Ford Library

Each week, the Wall Street Journal publishes a list of Business Best Sellers. Some books, such as the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team or Emotional Intelligence 2.0, stay on the list for years. Others are new works by CEO’s, journalists, academics and other thought leaders.  These four new books are on this week’s WSJ Business Best Sellers list and the Ford Library just loaded them onto our Notable Business Books Kindles. As you head out on Thanksgiving break, take home a Kindle collection.
 

Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne. Blue ocean shift : beyond competing. Hachette Books, 2017.

In this follow-up to their 2005 bestseller, Blue Ocean Strategy, two faculty members at INSEAD draw on 30 years of their own research into strategy in large and small organizations to reveal how to move beyond competing in existing crowded markets to creating new market opportunities. Using just 5 steps, they show that success is not about dividing up an existing pie, but about creating a larger economic pie for all.

Also available on Notable Business Books Kindles.

Dalio, Ray. Principles. Simon and Schuster, 2017.
 
Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio shares his personal journey from commodity trader to hedge fund titan, including his reflections on lessons learned from his investment and management mistakes.  He shares his process for making choices and achieving his goals, explaining concepts such as Radical Truth and Radical Transparency. He advises readers to be clear about what they want in life and to design a plan to attain it. Radical Truth: disappointing.

Also available on Notable Business Books Kindles and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

Galloway, Scott. The Four : the hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Portfolio/Penguin, 2017.

In this rambling monologue interrupted by napkin sketches, entrepreneur and NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway analyzes Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google — their strengths and strategies, their economic models, their ambition, innovations and risks, and their social consequences. In the second half of the book, he dispenses career and business advice based on his experience with start-ups.

Also available on Notable Business Books Kindles and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

Burchard, Brendon. High Performance Habits. Hay House Inc., 2016.

Using research on individual and team performance, author-coach Brendon Burchard identifies six habits that when practiced consistently lead to exceptional long-term results across multiple domains of life. Perhaps most salient are the first and last habits. The first is to seek clarity — know yourself and what you want. And the last is to demonstrate courage — stand up for yourself, your ideas and others.
 

Also available on Notable Business Books Kindles.

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

Here are the latest additions to our DVD collection:

Baby Driver
The Beguiled
The Dark Tower
Girls Trip
An Inconvenient Sequel : Truth to Power
Kidnap
Maudie
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
A Very Sordid Wedding
War for the Planet of the Apes
American Gods, season one
The Emoji Movie
Spider-Man: Homecoming

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

Strober, Myra. Sharing the work: what my family and career taught me about breaking through (and holding the door open for others). MIT Press, 2016.

Welcome participants in the Duke MBA Weekend for Women! You are already on the road to achieving power and purpose in your life, a road that was not always open to women. Those who came before you struggled to open the gates at work and at the university. While there are challenges ahead, you must achieve your dreams and break through the remaining barriers for others who will walk your road in the future.

Myra Strober is one woman who opened the gates in academia. In her 2016 memoir Sharing the Work, Strober completes a PhD in economics from the “quintessentially male” MIT in the 1969 and accepts a teaching position at the Univ. of MD. She follows her husband to Palo Alto, where he has a medical residency and assistant professorship at Stanford. Strober is offered a teaching position at Berkeley in 1970, but as a lecturer not assistant professor, because she is a woman. Soon after, the U.S. Labor Dept. begins investigating discrimination against women at universities and she is offered assistant professorships at both UC Berkeley (Economics) and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, although at a low salary.

When Strober joins the all-male faculty at Stanford GSB, she finds her colleagues to be polite, but they exclude her from their informal networks. When she presents her research on the economics of the childcare market, they pronounce her arguments as outrageous. They take umbrage at having to move the annual faculty retreat away from a male-only club. She teaches macroeconomics to MBA students but the men who make up 98% of the class behave in a hostile manner.

Strober’s research on gender and employment is published in A-list journals and books. She develops an interdisciplinary course on women and work, which she teaches for 40 years. She launches and leads the successful Center for Research on Women at Stanford. She organizes conferences. But when she comes up for tenure, she is denied. Not long after, Strober accepts an offer from the Stanford School of Education as a tenured faculty member.

When this reviewer earned a BA in economics and an MBA in the 1970’s, all of my instructors in economics and business were men. Since that time, opportunities for women in academia and in the corporate world have improved, but more change is needed. Women need to open the remaining gates for themselves and for those who will follow.

Also available as an eBook.

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

Here are the latest additions to our DVD collection:

2:22
Queen of the Desert
Transformers: The Last Knight
Wonder Woman
All Eyez on Me
The Big Sick
Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
The Hero
Lowriders
Megan Leavey
The Mummy
Paris Can Wait

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

Prinstein, Mitch. Popular: the power of likability in a status-obsessed world. Viking, 2017.

There are many likeable people on the Ford Library staff, and this summer one of the most likeable of all heard an interview on NPR featuring the author of a new book titled Popularity. Our librarian was sure that the book would become a runaway best seller but that has yet to happen. No matter, this engaging book shows how popularity profoundly effects people every day and offers insights on how to experience a happier life.

UNC chaired psychology professor Mitch Prinstein begins his book by explaining that there are two types of popularity, status and likeability, but only one of them is valuable. Status involves being well-known and influential. In high school, cheerleaders and athletes have status. In adult life, this group includes CEO’s and celebrities, but also ordinary people who strive for prestige, wealth and beauty. Sadly in later life, status-seeking individuals tend to be troubled by discontent, anxiety and depression.

Prinstein explains that the other type of popularity – likeability — confers lifelong benefits. More than intellect, ambition, or socioeconomic status, likeability is associated with future happiness and career success. Behaviors that make children likeable – being helpful, cheerful and kind — directly translate into how satisfied, successful and physically healthy they will be decades later. Likeability is also associated with close and caring relationships as well as personal growth. Likeable adults have more friends and higher self-esteem.

Likeable people live in a different world than their unlikeable peers – one of their own making. Choosing to be more likeable begins with small adjustments in current behavior, such as a friendly hello to a student in the mallway, a single act of kindness, or a smile. These small social cues will be picked up by others and reflected back. We both influence and are influenced by others’ likeability in a feedback loop all day long. If everyone were more likeable, they would be treated better every day. And Fuqua would become a better place for all.

Also available as an ebook on OverDrive and as an audiobook on OverDrive.

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

Mayer, Jane. Dark money : the hidden history of the billionaires behind the rise of the radical right. Anchor Books, 2017.

A post script to my recent review of Nancy MacLean’s new book Democracy in Chains:

In her new book about the radical right’s covert plan to restructure American shareholder capitalism and public policy, Duke history professor Nancy MacLean cited the work of investigative journalist Jane Mayer, who reported that the Koch brothers and other wealthy right-wing donors poured more than a $100 million into a “war against Obama”. These political contributions were given to groups and candidates who supported their ultraconservative core beliefs, but also benefited the donors’ powerful business interests, including corporate deregulation, lower personal and corporate taxes, cuts in social spending, and reduced oversight of the environment.

Termed “dark money,” this political spending is untraceable by law, but it is treated as a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Dark Money is also the name of Jane Mayer’s new bestselling book that portrays a network of archconservative families, who use political donations to influence how Americans think and vote. Most prominently featured are right wing multibillionaires Charles and David Koch, but Mayer also includes short portraits of other ultra-conservatives such as Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking and Gulf Oil fortunes; the DeVos family of Michigan, founders of the Amway marketing empire; and NC discount store magnate (Roses) Art Pope.

Dark Money was named one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year.

Also available as an audiobook on OverDrive and as an eBook on OverDrive.

Here are the latest additions to our DVD collection:

Alien: Covenant
Blind
The Circle
Colossal
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
Don’t Knock Twice
The Exception
King Arthur : Legend of the Sword
My Cousin Rachel
Opening Night
Shin Godzilla
Snatched
Baywatch
Everything, Everything
A Family Man
Going in Style
Guardians of the Galaxy. Vol. 2
The Lovers
Sleight

You may browse the entire DVD collection via the library catalog.

MacLean, Nancy. Democracy in chains: the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Viking, [2017].

Last week, I learned that both anti-immigration activist Stephen Miller and white nationalist Richard Spencer were students at Duke in 2006 when the lacrosse scandal consumed our town and the nation. At the time, Stephen Miller was an undergraduate studying political science and a columnist for The Chronicle. A decade after graduation, Miller had an office in the Trump White House advising the president on immigration issues.

White supremacist Richard Spencer was a PhD student in history at Duke in 2006, but he dropped out to become an editor of the American Conservative, where he was later fired for his extreme views. Credited for creating the term alt-right, Spencer was the leader of a protest in Charlottesville, VA last month that resulted in a violent confrontation.

Stephen Miller and Richard Spencer express views that garner media attention but far more threatening are the secret plans by more powerful players on the radical right. In her new book, Democracy in Chains, Duke history and public policy faculty member Nancy MacLean presents the story of the radical right and their well-planned and financed stealth campaign to rewrite democracy in America by concentrating economic and political power in the hands of a few.

Prof MacLean begins her story in the mid-1950’s at the University of Chicago and later at the University of Virginia and George Mason where economist James Buchanan and other like-minded intellectuals set out to free markets from collective action and government interference. These early libertarians argue that private markets acting in their own self-interest allocate goods and services most efficiently, and that public officials, who also operate with self-interested motives, cannot be trusted to act for the public good. Buchanan advocates for a smaller role for government, lower taxes and government spending, curtailing of worker rights, fewer environmental protections and privatizing public resources. In 1986, Buchanan wins a Nobel Prize in Economics for his groundbreaking work, but he and his associates make little headway in implementing his vision.

In the 1990’s, the Koch brothers and other multibillionaires begin financing a covert strategy to implement Buchanan’s groundbreaking ideas for radical and permanent change, replacing majority rule with pure capitalism. After 2008, the Koch team engineers a hostile takeover of the Republican party. Vice President Mike Pence sympathizes with their view. Libertarian leaders seek liberty, “The liberty to concentrate vast wealth, so as to deny elementary fairness and freedom to the many.” Recommended

Also available as an audiobook on OverDrive and as an eBook on OverDrive.

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

Ford Library will be open for our normal Semester / Term Hours on Labor Day, Monday, September 4th.

All Library services and resources as provided by our circulation desk attendants will be available except for research assistance.

Our professional staff, and expert reference librarians will return on Tuesday, September 5th to help guide you toward success in your MBA.

Good Luck in Fall Term 1!

Hidden Figures, a critical and commercial success, features engaging performances from its lead actors Taraji P.Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae. Set in the early 1960s, the three African-American mathemeticians play key roles in the nascent space program. Henson’s character Katherine Johnson is instrumental in calculating the Mercury 7’s flight trajectory, and the film manages to make scenes of rapid mathematical calculation riveting.

Toni Erdmann (Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film) centers around Winfried and Ines, a father and daughter. Winfried, who has affinity for pranks involving fake personas, is trying to reconnect with his serious daughter who’s left for a business consulting job. His attempts to build a bridge involve creating an alter ego, Toni Erdmann, an eccentric life coach who keeps showing up at Ines’ various work functions. The movie is a funny but touching character study.

The Expanse is a science fiction series with a compelling political narrative centering around a police detective, an officer on an interplanetary ice freighter and a United Nations executive.  Set two hundred years in the future, people have colonized the solar system but over the course of the show the characters uncover a conspiracy which threatens human survival.