How women can advance their careers and how people and companies can succeed in the digital economy are the subjects of several of the spring’s most important business books.
Top 10
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
Shoshana Zuboff. PublicAffairs, Aug. 21
As the power of giant high-tech companies grows, Zuboff believes the issue confronting Americans is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or their slaves.
Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?
Robert Kuttner. Norton, Apr. 10
Kuttner, a leading social critic, looks back at the years surrounding WWII—which he considers to be capitalism’s finest hour—to examine whether it is possible to roll back what he sees as the poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultranationalism.
Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance
Jeffrey Pfeffer. HarperBusiness, Mar. 20
Pfeffer, a Stanford business professor, contends that many modern management practices are toxic to both employees and to company performance, and offers ways to build human sustainability at work.
Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—and How to Fix It
Dambisa Moyo. Basic, Apr. 24
Moyo, a Zambian international economist, shows why economic growth is essential to global stability, and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today.
How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job
Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith. Hachette, Apr. 10
Goldsmith, author of the international bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, partners with leadership expert Helgesen to create a handbook for women trying to take the next step in their careers.
The Human Advantage: Pursuing Happiness in an Age of Smart Machines
Jay W. Richards. Crown Forum, June 19
Richards, an author, economist, and Fox News regular, makes the case for how the free market and individual responsibility can save the American dream in an age of automation and mass disruption.
The Infinite Desire for Growth
Daniel Cohen, trans. by Jane Marie Todd. Princeton Univ., June 5
Though many see economic growth as the cure-all for the human condition, Cohen asks, given many negative trends, whether society can survive slow growth.
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
Corey Pein. Metropolitan, Apr. 24
Journalist Pein challenges the image of tech tycoons as benevolent visionaries to reveal their self-justifying views and insidious visions for the future.
The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate
Fran Hauser. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Apr. 17
Hauser proves that women don’t have to sacrifice their values or hide their authentic personalities in the name of climbing the corporate ladder.
Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia
Chris Miller. Univ. of North Carolina, Mar. 5
Miller argues that despite Russia’s corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin’s economic strategy has been surprisingly successful.
Business & Economics
Agate B2
First Mover: Jeff Bezos in His Own Words, edited by Helena Hunt (Feb. 13, trade paper, $10.95, ISBN 978-1-57284-243-4), offers a look into the mind of one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs by collecting more than 500 of the Amazon founder’s quotes on business, technology, customer service, e-commerce, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Amacon
Marketing to Gen Z: The Rules for Reaching This Vast—and Very Different—Generation of Influencers[/strong] by Jeff Fromm and Angie Read (Mar. 15, hardcover, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8144-3927-2). By 2020, Generation Z—the demographic group after the millennials—will be 40% of all consumers. The authors draw from original quantitative research and interviews to analyze the characteristics of this generation and how they differ from their elders.
Ballantine
Ask a Manager: How to Navigate Clueless Colleagues, Lunch-Stealing Bosses, and the Rest of Your Life at Work by Alison Green (May 1, trade paper, $16, ISBN 978-0-399-18181-8). The host of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York magazine’s work advice columnist, provides a practical guide to navigating 200 difficult professional conversations in her new book.
Basic
Advice and Dissent: Why America Suffers When Economics and Politics Collide by Alan S. Blinder (Mar. 27, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-465-09417-2). In his newest book, one of America’s best-known economists explores what both politicians and economists must learn to fix America’s failing economic policies.
Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—and How to Fix It by Dambisa Moyo (Apr. 24, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-465-09746-3). The Zambian-born economist shows why economic growth is essential to global stability, and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today.
Berrett-Koehler
A Great Place to Work for All: Better for Business, Better for People, Better for the World by Michael C. Bush and the research team of Great Place to Work (Mar. 13, trade paper, $17.95, ISBN 978-1-5230-9508-7). Bush—CEO of the Great Place to Work organization, which produces Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For ranking—and his team offer a new definition of what it takes to make an organization great for all stakeholders: the business, people, and the world.
Bloomsbury Business
The Business of Excellence: Building High-Performance Teams and Organizations by Justin Hughes (May 1, trade paper, $15, ISBN 978-1-4729-5359-9). A management consultant and former fighter pilot, Hughes uses his background to deconstruct the drivers of high performance, and provides tangible tools and methods that readers can apply to their own teams and organizations.
Nicholas Brealey
Kill Bad Meetings: Cut 50% of Your Meetings to Transform Your Culture, Improve Collaboration, and Accelerate Decisions by Kevan Hall and Alan Hall (Feb. 27, hardcover, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4736-6837-9) explores how managers can eliminate unnecessary meetings, as well as topics and participants that make many meetings irrelevant, thereby improving the overall effectiveness of the work day.
Chelsea Green
Fruitful Labor: The Ecology, Economy, and Practice of a Family Farm by Mike Madison (Feb. 7, hardcover, $20, ISBN 978-1-60358-794-5). Madison has spent more than 30 years as an organic farmer in the Sacramento Valley and applies the broad lessons he has gleaned from his experience to help guide the next generation of farmers.
Crown/Currency
Big Potential: How Transforming the Pursuit of Success Raises Our Achievement, Happiness, and Well-Being by Shawn Achor (Feb. 13, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-5247-6153-0). Based on new research and experience working with numerous Fortune 100 companies, the author of the bestseller The Happiness Advantage walks readers through five actionable steps that will allow them to achieve their full potential in the modern work world.
Crown Forum
The Human Advantage: Pursuing Happiness in an Age of Smart Machines by Jay W. Richards (June 19, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-0-451-49616-4). The bestselling author, economist, and Fox News regular makes the definitive case for how the free market and individual responsibility can save the American Dream in an age of automation and mass disruption.
Doubleday
New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our Hyperconnected World by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms (Apr. 3, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-385-54111-4). Futurists Heimans and Timms describe “new power” in today’s hyperconnected world and how it can be channeled by businesses, organizations, and even individuals to spread their ideas and brands.
Familius
A Couple’s Guide to Happy Retirement and Aging: 15 Keys to Long-Lasting Vitality and Connection by Sara Yogev (Mar. 1, trade paper, $19.99, ISBN 978-1-945547-71-3) is a guide to the psychological aspects of retirement and how readers can make their retirement relationship happy, fruitful, loving, and successful.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: Or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails by Yanis Varoufakis (May 8, hardcover, $20, ISBN 978-0-374-27236-4). Greece’s former finance minister and the author of the international bestseller Adults in the Room writes a series of letters to his young daughter that educate her about the business, politics, and corruption of world economics.
Firefly
What Would Keynes Do? How the Greatest Economists Would Solve Your Everyday Problems by Tejvan Pettinger (Feb. 21, trade paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-228-10029-4), uses 40 examples of everyday challenges to explore the ideas of legendary economist John Maynard Keynes and other great social and economic theorists to provide a crash course in economics, which in turn provides guidance to making difficult decisions.
Hachette
How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back from Your Next Raise, Promotion, or Job by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith (Apr. 10, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-44012-7). Goldsmith, author of the international bestseller What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, partners with leadership expert Helgesen to create a handbook for women trying to take the next step in their careers.
Hachette/Twelve
Storynomics: Story-Driven Marketing in the Post-Advertising World by Robert McKee and Thomas Gerace (Mar. 20, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-5387-2793-5). Drawing from dozens of strategies and case studies taken from leading B2B and B2C brands, the authors demonstrate that original storytelling delivers results that surpass traditional advertising.
Harper
Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit by William Knoedelseder (May 1, hardcover, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-228907-0). The author of Bitter Brew chronicles the birth of the American auto industry through the life of Harley Earl, an eccentric visionary who dropped out of college and went on to invent the profession of automobile styling, thereby revolutionizing the way cars were made, marketed, and even imagined.
HarperBusiness
Borrowed Time: Citi, Moral Hazard, and the Too-Big-to-Fail Myth by James Freeman and Vern McKinley (June 12, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-06-266987-2) explores the more than 200 years of the giant bank’s history to show how the bailout Citi received in the Great Recession was not the first time the government had intervened on behalf of the bank.
Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Mar. 20, hardcover, $29.99, ISBN 978-0-06-280092-3). The Stanford business professor contends that many modern management practices are toxic to employees—hurting engagement, increasing turnover, and destroying their physical and emotional health—and to company performance, and offers ways to build human sustainability at work.
Harvard Univ./Belknap
The World Inequality Report: 2018, edited by Thomas Piketty et al. (May 14, trade paper, $25.95, ISBN 978-0-674-98455-4). Researched, compiled, and written by a team of the world’s leading economists of inequality, this work presents information and analysis that will be important to policy makers and scholars who deal with one of the most imperative and contentious subjects in contemporary politics and economics.
Harvard Business School
Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do by Daniel M. Cable (Mar. 27, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-63369-425-5). A social psychologist argues that so many people are unhappy at work because organizations, in an effort to routinize work and establish performance metrics, suppress the part of the brain that craves exploration and learning. Cable explores how organizations can activate this biological system.
The New Global Road Map: Enduring Strategies for Turbulent Times by Pankaj Ghemawat (May 1, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-1-63369-404-0) explains key trends affecting global business today and gives readers an informed understanding of how globalization levels around the world are changing and where they are likely to go in the future.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The Myth of the Nice Girl: Achieving a Career You Love Without Becoming a Person You Hate by Fran Hauser (Apr. 17, hardcover, $26, ISBN 978-1-328-83295-5) deals with a common problem described by women looking to advance their careers—if they are nice they are seen as a pushover, but if they are tough they are accused of being a bitch. Hauser shows that women don’t have to sacrifice their values or hide their authentic personalities in the name of success.
Island
How to Feed the World, edited by Jessica Anne Eise and Kenneth Alan Foster (Mar. 15, trade paper, $30, ISBN 978-1-61091-884-8), explores what changes will need to be made by 2050 to feed the estimated nine billion people who will populate the planet by that date.
Knopf
The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do by Edward Tenner (Apr. 17, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4000-4139-8) questions ingrained assumptions about efficiency, showing how relying on the algorithms of platforms can lead to wasted efforts, missed opportunities, and, above all, an inability to break out of established patterns.
Kogan Page
Digital Darwinism: Survival of the Fittest in the Age of Business Disruption by Tom Goodwin (Apr. 28, trade paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-7494-8228-2) shines a light into the future by investigating technology, society, and the lessons of the past so that readers can understand how to adapt, what to embrace, and what to ignore.
Little, Brown
3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Hip-Hop’s Multibillion-Dollar Rise by Zack O’Malley Greenburg (Mar. 6, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-31653-8). Greenburg examines the entrepreneurial genius of Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z and demonstrates how the three moved beyond hip-hop to become music’s new tycoons.
Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality by Hector MacDonald (Mar. 6, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-316-51082-0). The strategy and communications consultant explains how “competing truths”—two true statements about the same thing that can give wildly different impressions to the people listening—are used both constructively and misleadingly by businesses, media, politicians, advertisers, and even people having regular conversations.
Metropolitan
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein (Apr. 24, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-62779-485-5). A journalist, Pein became a would-be Silicon Valley entrepreneur to gain a first hand view of how the tech industry works. His work challenges the positive, feel-good self-image that tech tycoons have crafted “as nerdy and benevolent creators of wealth and opportunity” to reveal their self-justifying views and their insidious visions for the future.
Morrow
That’s What She Said: What Men Need to Know and Women Need to Tell Them About Working Together by Joanne Lipman (Feb. 13, hardcover, $28.99, ISBN 978-0-06-243721-1). The editor-in-chief of the USA Today Network contends that to achieve parity in the office, women don’t have to change—men do. Her realistic handbook offers help to professionals to solve gender gap issues.
New York Univ.
The Future of Tech Is Female: How to Achieve Gender Diversity by Douglas M. Branson (July 10, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-1-4798-7517-7). Drawing on 15 years of speaking, conferencing, writing, and publishing in the field of IT, Branson traces the history of women in information technology in order to identify solutions for the many problems facing women in the industry today.
Norton
Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? by Robert Kuttner (Apr. 10, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-393-60993-6). A leading social critic looks back at what he considers capitalism’s finest hour—the years surrounding WWII—to examine if it is possible to roll back what he sees as the growing trend of the poisonous alliance of reckless finance and ultranationalism.
Oxford Univ.
Land of the Fee: Hidden Costs and the Decline of the American Middle Class by Devin Fergus (July 2, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-19-997016-2) delves into how the explosion of fees accompanying virtually every transaction that people make has been an important, if overlooked, contributor to the massive transfer of wealth from the many to the few: large banking corporations, airlines, corporate hotel chains, and other entities of vast wealth.
Penguin Press
Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It by Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik (Mar. 20, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-0-7352-2263-2). Weaving together cutting-edge social science with stories that range from the Volkswagen scandal to backstage at the Oscars, the authors explain how the increasing complexity of our systems creates conditions ripe for failure and what steps can be taken to prevent future meltdowns.
Princeton Univ.
The Infinite Desire for Growth by Daniel Cohen, trans. by Jane Marie Todd (June 5, hardcover, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-691-17253-8), spotlights the obsession with economic growth as the cure-all for the human condition and the global tensions that have arisen as a result. Amid finite resources, increasing populations, environmental degradation, and political unrest, Cohen asks whether our society can survive slow growth.
Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society by W. Kip Viscusi (Apr. 29, hardcover, $35, ISBN 978-0-691-17921-6) provides a comprehensive look at economic and policy efforts to price lives and proposes sensible economic guideposts to foster more protective policies and greater levels of safety in the United States and throughout the world.
Publicaffairs
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff (Aug. 21, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-61039-569-4) argues that the U.S. is at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life: will we be the masters of information and machines or their slaves?
When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle by Scott Wapner (Apr. 24, hardcover, $27, ISBN 978-1-61039-827-5). The host of CNBC’s The Halftime Report was in the middle of an uninterrupted, 27-minute televised war of accusations between Wall Street heavyweights Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman over a company called Herbalife. This is Wapner’s account of the years-long saga, complete with shifting allegiances, lawsuits, and financial roller-coaster rides.
Random House
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Feb. 27, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-425-28462-9). The author of The Black Swan takes a deep dive into the phrase “skin in the game” and shows how it applies to all aspects of our lives.
Rowman & Littlefield
The Self-Employment Survival Guide: Proven Strategies to Succeed as Your Own Boss by Jeanne Yocum (Apr. 8, trade paper, $18.95, ISBN 978-1-5381-0871-0) alerts readers to the problems of working for oneself and provides proven strategies for surmounting the obstacles to success.
Simon & Schuster
Eye Contact: The Power of One on One by Brian Grazer (Apr. 10, hardcover, $18, ISBN 978-1-5011-4772-2). An Oscar-winning producer discusses how eye contact—really looking someone in the eyes—is one of the most transformative habits you can develop in your daily life, and has the power to offer validation, show generosity, create intimacy, and—most importantly—establish genuine human connection.
Skyhorse
The Rideshare Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Driving for Uber, Lyft, and Other Ridesharing Companies by Harry Campbell (Apr. 3, trade paper, $9.99, ISBN 978-1-5107-3531-6). The founder and director of the Rideshare Guy blog and podcast, and a driver himself offers a comprehensive handbook for current and prospective rideshare drivers.
St. Martin’s
How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story[/strong] by Billy Gallagher (Feb. 13, hardcover, $26.99, ISBN 978-1-250-10861-6). Tech journalist Gallagher provides an in-depth look at Snapchat, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups whose owners turned down a $3 billion offer from Facebook.
Univ. of North Carolina
Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia by Chris Miller (Mar. 5, hardcover, $28, ISBN 978-1-4696-4066-2). In this new analysis of Putin’s Russia, Miller argues that despite Russia’s corruption, cronyism, and overdependence on oil as an economic driver, Putin’s economic strategy has been surprisingly successful, underwriting his two-decade-long rule.
Vintage
The Excellence Dividend: Meeting the Tech Tide with Work That Wows and Jobs That Last by Thomas J. Peters (Apr. 3, trade paper, $17, ISBN 978-0-525-43462-7). Thirty-five years after In Search of Excellence, Peters returns to demonstrate that nothing beats a high-quality product or service, designed and delivered by people who are as dedicated to each other as they are to their shared goal.
Yale Univ.
Is Entrepreneurship Dead? The Truth About Startups in America by Scott A. Shane (Apr. 17, hardcover, $30, ISBN 978-0-300-21211-2) contends that entrepreneurship is alive and well, revealing that the number of incorporated startups is rising, fewer startups are failing, and the number of businesses without employees is increasing.
