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Books

The business books leaders should be reading in summer 2019

Our list of upcoming or newly released titles explores letters on life, what it takes to build unrivalled teams and the world beyond globalisation.

There’s an art to ensuring that your sporadic customers come back for the long term, as Nicholaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch outline in Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press)

In It’s the Manager (Gallup Press), Gallup chairman and CEO Jim Clifton and Jim Harter, its chief scientist, have compiled their research to highlight the importance of managers.   

Cracking Complexity: the Breakthrough Formula for Solving Just About Anything Fast (Nicholas Brealey International) by David Komlos and David Benjamin shows how problems should be tackled quickly rather than being left to simmer. 

Another simmering issue is explored by David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, in Not Working (Princeton University Press): he claims that the lack of decently waged, full-time employment has created despair and far-right populism. 

Carl Benedikt Frey shifts some of the blame on to how computers have mimicked the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution in The Technology Trap (Princeton University Press).

Philosopher Charles Handy turns his attention to the future in 21 Letters on Life and its Challenges(Penguin Books), musing on the opportunities the next generation faces. 

The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta gauges the “existential assault” facing advertising and marketing with Frenemies: the Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (HarperCollins).

Read more here.

What CEOs are reading

Last month I wrote about the ‘loveliness’ of leadership aspired to by Adam Smith (1723-1790), the founding father of free market capitalism. Lo and behold, this month we not only have a brilliant book about the man on our list (Adam Smith – What He Thought And Why It Matters by Jesse Norman), but also we’ve been besotted in actual, real life, by a ‘lovely leader’ in the Smithian mould – England manager Gareth Southgate.

He may not have brought football home this time, but he has at least changed the culture of football management today, tomorrow and for a long time to come.


SUPERMINDS: THE SURPRISING POWER OF PEOPLE AND COMPUTERS THINKING TOGETHER

Thomas W Malone

The founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence shows how groups of people working together in superminds – like hierarchies, markets, democracies, and communities – have been responsible for almost all human achievements in business, government, science, and beyond.

Read more here.