Higher ground : how business can do the right thing in a turbulent world by
An indispensable guide to help companies navigate the new era of ethical challenges and risks in a volatile global landscape. Today's headlines teem with employee unrest over racial injustice, communities infuriated by corporate environmental impacts, staff anxiety over surveillance, public outrage over corruption in business, and discoveries of child labor in supply chains. We've traveled far and fast from the old world of business ethics, where black-and-white concerns about bribery and fraud could be addressed via rules and processes. Simply maximizing shareholder value while not breaking the law is no longer a tenable approach, but we've never been so confused about what it means to do the right thing--and why it's so important. In this eye-opening, essential book, NYU Stern ethics professor Alison Taylor argues that amid stakeholder demands and transparency pressures, we can no longer treat ethics as merely a legal and reputational defense mechanism. Leaders at Davos and the Business Roundtable have called for a new corporate responsibility paradigm, but organizations struggle to implement these ideas in an atmosphere of heightened expectations and intense suspicion. Offering vivid stories and examples from years working in anti-corruption and advising companies on ethics, Taylor brings this complex, risky environment alive to provide a blueprint for how leaders can rethink and reshape their practices. How can CEOs cut through the noise to set robust environmental and social priorities? When should they speak out on contentious social and political issues--and how? What does it really take to build a healthy organizational culture? How are we to approach corporate values when society itself is so divided? Higher Ground shows leaders how business can navigate this messy paradigm shift, build trust, and achieve long-term strategic advantage in a turbulent world.
The everything war : Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power by
From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Everything War is the first untold, devastating expos of Amazon's endless strategic greed, its pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary, and the growing efforts to stop it.For over twenty years, Amazon was the quintessential American success story, whilst its "customer obsession" approach made it indelibly attractive to consumers across the globe. But the company was not benevolent; it operated in ways that ensured it stayed on top, coming to dominate over a dozen industries beyond retail, growing voraciously by abusing data, exploiting partners, copying competitors, and avoiding taxes-leveraging its power to extract whatever it could, at any cost and without much scrutiny. Until now.With unparalleled access, and having interviewed hundreds of people - from Amazon executives to competitors to small businesses who rely on its marketplace to survive - Dana Mattioli exposes how Amazon was driven by a competitive edge to dominate every industry it entered, bulldozed all who stood in its way, reshaped the retail landscape, transformed how Wall Street evaluates companies, and altered the very nature of the global economy.In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission filed a monopoly lawsuit against Amazon in what may become one of the largest antitrust cases in the 21st century. As Amazon's supremacy is finally challenged, The Everything War is the definitive, inside story of how it grew into one of the most powerful and feared companies in the world - and why this is the most consequential business story of our times.
Growth : a reckoning by
A revelatory account of the past, present, and future of economic growth - and how we should rethink itOver the past two centuries, economic growth has freed billions from poverty and made our lives far healthier and longer. As a result, the unfettered pursuit of growth defines economic life around the world. Yet this prosperity has come at an enormous price: deepening inequalities, destabilizing technologies, environmental destruction and climate change.Resolving this growth dilemma, best-selling economist Daniel Susskind argues, is the urgent task of our age. For many, in our era of sluggish productivity, the worry is slowing growth-in the UK, Europe, China and elsewhere-and reversing this stagnation is the goal of every politician. Others understandably claim, given its social and environmental costs, that the only way forward is through 'degrowth', deliberating shrinking our economies.At this time of uncertainty about growth and its value, Susskind has written an essential reckoning. In a sweeping analysis full of historical insight, he explores what really drives growth, offering original ideas for combatting our economic slowdown. He argues that we cannot abandon growth but shows instead how we can redirect it, making it better reflect what we truly value. Lucid, thought-provoking and brilliantly researched, Growth: A Reckoning is a vital guide to one of our greatest challenges.
Lucky loser : how Donald Trump squandered his father's fortune and created the illusion of success by
Soon after announcing his first campaign for the US presidency, Donald J. Trump told a national television audience that life 'has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me.' Building on a narrative he had been telling for decades, he spun a hardscrabble fable of how he parlayed a small loan from his father into a multi-billion-dollar business and real estate empire. This feat, he argued, made him singularly qualified to lead the country. Except: None of it was true. Born to a rich father who made him the beneficiary of his own highly lucrative investments, Trump received the equivalent of more than $500 million today via means that required no business expertise whatsoever. Drawing on over twenty years' worth of Trump's confidential tax information, investigative reporters Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig track Trump's financial rise and fall.
The unaccountability machine : why big systems make terrible decisions - and how the world lost its mind by
When we avoid taking a decision, what happens to it? In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies examines why markets, institutions and even governments systematically generate outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want. He casts new light on the writing of Stafford Beer, a legendary economist who argued in the 1950s that we should regard organisations as artificial intelligences, capable of taking decisions that are distinct from the intentions of their members.
Management cybernetics was Beer's science of applying self-regulation in organisational settings, but it was largely ignored - with the result being the political and economic crises that that we see today. With his signature blend of cynicism and journalistic rigour, Davies looks at what's gone wrong, and what might have been, had the world listened to Stafford Beer when it had the chance.
The trading game: a confession by
'An unforgettable story of greed, financial madness and moral decay' Rory Stewart'Hilarious, shocking and deeply sad - often in the same sentence' Sunday Times'The Wolf of Wall Street with a moral compass' Irvine Welsh An outrageous, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world - from someone who survived the trading game and then blew it all wide open'If you were gonna rob a bank, and you saw the vault door there, left open, what would you do?
The war below lithium, copper, and the global battle to power our lives by
This unprecedented look inside the global battle to power our lives is "required reading for anyone interested in the 360-degree impacts of the energy transition" (Daniel Poneman, former US Deputy Secretary of Energy) from acclaimed Reuters reporter Ernest Scheyder. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, and other vital building blocks. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change and powering crucial technologies. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of necessary materials, and no one understands the complexities of these issues better than Ernest Scheyder. The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches. With accessible and "illuminating" (Chris Miller, author of Chip War) writing, Scheyder shows the human toll of this war and explains why recycling and other newer technologies have struggled to gain widespread use. He also expertly chronicles Washington's attempts to wean itself off supplies from China, the global leader in mineral production and processing. The War Below paints a powerfully honest and nuanced picture of what is at stake in this new fight for energy independence, revealing how America and the rest of the world's hunt for the "new oil" directly affects us all.
Supremacy : AI, ChatGPT and the race that will change the world by
When ChatGPT was released, the world changed overnight. Even as we all played with the new toy, a very real danger was quickly coming to light: that untested automations would undermine our way of life insidiously, sucking value out of our economy, replacing high-level creative jobs and enabling a new, terrifying era of disinformation. The founders of the two companies behind the most advanced AIs in existence - Open AI (ChatGPT) and DeepMind (Bard) - started their journeys determined to solve humanity's greatest problems. But they couldn't develop their technologies without huge amounts of money - money that Microsoft and Google were more than happy to give them, in exchange for the most powerful seats at the table. 'Supremacy' is the behind-the-scenes story of the battle between two AI companies, their struggles to use their tech for good, and the direction that they're now going in.
Tribal : how the cultural instincts that divide us can help bring us together by
A revelatory, paradigm-shifting work from a renowned Columbia professor and "one of the great social and cultural psychologists" (Amy Cuddy) that demystifies our tribal instincts and shows us how to use them to create positive change. Tribalism is our most misunderstood buzzword. We've all heard pundits bemoan its rise, and it's been blamed for everything from political polarization to workplace discrimination. But as acclaimed cultural psychologist and Columbia professor Michael Morris argues, our tribal instincts are humanity's secret weapon. Ours is the only species that lives in tribes: groups glued together by their distinctive cultures that can grow to a scale far beyond clans and bands. Morris argues that our psychology is wired by evolution in three distinctive ways. First, the peer instinct to conform to what most people do. Second, the hero instinct to give to the group and emulate the most respected. And third, the ancestor instinct to follow the ways of prior generations. These tribal instincts enable us to share knowledge and goals and work as a team to transmit the accumulated pool of cultural knowledge onward to the next generation. Countries, churches, political parties, and companies are tribes, and tribal instincts explain our loyalties to them and the hidden ways that they affect our thoughts, actions, and identities. Rather than deriding tribal impulses for their irrationality, we can recognize them as powerful levers that elevate performance, heal rifts, and set off shockwaves of cultural change. Weaving together deep research, current and historical events, and stories from business and politics, Morris cuts across conventional wisdom to completely reframe how we think about our tribes. Bracing and hopeful, Tribal unlocks the deepest secrets of our psychology and gives us the tools to manage our misunderstood superpower.
The longevity imperative : building a better society for healthier, longer lives by
The last century saw a revolution in life expectancy. Whether you are male or female, born in the global south or north, the chances are that you can expect to live much longer than previous generations. But instead of seeing this as a precious gift of extra life, we see it as a burden, with ageing populations dogged by infirmity, dependent on an ever-decreasing number of young people to support them. Andrew Scott argues it doesn't have to be like that. Our longer lives can be a source of hope and fulfilment if we seize the opportunity to pursue the evergreen agenda, one in which we pursue a sustainable lifestyle both for ourselves as individuals - investing in our finances, health, skills and relationships to support a longer life - and for the planet
The friction project : how smart leaders make the right things easier and the wrong things harder by
No organisation is totally free from destructive friction; the forces that make it harder, more complicated and sometimes downright impossible to get things done. Drawing on years of research and featuring case studies on the likes of Uber, Netflix and Boeing, The Friction Project teaches readers how to become 'friction fixers'. Stanford professors Sutton and Rao unpack how we should think and act like trustees of others' time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad friction, and where to maintain and inject good friction. Their help pyramid shows how friction fixers do their work, which ranges from reframing issues they can't fix in the short term, to ultimately redesigning and repairing organisations.
The algorithm : how AI can hijack your career and steal your future by
Artificial intelligence is being used, on a massive scale, to decide who gets hired, fired and promoted. Through whistleblower exclusives, leaked internal documents and astonishing real-world practices, journalist Hilke Schellmann reveals the secret rise of AI in the world of work. Testing them herself, she discovers that many algorithms making these high-stakes calculations do more harm than good, and traces their origins to troubling pseudoscientific ideas about people's 'true' essence.
Interviewing experts, developers and ordinary workers, The Algorithm offers fascinating and alarming truths. From software analysing interviewees' facial expressions and tone of voice, to video games assessing their performance, to 'personality profiles' built from candidates' social media, almost all major employers use AI in recruitment. Programmes track their staff's activity, group dynamics and physical health, identifying who is productive, a bully, worth long-term investment, or likely to quit. But can we trust them?
In a world of severe job insecurity, workplace algorithms are on the brink of dominating or even threatening us-if we don't fight back.
Billionaire, nerd, saviour, king : the hidden truth about Bill Gates and his power to shape our world by
Bill Gates is one of the most powerful figures of the past four decades. But the world-famous public image he has so carefully crafted is not the whole truth. In this explosive new book, Anupreeta Das (finance editor of the New York Times) takes you behind the façade.
From his early years, when he was a divisive figure in the burgeoning tech industry, we see the Microsoft co-founder morph into a ruthless capitalist, only to change yet again when he fashions himself into a global do-gooder. But as Das's revelatory reporting shows us: billionaires have secrets and philanthropy can have a dark side.
Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, and those with insight into the Gates universe, Das delves into Gates's relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates and others to uncover the man behind the persona. In telling Gates's story, Das also provides a new way to think about how billionaires wield their influence, manipulate their image and pursue philanthropy to achieve their own ends.
Billionaire, Nerd, Saviour, King is a gripping story of wealth, power and reputation; it will open your eyes to the ways in which the world's richest people hold us in their thrall.
The corporation in the 21st century : why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong by
In the world of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, capitalists built and controlled mills and factories. That relationship between capital and labour continued in the automobile assembly lines and petrochemical plants of the twentieth century. But no longer: products and production have dematerialised. The goods and services provided by the leading companies of the twenty-first century appear on your screen, fit in your pocket, or occupy your head. Ownership of the means of production is a redundant concept. Workers are the means of production; increasingly, they take the plant home. Capital is a service bought from a specialist supplier with little influence over customer businesses. The professional managers who run modern corporations do not exert authority because they are wealthy; they are wealthy because they exert authority. The pharmaceutical industry (or Big Pharma) creates life-saving vaccines and ramps drug prices up to near-unaffordable levels. Amazon gives us next-day delivery on almost everything and has its workers urinate in bottles rather than take breaks. John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation - and describes how we have come to 'love the product' as we 'hate the producer.' This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest economists.
Unit X by
A riveting inside look at an elite unit within the Pentagon--the Defense Innovation Unit, also known as Unit X--whose mission is to bring Silicon Valley's cutting-edge technology to America's military: from the two men who launched the unit. A vast and largely unseen transformation of how war is fought as profound as the invention of gunpowder or advent of the nuclear age is occurring. Flying cars that can land like helicopters, artificial intelligence-powered drones that can fly into buildings and map their interiors, microsatellites that can see through clouds and monitor rogue missile sites--all these and more are becoming part of America's DIU-fast-tracked arsenal. Until recently, the Pentagon was known for its uncomfortable relationship with Silicon Valley and for slow-moving processes that acted as a brake on innovation. Unit X was specifically designed as a bridge to Valley technologists that would accelerate bringing state of the art software and hardware to the battle space. Given authority to cut through red tape and function almost as a venture capital firm, Shah, Kirchhoff, and others in the Unit who came after were tasked particularly with meeting immediate military needs with technology from Valley startups rather than from so-called "primes"--behemoth companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Boeing. Taking us inside AI labs, drone workshops, and battle command centers--and, also, overseas to Ukraine's frontlines--Shah and Kirchhoff paint a fascinating picture of what it takes to stay dominant in a fast-changing and often precarious geopolitical landscape. In an era when America's chief rival, China, has ordered that all commercial firms within its borders make their research and technology available for military exploitation, strengthening the relationship between Washington and Silicon Valley was always advisable. Today, it is an urgent necessity.
The divine economy : how religions compete for wealth, power, and people by
A novel economic interpretation of how religions have become so powerful in the modern world Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another--spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power. This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.
NB: The last e-book is not available to alumni.