More Business Books ... looking to the future, learning from the past

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE from Harvard Business Review Press is part of a series which also has texts dealing with Blockchain and Cybersecurity. This one, on artificial intelligence (AI) points out that companies that wait to adopt may never catch up and suggests some questions that ALL employees should be able to answer: How does AI work? What is it good at? And what should it never do? The contributors’ experience and background range from academicians (at University of Toronto, MIT, Stanford) to practitioners (at Facebook, Accenture, and more). One, Andrew Ng, currently CEO of Landing AI and who has worked for Baidu, Coursera, and Google Brain describes how to choose your first AI project.  Others write about collaborative intelligence as humans and AI join forces or about the future of using far less data, developing efficient robot reasoning with less reliance on deep learning from patterns. Each essay or reprinted article ends with a useful “takeaways” section. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE focuses on a topic which is highly interesting for many of our students and offers varied perspectives so that our business faculty could choose to incorporate a few selections (e.g., about ethics, bias and lack of transparency or about AI’s varied impact on work) for class readings.

As you may know, we currently have school-based subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. And on Friday both of those papers had stories about comments from Brad Smith. The New York Times said, “Microsoft Corp President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith said on Friday that technology companies are likely to change how they moderate online platforms in response to new laws from foreign governments, regardless of whether U.S. lawmakers act to change … U.S. law …” And The Wall Street Journal also discussed ethical issues while mentioning the new book, TOOLS AND WEAPONS by Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne. It contains a foreword by Bill Gates where he describes this book as “a clear, compelling guide to some of the most pressing debates in technology today.” Smith and Browne subtitled their book “The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age” and they do not shy away from relating events and raising issues associated with Snowden and diplomacy, with facial recognition and artificial intelligence and with social media, surveillance, or personal privacy. As reflected in the duality of the title, TOOLS AND WEAPONS prompts many questions about the concentration of power in corporations (e.g., amount of energy used to power machines) and in governments (e.g., relative to political activism and human rights).

Get informed for these key discussions – and please see a librarian or our ClassLinks page for help activating your digital newspaper subscriptions.  

 

Also of high interest to students will be THAT WILL NEVER WORK by Marc Randolph which deals with “The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea.” Of course, so many students are regular Netflix users and while they will relate to today’s product, they will likely find the company’s transformation over time to be surprising.  In particular, it will be valuable for them to see the frequent fails (such as never realizing the Blockbuster merger) or near failures (deficits and layoffs) that occurred prior to Netflix becoming the force it is today. Hopefully, it is also stimulating for them to think about the process of idea generation (and rejection or modification) as well as needed research on market needs, trends and competition.  Randolph, who co-founded Netflix, also has extensive experience in the entrepreneurship sphere in Silicon Valley.  He writes with an often amusing, very conversational tone, providing in THAT WILL NEVER WORK an inside look at many of the decisions and efforts to adapt as the company moved forward.

The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal

THE LAGER QUEEN OF MINNESOTA is the latest novel by J. Ryan Stradal (Kitchens of the Great Midwest).  This one, too, is full of descriptions to tempt your palate and stimulate your appetite. The focus, though, is not food; it is on beer – lager, ale, IPA, Gose, stout, porter and so on.  There is enough detail about the many varieties that some readers might even benefit from this quick guide on the types of beer from Time magazine. Stradal also refers to some history and trends (e.g., light beers, micro-breweries, waves of consolidation and acquisitions) in the industry since the 1970s. But his biggest emphasis is on the diverging lives of two sisters, Edith and Helen.  Edith is the older, hard-working, and someone who “looked at money like a motorcycle driver looks at asphalt. The more of it you see, the farther you can go, but a single mistake with it can finish you.” Helen’s one passion in life is to brew beer and she causes a decades long rift by using the sale of the family farm to fund her brewery launch.  While certainly a relatively quick and entertaining read, THE LAGER QUEEN OF MINNESOTA could also be used by our Junior Theme researchers and tied to economic themes (e.g., transitions for Midwest companies like Old Style, Schlitz, Hamm’s and Stroh’s; or difficulties of being an entrepreneur – especially a female one; or even the sense of identity which one’s work provides).  Alternatively, students could use this title as a springboard to look at family relationships like sibling rivalry or intergenerational responsibilities due to the large role played by Diana (Edith’s granddaughter) in this story. THE LAGER QUEEN OF MINNESOTA is a LibraryReads selection for July and it received starred reviews from both Booklist and Kirkus. Enjoy!

New and Forthcoming Business Books

 Here's a quick summary of a variety of recent and forthcoming business related books:

CRACK THE FUNDING CODE by Judy Robinett explains “How Investors Think and What They Need to Hear to Fund Your Startup.”  The preface, written by Kevin Harrington of Shark Tank is filled with some amazing statistics in that he estimates he has heard roughly 50,000 pitches, funded about 800 of them and saw 150 actually make money. Both he and Robinett stress the importance of packaging a concept so as to “pitch to investors’ needs” (be they profit margins, sales volume, etc.). Robinett begins with a section on how to think like an investor and then segues to finding the right investors, what investors are looking for, and closing the deal.  She also includes several helpful appendices with information on “power connecting,” a strong pitch deck example, and a due diligence checklist. CRACK THE FUNDING CODE should be a particularly valuable for those, like our Entrepreneur class students, who are seeking funding for new and innovative ideas.(Jan. 2019; Amacom)
 

THE WISE ADVOCATE by Art Kleiner, Jeffrey Schwartz, and Josie Thomson focuses on Strategic Leadership, particularly in relation to what we know about neuro-science and how are brains work.  The authors describe a wise advocate as “the person who believes, and can inspire others to believe, that the problem is worth solving; that it cannot be solved in conventional ways; … that a new way of looking at things is available to them; and that they can all make a difference together if they act on this belief.” Two types of leadership – transactional (“exchanging gratifications”) and transformative (more adaptive and strategic) – are discussed. Given increasingly complex issues and problems, they recommend calling on the “inner wise advocate” and use a variety of scenarios (from running a large international plant to personal setbacks at work) in order to illustrate their points about the need to reframe and think differently about a situation. Throughout the text, they emphasize “habits of mind” which will lead to better decisions and outcomes. (Jan. 2019, Columbia UP)

Mihir Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School, and his latest text, HOW FINANCE WORKS, is filled with charts, diagrams and equations.  As such, Desai takes a complicated subject about which he is very knowledgeable and tries to simplify it for those who are relatively new to the discipline. Building on his almost two decades of teaching experience, he deftly employs interactive exercises and case studies to prompt questioning and learning. Desai is also the author of Wisdom of Finance (2017), which was long-listed for the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.  (Apr. 2019, Harvard Business Review)

WHY DO SO MANY INCOMPETENT MEN BECOME LEADERS?  is a challenging question and title of a new book by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and at Columbia University, and an associate at Harvard's Entrepreneurial Finance Lab. Chamorro-Premuzic explores various facets of leadership in chapters with titles like “Why Most Leaders Are Inept,” “What Good Leaders Look Like,” and “Measuring a Leader’s Impact.”  Along the way, he discusses, the gender imbalance in more powerful positions; noting for example, that at Fortune 500 companies in 2017 women made up 44% of the workforce, 36% of first-line and mid-level managers, but only 20% of board members and 6% of CEOs. He argues that men’s character flaws (e.g., overconfidence or self-absorption) “help them emerge as leaders because they are disguised as attractive leadership qualities” (e.g., charisma), resulting in reduced leadership opportunities for both women and men “while keeping the standards of leadership depressingly low.” Chamorro-Premuzic himself “calls for a different type of analysis” and his work certainly offers a unique perspective which will be valuable for our Psychology students and Junior Theme researchers investigating women’s roles in the workforce. (Mar. 2019, Harvard Business Review)