Taylor Swift is arguably the world’s most famous female musician and also the wealthiest, with a net worth of $1.6 billion. The authors of two new books on Swift’s business savvy explore the wild success of the pop icon’s approachable brand.
The title of Sinead O’Sullivan’s debut, Good Ideas and Power Moves (Viking, Sept.), is a lyric from Swift’s song “The Man,” which imagines how the pop star’s achievements would have been viewed differently had she not been a woman. “I come from a world of cutthroat finance business strategy, which relies on domination,” says O’Sullivan, former head of Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, cofounder of a global investment fund, and self-proclaimed Swiftie. “She brings people to negotiate with a bottom-up perspective.”
The book breaks down Swift’s strategy into 10 “power moves,” which O’Sullivan sees as “decisions made with clarity, intention, and long-term impact to achieve outsized things, whether personal or career”—for instance, “build a world (not a product)” and “be anti-fragile.” As universal as Swifts’s appeal is, she’s a one-of-a-kind force for business, O’Sullivan says. “She’s a much bigger deal to the economy than hedge fund managers are. There were genuine concerns from the Fed because of the economic impact of her tours—the Fed didn’t know if its monetary policies were working.”
Crystal Haryanto, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2023 with a degree in economics, delves into what she calls Swift’s “woman of the people” persona in her debut, The Glory of Giving Everything (Wiley, July), drawing lessons in branding, marketing,
and engagement; the title riffs on the phrase “take the glory, give everything” from the song “Clara Bow.” She notes that Swift has made substantial charitable donations to organizations, such as the New York City school system, in places where she’s lived, and on one occasion showed up to perform at a fan’s
wedding celebration.
When Swift released the Lover album in 2019, four special edition CD versions were each packaged with different selections from the journals she kept in her teens and 20s. This was a lucrative marketing tool, but, Haryanto says, it was also a vulnerable move that allowed fans to feel closer to her. “The book underscores her philosophy that success and joy is found in the giving itself, not just quantifiable monetary success.”
Both authors see Swift as motivated by more than money and success. “She broke all the records five albums ago,” O’Sullivan says. “Now the only records she can break are her own. You can’t scare someone who just wants to wake up every morning and do what they’re doing.”
