Ford Library

Welcome to the Spring 2013 installment of Ford Library Director, Meg Trauner’s selections of five recent business books recommended to readers at the Fuqua School of Business.

Click the titles below for information on location and availability. Complete reviews, and audiobook versions are linked where they’re available.

Bailout : an inside account of how Washington abandoned main street while rescuing Wall Street. by Neil M. Barofsky. The lawyer responsible for oversight of TARP funds explains how federal officials gave away $700 billion to Wall Street bankers instead of mortgage holders and business owners. Read the full review here.

Exposure : inside the Olympus scandal : how I went from CEO to whistleblower by Michael Woodford. The CEO of Olympus discovers a fraud and cover-up at his Japanese multinational, blows the whistle on his own company and flees the country for his life.

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen et al. Harvard professor Christensen applies business principles to the challenges of students’ career and personal lives. Read the full review here.

The power of habit : why we do what we do in life and business by Charles Duhigg.
A New York Times business reporter describes how habits are created and changed in individuals and within organizations. Read the full review here.

The price of inequality : how today’s divided society endangers our future by Joseph E. Stiglitz.  Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate (Economics) argues that the level of inequality in the United States is excessive, reducing economic growth and eroding opportunities for young people. Read the full review here. Also available as an audiobook.

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

Here are the first of the new additions to our DVD collection this month:

Rise of the Guardians
A Royal Affair
Zero Dark Thirty
John Dies at the End
Life of Pi
Lost Girl, season 2
Mad Men, season 5
Les Misérables
Parental Guidance
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Smashed

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

Coates, John. The hour between dog and wolf : risk-taking, gut feelings and the biology of boom and bust. Penguin Press, 2012.

In recent years, there have been a number of books published that explain how market participants make decisions and why risk takers make errors.  The name of this discipline is behavioral finance.  Among the best works is a new book, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, written by a former trader at Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, who quit his job, earned a doctorate in neuroscience from Cambridge University and began to research the biology of financial risk taking.

John Coates begins his book by explaining that high-stakes risk taking triggers strong emotions and biological reactions in financial traders.   On a day when traders make millions, they become arrogant and egotistical.  When they lose millions, they become paralyzed, mentally replaying their mistakes.  While there is no real physical risk in financial trading, their bodies experience the same physical changes that enabled our ancestors to fight an enemy or flee from a predator.  Coates describes these physical changes and why they happen, including the effect of hormones, particularly steroids such as testosterone and cortisol that have profound effect on thinking and behavior.  Coates explains that when traders make money, they experience a surge in testosterone that results in overconfidence, impulsiveness and excess risk taking.  When traders lose money, they experience a surge in the steroid cortisol that promotes feelings of anxiety and fear.  Coates hypothesizes that during bull markets, testosterone rises among participants, which leads to bubbles.  During bear markets, cortisol rises,  encouraging sell offs, and eventually creating crashes.  He believes that the financial community develops chronically elevated steroid levels that profoundly effect market behavior.

Using anecdotes and examples from his own personal experience as a trader, Coates shows that rational decision making on Wall Street is overshadowed by primitive drives.  Coates relates how the brain and body work together and discusses the role of gut thinking.  Near the end of the book, he offers solutions to the emotional boom and bust, including changes to the incentive structure, mandatory vacations for traders and workforce diversification, as women and older men have less testosterone.  This thought provoking book is entertaining to the end.

Also available as an audiobook.

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

Our recent survey revealed that you are interested in reading popular business titles and career books on an e-reader. However, many of you mentioned that you also do not currently own an e-reader. We have the solution: Kindles can now be checked out from the Ford Library! We currently have two sets of Kindle titles available: Business Best Sellers and Career Books. A new category of Kindle titles, Business Classics, is coming soon.

To find out more information about this project, please visit our Kindle Project webpage. If you would like to see a particular title available on our Kindles, you can request it by following the “Suggest a Title” link on the webpage. Questions and feedback about the Kindle Project, as well as the Library in general, are welcome.

We hope you enjoy this terrific new addition to the Ford Library’s collection!

Season 6 of Mad Men premieres on Sunday, April 7, and most people at Fuqua will be watching. One of the most popular TV shows of all time, the plot focuses on the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, particularly Don Draper and the people in his life. The show documents societal changes and specific events from the 60’s, which is entertaining for the young but especially meaningful to those who lived through that era.

In recognition of Mad Men’s new season, here are 6 new books in the Ford Library about the world of advertising:

Mad women by Jane Maas. Depicting the real lives of women working in the New York advertising world of the 1960’s and 70’s, Jane Maas outlines her own career, beginning in 1964 as a copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather, rising to creative director and agency officer, then ultimately, president of a New York agency. Also available as an audiobook.

I’d rather be in charge by Charlotte Beers. Charlotte Beers chronicles her successes and missteps in her trailblazing career in the advertising industry, as she advises women who face their own workplace challenges in achieving positions of leadership. Read the full review. Also available as a single-user e-book and an audiobook.

The Daily You by Joseph Turow. Advertisers and media companies peek into the lives individual consumers through browser searches, smartphones and social marketing sites to assess the backgrounds, plans, activities and relationships of individuals and separate them into categories based on their financial attractiveness.

Soap, sex, and cigarettes by Juliann Sivulka – An entertaining exploration of advertising 1942- 2010, including how the industry grew in the U.S., how brands were created and promoted, and how advertisers introduce cultural trends and reflect social issues.

Advertisers at work by Tracy Tuten – interviews with 18 advertising leaders – company founders, creative directors and presidents — cover their backgrounds, successes and challenges, aspirations and directions of the industry.

Advertising for people who don’t like advertising by KesselsKramer (firm) – People who don’t like traditional advertising will probably appreciate it more after reading this odd book of experimental, rather incomprehensible and somewhat disturbing work.

Postscript: for a fun read, Mad Men fans should also see 20^th century fashion: 100 years of apparel ads (Heimann and Nieder, 2009).  Organized by decade and heavily illustrated, the book contains 400 sketched and photographed fashion advertisements that convince consumers that to be a success, one must be fashionable.

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

Feiler, Bruce S. The secrets of happy families : improve your mornings, rethink family dinner, fight smarter, go out and play, and much more. William Morrow, 2013.

One of the library’s most popular business books of all time is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, published in 1989.  Author Steven Covey was a Harvard MBA and in his work as a management consultant, he often asked his clients to describe their company’s essential purpose and its primary strategy for achieving it.  Executives at the same organization often provided completely different answers.  Creating a unified statement was often a transforming event for the company.  In 1997, Covey applied the same business analysis to families to create a clear vision of the family that was shared by all.

Journalist Bruce Feiler took it a step further.  He and his wife created their own family brand, with a family mission statement, a list of shared values and a logo.  In The Secrets of Happy Families, Feiler explains that the brand was designed to improve family life.

Feiler begins his book by discussing the basic ideas behind agile development, a management technique used in the software industry.  By accepting that disorder exists and by addressing problems, the system (family) learns to operate successfully.  He dissolves his top-down parenting style and empowers the children to help manage themselves.  Everyone stays committed to trying new solutions to solve family conflicts.

Throughout his book, Feiler applies business analysis to daily problems of family life, including parenting, managing money and sharing housework.  He draws on the work of management gurus familiar to Fuqua students, applying their concepts to typical family issues.  He interviews Jim Collins (Good to Great) on ways to make a family an “enduring, great human entity.”  He interviews William Ury (Getting to Yes) about how to negotiate disagreement.  And he interviews Sheila Heen (Difficult Conversations) about how to resolve conflict through discussion.

While not a deep or insightful work, this book has an amusing breezy style that is entertaining.  This easy read is recommended for students and younger members of the staff who are parents.

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

Here are the remaining new DVD titles for March:

The Intouchables
The Kid with a Bike [Le Gamin au Vélo]
A Simple Life [Tao Jie ]
Skyfall
Small Apartments
Turn Me On, Dammit! [Få Meg På, For Faen]

Three entertaining new books about business leaders and their companies explore leadership on a personal level, with observations and anecdotes from close associates.

The Steve Jobs way : iLeadership for a new generation by Jay Elliot. Former Senior VP of Apple provides a personal portrayal of Steve Jobs, his career, his challenges and triumphs at Apple, and his management style and leadership principles. Also available as an audiobook.

The new tycoons by Jason Kelly. Reporter for Bloomberg News tells the stories of top private equity firms and their managers, showing how this complex industry influences both Wall Street and Main Street. Also available as a single-user e-book.

The corner office : indispensable and unexpected lessons from CEOs on how to lead and succeed by Adam Bryant. New York Times editor interviews 75 CEO’s and offers insights about their personal stories, successes and failures, and how they manage their time, their people and the corporate culture. Also available as an audiobook.

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

Here are the first of our newest DVDs for the month:

Argo
Chasing Mavericks
Chicken with Plums
Escape Fire : the Fight to Rescue American Healthcare
Freaky Deaky
Game of Thrones, season 2
Hit & Run
House at the End of the Street
The Master
My Lucky Elephant
Sinister
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2
Wreck-It Ralph

Gore, Albert, Jr. The future : six drivers of global change. Random House, 2013.

(Guest Reviewer – Randall Mayes) Roughly eight years ago someone asked Al Gore what he considered were the major drivers of global change. After responding with a rather simplistic answer, the question would continue to linger in his sub-conscious. On a plane flight back home, Gore spent several hours outlining his thoughts on his computer.

Drawing on his studies as far back as the 1970s of the works of futurists, Gore’s outlines eventually grew to extensive flow charts which precede each of the chapters of his most recent book, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change.

In the final analysis, it turns out that of Gore’s six major drivers, three are technology. Technologies are significant because they present a Faustian bargain. Some technologies revolutionize the existing infrastructure. Robotics has made our lives easier, but has increasingly resulted in unemployment, a phenomenon Gore refers to as robosourcing. This is not a surprising or unique phenomenon. Roughly a century ago, Henry Ford’s revolution of transportation put many people in jobs relating to horses out of business, but created jobs in the auto industry.

Our modern technology driven world also brings potential risks and tests our values. We are in the century of biology. Advances in biotechnology that will potentially lead to cures for bird flus, Superbugs and advance personalized medicine have a dual-use nature. They also enable the production of biological weapons and ethically controversial athletic and cognitive enhancements.

Digital electronic communications has led to privacy issues not only with DNA, but in other areas including online banking, medical records, commercial trade secrets, our personal lives, and national security. But, overwhelmingly advanced societies feel the benefits of technology outweigh the risks.

Read more …