Ford Library

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.

Now available from Ford Library, Notable Business Books on Kindles. Each Notable Business Books Kindle is preloaded with e-books, such as:

• The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer
• Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
• The Exceptional Presenter: A Proven Formula to Open Up and Own the Room by Timothy J Koegel
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt
• The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald
• The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves by Dan Ariely
• The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross
• The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over by Jack Schafer
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Chris Voss
• Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Sheryl Sandberg
• Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds by Carmine Gallo

You may borrow a Kindle from the Ford Library circulation desk using your Duke ID. Learn more about our Kindles here: https://library.fuqua.duke.edu/resources/kindles.htm

Here are the latest titles added to our DVD collection:

Black Butterfly
The Boss Baby
The Promise
Smurfs, the Lost Village
Their Finest
Tommy’s Honour
The Expanse, season 2
Free Fire
Kong : Skull Island
The Lost City of Z
The Zookeeper’s Wife
Norman : the Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer

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

Economic scholars study, debate and write about problems in today’s global economy, but only the most optimistic readers believe that government policymakers will reverse the trends. Three important works were published last year addressing sluggish growth, rising inequality and unstable financial markets.

Ricks, Morgan. The money problem : rethinking financial regulation. The University of Chicago Press, [2016].

The central problem in the U.S. financial system is vulnerability in the short term funding markets. The solution is to update and redesign the monetary system to include explicit government guarantees for all short-term borrowing of financial firms.

Also available as an eBook.

El-Erian, Mohamed A. The only game in town : central banks, instability, and avoiding the next collapse. Random House, [2016].

In 2008, central banks prevented a collapse in the world economy. Now they are the only responsible economic policymakers. It is time for governments to step up and develop comprehensive economic policies that will lead to growth and stability.

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

Milanovic, Branko. Global inequality : a new approach for the age of globalization. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [2016].

The industrial revolution in Europe and North America drove up inequality between rich and poor countries, but the fast rate of growth of Asian countries is pushing global inequality back down. The current trend of shrinking inequality among nations but increasing inequalities within nations will continue.

Also available as an eBook.

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

Here are the latest DVDs added to our collection:

Absolutely Anything
Alone in Berlin
Everybody Loves Somebody
Grey Lady
Handsome Devil
Land of Mine
The Last Word
Life
Table 19
This Beautiful Fantastic
A United Kingdom
The Autopsy of Jane Doe
Beauty and the Beast
The Lego Batman Movie
The Sense of an Ending

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

J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (reviewed here) has been on the New York Times’ list of best sellers for almost a year and his memoir is one of only 5 titles on Bill Gates’ summer reading list. In his insightful book, Vance illustrates how the consumer-oriented values and chaotic family customs of the working class limit their children’s chances for a prosperous future.

But that is not the whole story. In addition to suffering from their own dysfunctional behaviors, ordinary people are routinely cheated in subtle ways that are impossible to detect. Two new books illustrate how elites are advancing their own agendas, while abandoning a longstanding sense of social responsibility.

Enrich, David. The spider network. Custom House, [2017].

Wall Street Journal editor David Enrich tells the story of British math prodigy Tom Hayes, who was convicted of criminal fraud in 2015 for manipulating Libor, the benchmark that underlies the interest rate on loans worldwide. From his first days as a trader in the City of London, Hayes learns that his sole objective is to make money. Working at a series of banks, he speculates on the companies’ own funds, using sophisticated pricing models. Hayes optimizes his performance by working with a group of bankers to change their Libor submissions in the direction favorable to his security holdings.

Executives at powerful banks, Citigroup, Goldman, UBS and others, were complicit; yet these influential people were never held accountable. Oversight from regulators was minimal. Meanwhile, people on Main Street who used a credit card, took out a variable rate mortgage or carried a student loan paid more for interest on those obligations. Those with pensions saw lower returns.

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

McDonald, Duff. The golden passport. Harper Business, [2017].

The Harvard Business School (HBS) proudly claims to educate leaders who make a difference in the world. But business journalist Duff McDonald holds HBS to blame for the key problems in America today — growing inequality and the flawed structure of today’s shareholder capitalism. As the most prominent and largest graduate business school, HBS has shaped countless companies, but also the world’s financial system, the economy and society itself. An HBS MBA is the “golden passport” to influence and wealth.

McDonald explains that HBS created the Socratic case method to train MBA students to operate in an ambiguous environment, to diagnose problems and frame solutions, to prioritize, communicate and act. But he also argues that the case method is backward facing and has armed its graduates with conventional answers to conventional questions. McDonald holds Harvard faculty members responsible for the theories that empower executives to increase stock prices by laying off employees. He also criticizes the pervasive focus on money within the school. MBA’s flock to lucrative consulting and investment banking careers. Administrators fixate on raising money from alumni. Faculty members multiply their salaries by serving as consultants for corporate clients. While the institution revolves around making money, McDonald calls for HBS to live up to its aspiration to make the world a better place.

Also available as an audiobook on CD, an audiobook on OverDrive, an eBook on OverDrive, and on Notable Business Books Kindles at the Ford Library.

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

The Ford Library will be closed Sunday, July 2nd – Tuesday, July 4th in observance of Independence Day.

Summer hours will resume on Wednesday, July 5th.

Wishing you a safe and happy holiday!

Kolhatkar, Sheelah. Black Edge: inside information, dirty money, and the quest to bring down the most wanted man on Wall Street. Random House, 2017.

Stories about powerful people behaving badly make good beach reading, especially if the protagonists are rich financiers and they come to a bad end. Extra points if the books illuminate the workings of Wall Street.

Ruthless hedge fund owner Stephen A. Cohen is the subject of Sheelah Kolhatkar’s new book, Black Edge. The story begins as Cohen graduates from Wharton and begins his career at a small brokerage firm in lower Manhattan. His natural instincts make him a star trader almost immediately. Fearless and self-confident, he generates huge profits by trading large blocks of stock at high frequency.

In 1992, Cohen starts his own hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, and by 1995, the company is worth $100 million. He charges exorbitant fees and keeps half the profits. As he grows more powerful, he requires Wall Street bankers to give him advance notice before releasing information that would affect the price of a stock. After SAC surpasses $1 billion in assets, he hires new traders who have personal connections with people working in public companies. He uses these contacts to gather inside information (black edge) that he uses for trading. Cohen becomes one of the richest men in the world.

One of Cohen’s first in-house analysts is Duke engineering alumnus C.B. Lee, who travels to Taiwan and China to gather inside information on companies that manufacture semiconductors. Another early hire is Mathew Martoma, a Stanford MBA, who had attended Duke as an undergrad under the name Ajai Mathew Thomas. Martoma is a biotechnology specialist at SAC who had black edge on pharmaceuticals. After the FBI and SEC investigates, Lee cooperates with law enforcement, while Martoma is convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to prison. He never turns on Cohen, who goes free. At the end of the book, Stephen A. Cohen is more wealthy and powerful than ever. Instead of ending corruption in a powerful industry that operates in the dark, the FBI and SEC stop prosecuting high level corporate criminals on Wall Street.

Sheelah Kolhatkar is a master storyteller. Her entertaining and well-researched book is recommended for anyone interested in finance and ethics. She presents complex material in a clear narrative. Characters are multi-dimensional, including Duke alumni C.B. Lee and Mathew Martoma, who are treated sympathetically. Duke readers note: there is a third university connection — ethics professor Bruce Payne (Sanford School of Public Policy) who is depicted as acting with honesty and integrity.

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

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

Here are the latest DVDs in our collection:

Collide
A Dog’s Purpose
Get Out
Gold
The Great Wall
Logan
My Life as a Zucchini
Rings
The Salesman
Silicon Valley, season 3
A Street Cat named Bob
The Void
Before I Fall
Queen Sugar, season 1
The Space Between Us

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

The film The Circle was released last month and has already grossed $170 million. Reviews have been negative, but that has not stopped readers from wanting to read the book that the film was based on.

I reviewed The Circle by Dave Eggers on this blog in 2015, after it was selected as one of the best business books of 2014 by leadership expert James O’Toole. In Eggers’ novel, The Circle is the name of the powerful internet 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 story is about a young woman who lands a customer relations job at The Circle and is selected for a new technology project at the company. Employees are pressured to share their experiences through social media and in company sponsored events. This habit of online sharing intensifies into constant surveillance called “transparency.” Employee performance is based on feedback from millions of nameless users.

As time passes at The Circle, relationships become superficial and everyday communication sounds hollow. Individuals are conscious of everything they do and filter everything they say. As employees begin spending all their time at work, life becomes one-dimensional.

While not a great book, The Circle provokes ideas about workplace culture, privacy, surveillance and freedom. 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.