Right kind of wrong : why learning to fail can teach us to thrive by
Recommended by Stefano Turconi, Teaching Fellow of Strategy and Entrepreneurship.
In this book, winner of the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, Amy Edmondson highlights how failure, when mismanaged, can lead to wasted opportunities and demoralised teams. The popular mantra “fail fast and often” can be misleading – even counterproductive – without a nuanced understanding of failure. Edmondson, renowned for her research into psychological safety, identifies three types of failure: basic failures, arising from neglect or oversight in routine tasks; complex failures, caused by interacting factors in unpredictable environments; and intelligent failures, which occur in novel situations where calculated risks are taken with learning as the goal.
The diary of a CEO : the 33 laws of business & life by
Recommended by Randall S Peterson, Professor of Organisational Behaviour; Academic Director, Leadership Institute.
I know what CEOs do, yet this work by the entrepreneur, podcaster and star of BBC TV’s Dragon’s Den – subtitled The 33 Laws of Business and Life – is a fantastically good read on how to lead others. It is well-researched, evidence-based and illustrated with lots of stories from the author’s time as an entrepreneur.
As the subtitle suggests, the book is structured around 33 key “laws” or principles that cover a wide range of topics including creativity, communication, resilience and self-awareness. Each chapter explores a specific law and examines its applicability to personal and professional growth, with actionable (and extremely useful) strategies for implementation.
Growth : a reckoning by
Recommended by Joseba Martinez, Assistant Professor of Economics.
“Sustained economic growth is the only route to improving the prosperity of our country and the living standards of working people.” This declaration in the UK Labour Party’s election-winning manifesto of 2024 is a hopeful sign that economic growth is reclaiming its place at the centre of policy debates.
Growth: A Reckoning arrives at precisely the right moment to address the puzzle of how to increase growth. The author documents that sustained growth in GDP per capita is a modern phenomenon that emerged only with the Industrial Revolution. His account traces how our understanding of the origins of growth has evolved; from early theories focused on physical capital to modern insights about the crucial role of technological advancement and innovation. While Susskind celebrates humanity’s success in raising living standards, he confronts the darker consequences of growth, particularly climate change and widening inequality. Yet, rather than embracing fashionable calls for “degrowth”, he charts a more nuanced course: finding ways to grow sustainably while managing the delicate balance between economic expansion and its social and environmental costs.
Intuition in business by
Recommended by Stefano Turconi, Teaching Fellow of Strategy and Entrepreneurship.
Can intuition and failure be transformed into strategic advantages in the age of AI and systemic disruption? In Intuition in Business, Eugene Sadler-Smith explores how intuition – a uniquely human sensing capability – can complement analytical thinking in decision-making. He gives a compelling and detailed explanation of the science behind this; arguing that, while our analytical mind evolved to solve, our intuitive mind evolved to sense.
Milton Friedman : the last Conservative by
Recommended by Linda Yueh, Adjunct Professor of Economics
JK Galbraith, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, captured the importance of Milton Friedman best. Galbraith said, at the end of the 1970s, “The age of John Maynard Keynes gave way to the age of Milton Friedman.”
The Keynesian Revolution was superseded by Friedman’s monetarists, whose views were encapsulated in the phrase, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” Friedman attacked the Keynesian saving-investment theory as “unbelievably simple. Yet simply unbelievable.”
This biography excels not only in setting out Friedman’s intellectual contribution, but also in giving the reader a sense of the person and the times in which he lived. A libertarian and free market advocate, he believed that government had to set up basic rules and institutions to support the price system, but then get out of the way.