The First 90 Days, Updated and Expanded: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter
Michael Watkins
Harvard Business Review Press, $33.50

The world’s most trusted guide for leaders in transition. Transitions are a critical time for leaders. In fact, most agree that moving into a new role is the biggest challenge a manager will face. While transitions offer a chance to start fresh and make needed changes in an organization, they also place leaders in a position of acute vulnerability. Missteps made during the crucial first three months in a new role can jeopardize or even derail your success. In this updated and expanded version of the international bestseller, The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins offers proven strategies for conquering the challenges of transitions—no matter where you are in your career.

Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor: The New Way to Fast-Track Your Career
Ann Hewlett
Harvard Business Review Press, $23.00

You need more than a mentor when traditional pathways to career progression have all but disappeared. Mentors used to be the answer, but in today’s world, research shows that they are not enough to help you advance. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, economist, author, and originator of such prominent ideas as off-ramping and on-ramping, shows why sponsorship is the new route to success. What makes a sponsor different from a mentor is critical in terms of getting you into the role you covet and deserve.

Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best at Could Be Your Biggest Problem
Robert E. Kaplan and Robert B. Kaiser
Berrett-Kohler, $22.95

Once you’ve discovered your strengths, you need to discover something else: your strengths can work against you. You can have too much of a good thing. Many leaders know this on some intuitive level, and they see it in others. But they don’t see it as clearly in themselves. Mainly, they think of leadership development as working on their weaknesses. No wonder. Nationally recognized leadership experts Bob Kaplan and Rob Kaiser have conducted thousands of assessments of senior executives designed to determine when their strengths are betraying them.

The Little Book of Venture Capital Investing: Empowering Economic Growth and Investment Portfolios
Louis Gerken
Wiley, $27.95

Having been thrown for a loop by the bursting of the tech bubble more than a decade ago, the venture capital industry has suddenly come roaring back to life over the past two years. In 2011 alone, more than $7.5 billion in venture capital was invested, representing more than a 19 percent increase over the following year, in more than 966 companies. A majority of these companies reside in the life sciences, Internet, and alternative energy sectors. Written by Lou Gerken, a noted international authority on venture capital and alternative investments, this book tells you everything you need to know about the venture capital industry’s important role in enhancing economic growth and employment. It is also the perfect go-to primer on making venture capital investments to enhance portfolio returns.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
Gregory Zuckerman
Portfolio, November 19, 2013, $31.50

In the last five years, the United States has seen a historic burst of oil and natural gas production, easing the U.S.’s insatiable hunger for energy. A new drilling process called fracking has made the U.S. the world’s fastest growing energy power, on track to pass Saudi Arabia by 2020. But despite headlines and controversy, no previous book has shown how the revolution really happened. The Frackers tells the dramatic tale of how a group of ambitious and headstrong wildcatters ignored the ridicule of experts and the derision of colleagues to pursue massive, long-overlooked deposits.

Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market
Noah Horowitz
Princeton University Press, $24.95

Art today is defined by its relationship to money as never before. Prices of living artists’ works have been driven to unprecedented heights, conventional boundaries within the art world have collapsed, and artists now think ever more strategically about how to advance their careers. Noah Horowitz exposes the inner workings of the contemporary art market, explaining how this unique economy came to be, how it works, and where it’s headed.

The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting
Alan Greenspan
Penguin Press, October 22, 2013, $38.00

Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role in economic decision making in the world saw beforehand the storm for what it was. How had our models so utterly failed us? To answer this question, Alan Greenspan embarked on a rigorous and far-reaching multiyear examination of how “Homo economicus” predicts the economic future, and how it can predict it better. The Map and the Territory is nothing less than an effort to update our forecasting conceptual grid using 21st-century technologies. It integrates the history of economic prediction, the new work of behavioural economists, and the fruits of the author’s own remarkable career to offer a thrillingly lucid and empirically based grounding in what we can know about economic forecasting and what we can’t.