviewed Invisibles by David Zweig, who describes the work culture of the people that he calls the “Invisibles” as the complete opposite of the work culture that Eggers creates in The Circle.  Zweig’s Invisibles are highly skilled professionals who work anonymously, deriving meaning from the craft itself and excellence in its performance. By contrast, the characters who work in The Circle receive instant numeric feedback after each task and are driven to relentless self-promotion to improve their metrics.

I went back to The Circle and my second reading gave it more stars.  In Eggers’ novel, the Circle is the name of the company that replaces Google, Facebook, Twitter with one unified corporation that offers a single account for email, banking, social media and all other identity needs.  The goal of the company is to improve the world, through utility, efficiency and transparency.

The Circle pushes their employees to share their experiences through social media and in company sponsored events.  Since people improve their behavior when all is visible, the Circle intensifies the habit of sharing into constant surveillance called “transparency.”  Individuals are conscious of everything they do and filter everything they say.  Communication sounds forced.  Relationships become superficial.  Life grows less spontaneous, less genuine.  Perhaps Eggers’ superficial characters and unnatural dialogue were purposeful choices by an exceptional author.

Or not.  Either way The Circle provokes ideas about workplace culture, and about our changing attitudes around sharing and privacy.  I recommend The Circle to anyone interested in the culture of organizations as well as those concerned about the changes in society arising from use of the internet.

© Meg Trauner & Ford Library – Fuqua School of Business.
All rights reserved.