Everyday Emotional Intelligence: Big Ideas and Practical Advice on How to Be Human at Work
Daniel Goleman, Annie McKee, and Shawn Acor
Harvard Business Review Press November 2017, $34.95

Enjoy 10 definitive Harvard Business Review (HRB) articles on emotional intelligence (EQ) by Daniel Goleman and other leaders in the field. Curated by HBR’s editors, Everyday Emotional Intelligence is paired with smart, focused advice from HBR experts about how to implement those ideas in your daily work life. You’ll learn how to recognize your own EQ strengths and weaknesses; regulate your emotions in tough situations; manage difficult people; build the social awareness of your team; motivate yourself through ups and downs; write forceful emails people won’t misinterpret; make better, less emotionally biased decisions; help an employee develop emotional intelligence; and handle specific situations like crying at work and tense communications across different cultures.

Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth—and How to Fix It
Dambisa Moyo
Basic Books, April 2018, $36.50

From an internationally acclaimed economist, a provocative call to jump-start economic growth by aggressively overhauling liberal democracy.

Around the world, people who are angry at stagnant wages and growing inequality have rebelled against established governments and turned to political extremes. Liberal democracy, history’s greatest engine of growth, now struggles to overcome unprecedented economic headwinds—from aging populations to scarce resources to unsustainable debt burdens.

In Edge of Chaos, Dambisa Moyo shows why economic growth is essential to global stability and why liberal democracies are failing to produce it today. Rather than turning away from democracy, she argues, we must fundamentally reform it. Edge of Chaos presents a radical blueprint for change in order to galvanize growth and ensure the survival of democracy in the 21st century.

What You Don’t Know About Leadership, But Probably Should: Applications to Daily Life
Jeffrey Kottler
Oxford University Press, April 2018, $32.95

Leadership is not just for CEOs. We all find ourselves in leadership positions at one time or another, whether in meetings and in classes or at social events and at family gatherings. Yet, even though leadership is the single most studied aspect of all human behaviour, there remains a scarcity of qualified leaders to step into critical positions. This deficit is laid bare in the gulf between what leaders are trained to do and how they actually act.

What You Don’t Know About Leadership focuses on key attributes such as self-confidence, flexibility, charisma, and humility while noting the serious pitfalls associated with traits such as hubris, immodesty, and narcissism. Jeffrey Kottler’s writing is candid and realistic. Though there are no easy rules or programs that instantly lead to success, there are steps you can take to make a difference in others’ lives, better manage conflict and stress, and ultimately serve as an effective leader.

Money: What It Is, How It’s Created, Who Gets It and Why It Matters
Sergio Focardi
Routledge, April 2018, $49.95

Understanding money—its creation, distribution, and the value attached to it—is critical to understanding a society. This book introduces the principal theories of money, integrating them with macroeconomics.

Sergio Focardi takes three perspectives: historical, showing how the forms of money evolve in society; engineering, discussing money as a social technology for free exchange; and scientific-philosophical, asking what is fundamental in money.

The book addresses five key questions. What is money? How is it generated? How is it distributed? How does money acquire value, and how does that value change? How does money impact the economy and society?

It will appeal to all those seeking an understanding of the interplay between money and society.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
Harvard Business Review Press, April 2018, $38.99

The idea of artificial intelligence (AI)—job-killing robots, self-driving cars, and self-managing organizations—captures the imagination, evoking a combination of wonder and dread for those of us who will have to deal with the consequences. But what if it’s not quite so complicated? The real job of AI, argue these three economists, is to lower the cost of prediction. And once you start talking about costs, you can use some well-established economics to cut through the hype. The constant challenge for all managers is to make decisions under uncertainty. And AI contributes by making knowing what’s coming in the future cheaper and more certain.

But decision-making has another component: judgment, which is firmly in the realm of humans, not machines. Making prediction cheaper means we can make more predictions more accurately and assess them with our better (human) judgment. Once managers can separate tasks into components of prediction and judgment, we can begin to understand how to optimize the interface between humans and machines. More than just an account of AI’s powerful capabilities, Prediction Machines shows managers how they can most effectively leverage AI, disrupting business as usual only where required, and provides businesses with a tool kit to navigate the coming wave of challenges and opportunities.

When the Wolves Bite: Two Billionaires, One Company, and an Epic Wall Street Battle
Scott Wapner
PublicAffairs, April 2018, $35.00

The inside story of the clash of two of Wall Street’s biggest, richest, toughest, most aggressive players—Carl Icahn and Bill Ackman—and the little company caught in the middle.

With their unprecedented amounts of capital and their savvy understanding of business, activist investors Icahn and Ackman have the ability to move markets and change the fortunes of investors, workers, and even large companies with the flick of a wrist. But what happens when they run into the one thing in business they can’t control: each other?

For this book, Scott Wapner has gained unprecedented access to all the players and unravels this remarkable war of egos, showing the extreme measures the participants were willing to take. The result is both a rollicking business story and a cautionary tale about the power that, 10 years after the financial crisis, still lives in the hands of a precious few.

Soon: An Overdue History of Procrastination, From Leonardo and Darwin to You and Me
Andrew Santella
Dey Street Books, March 2018, $31.99

An entertaining, fact-filled defence of the nearly universal tendency to procrastinate, drawing on the stories of history’s greatest delayers, and on the work of psychologists, philosophers, and behavioural economists to explain why we put off what we’re supposed to be doing and why we shouldn’t feel so bad about it.

Drawing on an eclectic mix of historical case studies in procrastination—from Leonardo da Vinci to Frank Lloyd Wright, and from Old Testament prophets to Civil War generals—Andrew Santella offers a sympathetic take on habitual postponement. He questions our devotion to “the cult of efficiency” and suggests that delay and deferral can help us understand what truly matters to us. Being attentive to our procrastination, Santella writes, means asking “whether the things the world wants us to do are really worth doing.”

Risk Arbitrage: An Investor’s Guide (2nd edition)
Keith Moore
Wiley, May 2018, $114.00

Fully updated with new laws, cases, and techniques, Risk Arbitrage is the definitive guide to the field and features a comprehensive overview of the theory, techniques, and tools that traders and risk managers need to be effective. This new edition is completely updated and fully revised to reflect the changes to laws and technology, and includes new case studies and a detailed discussion of computer-based trading systems. Readers gain deep insight into the factors and policies that affect merger transactions, and the new developments that allow individuals to compete with professionals in managing risk arbitrage portfolios. The book provides techniques for computing spreads and determining risk, with practice exercises that allow readers to become confident with new methods before using them professionally.

The current wave of corporate mergers, acquisitions, restructurings, and similar transactions has created unprecedented opportunities for those versed in contemporary risk arbitrage techniques. At the same time, the nature of the current merger wave has provided such transactions a much higher degree of predictability than ever before, making risk arbitrage more attractive to all types of investors. Risk Arbitrage provides the essential guidance needed to participate in the business.