Decoding CEO-Speak

Russell Craig and Joel Amernic

Rotman-UTP Publishing, September 2021, $34.95

The words of business leaders matter. They can spark action, enhance branding, share knowledge, transmit values, and influence social and cultural behaviour.

Decoding CEO-Speak  critiques the public language of a powerful class of people: the chief executive officers (CEOs) of major companies. Interest in the behaviour and thinking of CEOs is not confined only to their corporation’s direct stakeholders: the public is also increasingly interested in where CEOs stand on current issues and community debates.

Decoding CEO-Speak  demonstrates how monitoring the language of CEOs can yield valuable insights into a company’s policy, strategy, and ethicality, and how it can point to the priorities, values, and personality of a CEO. The book will appeal to CEOs, senior managers, and public relations and media consultants, as well as business professors, students, and corporate stakeholders who want to find otherwise disguised meaning in the words of leaders.

Balancing Acts: A Human Systems Approach to Organizational Change

James Conklin

Rotman-UTP Publishing

October 2021, $36.95

Balancing Acts is about organizational change. It offers consultants and managers a simple, powerful way to think about change and describes a four-phase iterative process for implementing change. The book discusses many examples of change initiatives in different types of organizations and confronts head-on the problems and pitfalls that often arise. Conklin explains why organizational change can be so difficult and shows that by balancing a set of competing psychological and systemic challenges, interveners can increase their chances of success.

Conklin shows that human groups function as complex systems and that a change initiative is not a linear progression toward a predefined conclusion. Rather, change is an iterative process that involves a search for feasible and useful solutions. The book’s central argument is that, while leading or supporting this search, consultants and leaders must balance four critical concerns. They must balance confrontation with compassion, participation with observation, assertion with inquiry, and planfulness with emergence.

The Hidden Habits of Genius: Beyond Talent, IQ, and Grit-Unlocking the Secrets of Greatness

Craig Wright

HarperCollins

October 2021, $21.99

Einstein. Beethoven. Picasso. Jobs. The word “genius” evokes these iconic figures whose cultural contributions have irreversibly shaped society. Yet Beethoven could not multiply. Picasso couldn’t pass a fourth grade math test. And Jobs left high school with a 2.65 GPA. What does this say about our metrics for measuring success and achievement today? Why do we teach children to behave and play by the rules when the transformative geniuses of Western culture have done just the opposite? And what is genius, really?

Professor Craig Wright, creator of Yale University’s popular “Genius Course,” has devoted more than two decades to exploring these questions and probing the nature of genius, which is deeply embedded in our culture. In The Hidden Habits of Genius, he reveals what we can learn from the lives of those we have dubbed “geniuses,” past and present. This book will not make you a genius. But embracing the hidden habits of these transformative individuals can make you more strategic, creative, successful, and, ultimately, happier.

Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day

Amishi P. Jha

HarperCollins

October 2021, $35.99

Research shows we are missing 50 percent of our lives. Why? Because we aren’t paying attention. From the constant buzzing of your phone, to the lure of your media feed, to your unrelenting, all-encompassing, and ever-growing mental to-do list, the demands on your attention have never been so intense. The result is an escalating crisis of feeling foggy, scattered, and overwhelmed. Remarkably, the solution to our attention crisis has been right here in front of us the entire time.

An acclaimed neuroscientist, Amishi P. Jha, PhD has dedicated her life’s work to understanding the science of attention at every level, from studying brain imaging in a lab to field testing soldiers, athletes, students, and firefighters. Her mission has been to scientifically determine how we can harness the full power of our attention to better meet all of life’s demands. Dr. Jha expertly guides the reader through fascinating research, debunks common assumptions, and offers stunning new insights into where presence and purpose really come from. Peak Mind  reveals remarkably easy-to-adapt, flexible twelve-minute-a-day exercises to lift the mental fog, declutter the mind, and strengthen focus so that you can experience more of your life.

Gentelligence: The Revolutionary Approach to Leading an Intergenerational Workforce

Megan Gerhardt, Josephine Nachemson-Ekwall, and Brandon Fogel

Rowman & Littlefield

June 2021, $42.00

No one needs another book about how to lead millennials—what we need is a book about harnessing the untapped potential of the diversity of thought found in a multigenerational workforce. Gentelligence is that book. It presents a transformative way to end the generational wars once and for all.

Leading a generationally diverse workforce is challenging, but this book provides a reader’s guide of best-in-class strategies for harnessing and unleashing its potential. The book first introduces the concept of “gentelligence” as a powerful business strategy and shows why it is critical for the future of work. It then presents a practical guide and a call to action for leaders of all ages to unlock the potential strengths of each generation. Readers will learn how an intergenerational workforce can be reframed as a profound business opportunity and discover how gentelligence can help them win the talent war, create strong, diverse teams, and build adaptable cultures that will flourish in an era of rapid change. Gentelligence shares groundbreaking evidence that will have readers thinking about their generationally diverse workforce in an entirely different way. Unlike other books on generational leadership, this book rejects common stereotypes assigned to different generations, replacing them with a deep understanding of why those who grew up in different times may behave in unique and valuable ways. The authors challenge leaders to go beyond simply accepting generational differences to proactively leveraging them to increase engagement, innovation, and organizational success.

Crucial Conversations, Third Edition

Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Rob McMillan, Al Switzler, and Emily Gregory

McGraw-Hill Education

October 2021, $27.95

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today’s workplace. Crucial Conversations  provides powerful skills to ensure all conversations—especially difficult ones—lead to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, the book teaches readers how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and how to master high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person. Whether they take place at work or at home, with your coworkers or your spouse, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future.

The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World

Dorie Clark

Harvard Business Review Press

September 2021, $36.99

Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments necessary for long-term growth, the same is true in our own personal and professional lives. We need to reorient ourselves to see the big picture so we can tap into the power of small changes that, if made today, will have an enormous and disproportionate impact on our future success. We need to start playing the long game.

As top business thinker and Duke University professor Dorie Clark explains, we all know intellectually that lasting success requires persistence and effort. Yet so much of the relentless pressure in our culture pushes us toward doing what’s easy, what’s guaranteed, or what looks glamourous in the moment. In The Long Game, Clark argues for a different path. It’s about doing small things over time to achieve our goals—and being willing to keep at them, even when they seem pointless, boring, or hard.

Global Recession: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review, Martin Reeves, Andris A. Zoltners, Claudio Fernandez-Araoz, and Ranjay Gulati

Harvard Business Review Press

March 2021, $29.99

You’ve weathered the shock, the lockdowns, and the slow crawl back. But with a new normal comes new risks—and new opportunities. What must you and your business do now to come out of the downturn stronger and better positioned for the future?

Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company’s future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR’s smartest thinking on fast-moving issues—blockchain, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and more—each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow.

Reimagining Global Philanthropy: The Community Bank Model of Social Development

Kirk S. Bowman and Jon R. Wilcox

Columbia University Press

September 2021, $30.95

Well-meaning Westerners want to find ways to help the less fortunate. Today, many are not just volunteering abroad and donating to international non-profits, but also advancing innovations and launching projects that aim to be socially transformative. However, often these activities are not efficient ways of helping others, and too many projects cause more harm than good.

Applying lessons from the success of community banks, Kirk Bowman and Jon Wilcox develop and implement a new model that significantly increases philanthropic efficacy. Their straightforward and rigorously tested approach calls for community members to take the lead, while outside partners play a supporting role. Bowman and Wilcox recount how they tested the model in Brazil, demonstrating the value of giving people in marginalized communities the opportunity to innovate. In a time of widespread social reckoning, this book shows how global philanthropy can confront its blind spots and failures in order to achieve truly transformative outcomes.

The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

Laura Shin

PublicAffairs

November 2021, $38.00

In their short history, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone through booms, busts, and internecine wars. Yet today they are very much still with us: Bitcoin currently trades for over $50,000, and the value of all crypto assets is greater than $1.7 trillion. The central promise of crypto is too good to pass up: vast fortunes that are made from decentralized networks not controlled by any single entity and not yet regulated by many governments.  

Yet cryptocurrency was growing increasingly marginal until a brilliant new idea changed its fortunes once again: Ethereum. In this book, Laura Shin takes readers inside the creation of this new form of cryptocurrency network, which enabled users to launch their own new coins, and in so doing, created a new crypto fever. In this book, you’ll meet people like Vitalik Buterin, the wunderkind whose idea quickly became a $100 billion empire; Charles Hoskinson, the initial CEO who left the project within five months; and Joe Lubin, a former Goldman Sachs Vice President whose early involvement in Bitcoin and Ethereum helped him become one of crypto’s most well-known billionaires. Sparks flew as these outsized personalities fought for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity.

The fortunes of crypto continue to rise and fall, but the people fighting to take it mainstream are making and losing fortunes and careers on it. This fascinating book shows the crypto market for what it really is: a deeply personal struggle to influence the coming revolution in money, culture, and power.