The Management of Innovation
Managing and Creating Technology Capital
Alberto Galasso
University of Toronto Press
May 2024, $37.95

Despite the importance of innovation for the growth of firms, industries, and the national economy, the strategic tools available to effectively manage and create new technologies are often neglected by entrepreneurs and corporate managers. The Management of Innovation examines how firms can leverage and create technology capital.

Over the past two decades, economists and management scholars have developed several new insights into how large companies and startups can be more innovative. Many of these research findings have not yet reached management practice. Alberto Galasso aims to address this issue by providing an accessible overview of the innovation literature and a discussion of the latest research findings.

The analysis considers the two key stages of the innovation process: technology management and technology creation. Each stage involves complex managerial decisions related to resource allocation and the assessment of relevant costs and benefits. This book examines the most frequent trade-offs that shape the innovation process across these two stages. It also provides an introduction to intellectual property and patent analytics. In doing so, The Management of Innovation provides MBA students and practitioners with the necessary tools and insights to help avoid poor decisions by startup entrepreneurs and corporate managers alike.

The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
Joseph E. Stiglitz
W.W. Norton
April 2024, $39.99

Joseph E. Stiglitz reveals why America’s core political and economic systems don’t offer true freedom. Taking on giants of neoliberalism and free market capitalism, such as Hayek and Friedman, Stiglitz turns these accepted ideas about our systems on their heads. The Road to Freedom offers a fundamental re-evaluation of democracy, economics, and what constitutes a good society, showing what kind of economic and political system is most likely to deliver a good society, including one that enhances meaningful freedoms for most individuals. Stiglitz’s latest is vital reading for anyone envisioning a future led by tolerance, education, and, above all, freedom.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
Nick Romeo
PublicAffairs
January 2024, $41.00

Confronted by the terrifying trends of the early twenty-first century—widening inequality, environmental destruction, and the immiseration of millions of workers around the world—many economists and business leaders still preach dogmas that lack evidence and create political catastrophe: Private markets are always more efficient than public ones; investment capital flows efficiently to necessary projects; massive inequality is the unavoidable side effect of economic growth; people are selfish and will only behave well with the right incentives.   But a growing number of people—academic economists, business owners, policy entrepreneurs, and ordinary people—are rejecting these myths and reshaping economies around the world to reflect ethical and social values. Though they differ in approach, all share a vision of the economy as a place of moral action and accountability. Journalist Nick Romeo has spent years covering the world’s most innovative economic and policy ideas for The New Yorker. Romeo takes us on an extraordinary journey through the unforgettable stories and successes of people working to build economies that are more equal, just, and livable. 

Never Not Working: Why the Always-On Culture Is Bad for Business—and How to Fix It
Malissa Clark
Harvard Business Review Press
February 2024, $41.99

The always-on, hustle culture creates an unhealthy, counterproductive relationship with work.

Many workers believe that to compete with other top talent, they must embrace a culture that rewards long hours and a constant connection to work. Businesses and society endorse busyness, overwork, and extreme commitment as the most valued traits in workers. Sometimes that endorsement is explicit, as when Elon Musk told X/Twitter employees to work “long hours at high intensity” or get fired. More often it’s an implicit contract, a buildup of organizational and cultural norms and the adoption of new technologies that make it easy to tether people to work.

Either way, this workaholic behaviour is unhealthy and counterproductive for workers and for organizations. It’s time to fight back. Malissa Clark—a preeminent researcher on the culture of overwork—explains how in Never Not Working. Clark examines overwork and burnout, not just from the individual’s perspective but from an organizational perspective too. She delivers a comprehensive, nuanced definition of workaholism, busting myths along the way—working long hours, it turns out, doesn’t automatically make you a workaholic. She also helps you assess whether you’re falling prey to the phenomenon and whether you’re creating workaholics in your organization.

Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order
Saleha Mohsin
Penguin Publishing Group
March 2024, $39.99

From Bloomberg News reporter Saleha Mohsin, the untold story of how one of America’s most invincible institutions—the Treasury—has used the US dollar to define America’s role in the world and our economic future.

In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next 30 years of currency policy with the mantra, “A strong dollar is in America’s interest.” That mantra held, ushering in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America’s manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped US policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon—and what that means in a new age of crisis.

For decades, America has preferred its currency to be superpower-strong, the basis of a “strong dollar” policy that attracted foreign investors and pleased consumers. Drawing on Mohsin’s unparalleled access to current and former Treasury officials like Robert Rubin, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen, Paper Soldiers traces that policy’s intended and unintended consequences, including the rise of populist sentiment and trade war with China—culminating in an unprecedented attack on the dollar’s pristine status during the Trump presidency—and connects the dollar’s weaponization from 9/11 to the deployment of crippling financial sanctions against Russia. Ultimately, Mohsin argues that, untethered from many of the economic assumptions of the last generation, the power and influence of the American dollar is now at stake.

With first-hand reporting and fresh analysis that illustrates the vast, often unappreciated power that the Treasury Department wields at home and abroad, Paper Soldiers tells the inside story of how we really got here—and the future not only of the almighty dollar, but the nation’s teetering role as a democratic superpower.

The Warren Buffett Way, 4th edition
Robert G. Hagstrom
Wiley
April 2024, $35.99

This best-selling Buffett book is for readers of the original and other editions, Buffett fans, and general finance readers. The cloth and paper editions of the previous three editions sold over a million copies, and the first edition spent 21 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Author Hagstrom is top authority on Buffett: He has been following the life and success of Warren Buffet since 1984—some time before he became the investment guru and business media magnate that he is today. While many books have been written on Warren Buffett, Hagstrom’s The Warren Buffett Way is the most detailed and authoritative interpretation of Buffett’s investment methods. 

Possible: How We Survive (and Thrive) in an Age of Conflict
William Ury
Harper Collins
February 2024, $39.50

The author of the world’s best-selling book on negotiation draws on his nearly 50 years of experience and knowledge grappling with the world’s toughest conflicts to offer a way out of the seemingly impossible problems of our time.

Conflict is increasing everywhere, threatening everything we hold dear—from our families to our democracy, from our workplaces to our world. In nearly every area of society, we are fighting more and collaborating less, especially over crucial problems that demand solutions.

With this groundbreaking book, bestselling author and international negotiator William Ury shares a new “path to possible”—time-tested practices that will help readers unlock their power to constructively engage and transform conflict. Part memoir, part manual, part manifesto, Possible offers stories and sage advice from Ury’s nearly 50 years of experience on the front lines of some of the world’s toughest conflicts.

One of the world’s top experts in the field, Ury has worked on conflicts ranging from boardroom battles to labour strikes, from the US partisan divide to family feuds, from wars in the Middle East, Colombia, and Ukraine to helping the US and USSR avoid nuclear disaster. Now, in Possible, he helps us tackle the seemingly intransigent problems facing us.

In Possible, Ury argues conflict is natural. In fact, we need more conflict, not less, if we are to grow, change, evolve and solve our problems creatively. While we may not be able to end conflict, we can transform it—unleashing new, unexpected possibilities.

Successfully tested at Harvard University with almost a thousand participants from business, government, academia, and the nonprofit sector, Ury’s “Path to Possible” proved so valuable that Harvard’s Program on Negotiation selected it as its inaugural online daylong in April 2022.

Possible introduces Ury’s methods and makes them available for everyone. Combining accessible frameworks and powerful storytelling and offering dozens of examples, it is an essential guide for anyone looking to break through the toughest conflicts in their workplace, family, community, or the world.

The Trading Game: A Confession
Gary Stevenson
Crown Currency
March 2024, $39.99

Ever since he was a kid, kicking broken soccer balls on the run-down streets of East London, Gary Stevenson dreamed of something bigger. As luck would have it, he was good at numbers.

At the London School of Economics, wearing tracksuits and sneakers, Stevenson shocked his posh classmates by winning a competition called “The Trading Game.” The prize? A golden ticket to a new life as the youngest trader at Citibank. A place where you could make more money than you’d ever imagined. Where your colleagues are dysfunctional geniuses and insecure bullies, yet start to feel like family. Where, against the odds, you become the bank’s most profitable trader, closing deals worth nearly a trillion dollars a day.

Soon you are dreaming of numbers in your sleep—and then you stop sleeping at all. But what happens when winning starts to feel like losing? You’re making a killing betting on millions of people becoming poorer—like the very people you grew up with. The economy is slipping off a precipice, and your own sanity starts slipping with it. You want to stop, but you can’t. Because nobody ever leaves.

Would you stick, or quit? Even if it meant risking everything?

The Trading Game is an outrageous, unvarnished, white-knuckle journey to the dark heart of an intoxicating world—the trading floor—from someone who survived the game and then blew it all wide open.

Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance andMental Health
Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Page Two Books
February 2024, $24.95

Resilience is not a given. You need a strategy.

Leaders and business professionals handle gruelling hours and exceed high expectations. They are undaunted by challenges and embrace opportunities for growth. They assume they are resilient.

But given enough demands, anyone can burn out. This makes logical sense, yet you likely still think it could never be you. You are fabulous and at risk of burning out.

Resilience is not an innate character trait. Whether you’re in a leadership role or working as part of a team, you need to implement strategies that build and nurture resilience. You need a resilience plan.

Award-winning mental health expert Marie-Hélène Pelletier draws on her clinical practice and extensive knowledge in therapeutics and business practices to explore how resilience is the best defense against burnout and how everyone can build it in themselves—not with a one-size-fits-all plan, but with strategies to help you create a custom plan.

Pelletier uses relatable stories and activities to bring her concepts into context. By working through the exercises in this practical guide, you will have a goal-oriented, custom strategy and the knowledge to implement and sustain it to protect your health and success into the future.