The Prosperity Paradox: How Innovation Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty
Clayton M. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, and Karen Dillon
HarperCollins, January 2019, $36.99

Global poverty is one of the world’s most vexing problems. For decades, we’ve assumed smart, well-intentioned people will eventually be able to change the economic trajectory of poor countries. From education to healthcare, and infrastructure to eradicating corruption, too many solutions rely on trial and error. Essentially, the plan is often to identify areas that need help, flood them with resources, and hope to see change over time. But hope is not an effective strategy.

Applying the rigorous and theory-driven analysis he’s known for, Clayton M. Christensen suggests a better way. The right kind of innovation not only builds companies but also builds countries. The Prosperity Paradox identifies the limits of common economic development models, which tend to be top-down efforts, and offers a new framework for economic growth based on entrepreneurship and market-creating innovation. Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, and Karen Dillon use successful examples from America’s own economic development—including Ford, Eastman Kodak, and Singer Sewing Machines—and show how similar models have worked in other regions such as Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, Rwanda, India, Argentina, and Mexico.

The ideas in this book will help companies desperate for real, long-term growth see actual, sustainable progress where they’ve failed before. But The Prosperity Paradox is more than a business book; it’s a call to action for anyone who wants a fresh take for making the world a better and more prosperous place.

The Future is Asian
Parag Khanna
Simon & Schuster, February 2019, $39.95

In the 19th century, the world was Europeanized. In the 20th century, it was Americanized. Now, in the 21st century, it’s being Asianized.

The “Asian century” is even bigger than you think. Far greater than just China, the new Asian system taking shape is a multi-civilizational order spanning Saudi Arabia to Japan, Russia to Australia, Turkey to Indonesia—linking five billion people through trade, finance, infrastructure, and diplomatic networks that, together, represent 40 percent of global GDP. China has taken a lead in building the new Silk Roads across Asia, but it will not lead this new order alone. Rather, Asia is rapidly returning to the centuries-old patterns of commerce, conflict, and cultural exchange that thrived long before European colonialism and American dominance. Asians will determine their own future—and as they collectively assert their interests around the world, they’ll determine ours as well.

Diversity Beyond Lip Service: A Coaching Guide for Challenging Bias
La’Wana Harris
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, May 2019, $29.99

The elephant in the room with diversity work is that people with privilege must use that privilege to allow others equal access to power. This is often why diversity efforts falter—people believe in diversity until they feel they have to give something up. How do we talk them through this shift?

La’Wana Harris introduces inclusion coaching, a new tool based on cutting-edge research that identifies the stages of preparation, implementation, and “self-work” necessary to help individuals, teams, and organizations build a sustainable culture of inclusion. Harris’s six-stage COMMIT model—Commit to courageous action, Open your eyes and ears, Move beyond lip service, Make room for controversy and conflict, Invite new perspectives, and Tell the truth even when it hurts—provides a proven process for making people aware of their own conscious and unconscious biases, and concrete steps to make inclusion an embedded reality.

Harris offers managers and diversity coaches new models to empower everyone from employees to CEOs to “do” inclusion and address deep-rooted biases that are often invisible. She addresses the growing need to challenge bias and build authentic cultures where everyone can feel a sense of belonging.

The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work
Lisa Taylor and Fern Lebo
Rotman-UTP Publishing, April 2019, $32.95

The definitive guide to maximizing workforce value, The Talent Revolution exposes work-life longevity as the most influential driver transforming today’s workplace—a competitive edge for organizations smart enough to capitalize on it.

This is a first—a book that positions older workers as revolutionaries and reveals how organizations that engage employees across all life stages will outperform their competitors. With clarity and specificity, it describes new models, debunks commonly held myths about older workers, demolishes justifications for traditional structures and attitudes, and builds the case for a reset that will help smart companies profit from their most valuable assets.

Through case studies, metrics, strategies, and tactics, The Talent Revolution explores the impact of workforce demographics on the future of work and provides new, actionable strategies for turning an aging workforce into a competitive advantage.

The Good Fight: Use Productive Conflict to Get Your Team and Organization Back on Track
Liane Davey
Page Two Books, March 2019, $29.95

In the modern workplace, conflict has become a dirty word. After all, conflict is antithetical to teamwork, employee engagement, and a positive company culture. Or is it?

The truth is, our teams and organizations require conflict to get things done. But we avoid conflict and build up conflict debt by deferring and dodging the difficult decisions. Our organizations are paying the price—becoming less productive, less innovative, and less competitive. Individuals are paying, too—suffering from overwhelming workloads, endless drama, and sleepless nights.

In The Good Fight, Liane Davey shows you how to create the productive conflict your organization needs to get along and get stuff done. Drawing on her 20-year career as an advisor to the C-suite, Davey shares real-world examples and practical tools you and your team can use to handle even the most contentious conflicts as allies—instead of adversaries. Filled with strategies you’ll use again and again, The Good Fight is an essential field guide for leaders at all levels.

Operational Risk Modeling in Financial Services: The Exposure, Occurrence, Impact Method
Patrick Naim and Laurent Condamin
Wiley, April 2019, $72.00

Operational Risk Modeling in Financial Services provides risk professionals with a forward-looking approach to risk modelling, based on structured management judgment over obsolete statistical methods. Proven over a decade’s use in significant banks and financial services firms in Europe and the U.S., the Exposure, Occurrence, Impact (XOI) method of operational risk modelling played an instrumental role in reshaping their operational risk (OpRisk) modelling approaches. In this book, the expert team that developed this methodology offers practical, in-depth guidance on XOI use and applications for a variety of major risks.

The Basel Committee has dismissed statistical approaches to risk modelling, leaving regulators and practitioners searching for the next generation of OpRisk quantification. The XOI method is ideally suited to fulfill this need, as a calculated, co-ordinated, consistent approach designed to bridge the gap between risk quantification and risk management. This book details the XOI framework and provides essential guidance for practitioners looking to change the OpRisk modelling paradigm.

Bubbles and Crashes: The Boom and Bust of Technological Innovation
Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch
Stanford University Press, February 2019, $47.50

Financial market bubbles are recurring, often painful, reminders of the costs and benefits of capitalism. While many books have studied financial manias and crises, most fail to compare times of turmoil with times of stability. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch give us new insights into the causes of speculative booms and busts. They identify a class of assets—major technological innovations—that can, but does not necessarily, produce bubbles. This methodological twist is essential: only by comparing similar events that sometimes lead to booms and busts can we ascertain the root causes of bubbles.

Using a sample of 88 technologies spanning 150 years, Goldfarb and Kirsch find that four factors play a key role in these episodes: the degree of uncertainty surrounding a particular innovation, the attentive presence of novice investors, the opportunity to directly invest in companies that specialize in the technology, and whether or not a technology is a good protagonist in a narrative. Goldfarb and Kirsch consider the implications of their analysis for technology bubbles that may be in the works today, offer tools for investors to identify whether a bubble is happening, and propose policy measures that may mitigate the risks associated with future speculative episodes.

Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Fail So Badly
John Quiggin
Princeton University Press, April 2019, $40.50

Since 1946, Henry Hazlitt’s bestselling Economics in One Lesson has popularized the belief that economics can be boiled down to one simple lesson: market prices represent the true cost of everything. But one-lesson economics tells only half the story. It can explain why markets often work so well, but it can’t explain why they often fail so badly—or what we should do when they stumble. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Paul Samuelson quipped, “When someone preaches ‘economics in one lesson,’ I advise, go back for the second lesson.”

In Economics in Two Lessons, John Quiggin teaches both lessons, offering a masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes—and failures—of free markets. The book explains why market prices often fail to reflect the full cost of our choices to society as a whole. For example, every time we drive a car, fly in a plane, or flick a light switch, we contribute to global warming. But, in the absence of a price on carbon emissions, the costs of our actions are borne by everyone else. In such cases, government action is needed to achieve better outcomes. Two-lesson economics means giving up the dogmatism of laissez-faire as well as the reflexive assumption that any economic problem can be solved by government action, since the right answer often involves a mixture of market forces and government policy. But the payoff is huge: understanding how markets actually work—and what to do when they don’t. Economics in Two Lessons unlocks the essential issues at the heart of any economic question.

Whistleblowing: Toward a New Theory
Kate Kenny
Harvard University Press, April 2019, $58.50

Society needs whistleblowers, yet to speak up and expose wrongdoing often results in professional and personal ruin. Kate Kenny draws on the stories of whistleblowers to explain why this is, and what must be done to protect those who have the courage to expose the truth.

Despite their substantial contribution to society, whistleblowers are considered martyrs more than heroes. When people expose serious wrongdoing in their organizations, they’re often punished or ignored. Many end up isolated by colleagues, their professional careers destroyed. The financial industry, rife with scandals, is the focus of Kenny’s penetrating global study. Introducing whistleblowers from the U.S., the U.K., Switzerland, and Ireland working at companies like Wachovia, Halifax Bank of Scotland, and Countrywide/Bank of America, Whistleblowing suggests practices that would make it less perilous to hold the powerful to account and would leave us all better off.

Kenny interviewed the men and women who reported unethical and illegal conduct at major corporations in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis. Many were compliance officers working in influential organizations that claimed to follow the rules. Using the concept of affective recognition to explain how the norms at work powerfully influence our understandings of right and wrong, she reframes whistleblowing as a collective phenomenon, not just a personal choice but a vital public service.

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After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality
Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong, and Marshall Steinbaum
Harvard University Press, February 2019, $26.99

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty, in what is sure to be a much-debated book in its own right.

After Piketty opens with a discussion by Arthur Goldhammer, the book’s translator, of the reasons for Capital’s phenomenal success, followed by the published reviews of Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Robert Solow. The rest of the book is devoted to newly commissioned essays that interrogate Piketty’s arguments. Suresh Naidu and other contributors ask whether Piketty said enough about power, slavery, and the complex nature of capital. Laura Tyson and Michael Spence consider the impact of technology on inequality. Heather Boushey, Branko Milanovic, and others consider topics ranging from gender to trends in the global South. Emmanuel Saez lays out an agenda for future research on inequality, while a variety of essayists examine the book’s implications for the social sciences more broadly. Piketty replies to these questions in a substantial concluding chapter.

That’s What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together
Joanne Lipman
HarperCollins, February 2019, $21.99

The world has changed in the wake of the #MeToo movement. What comes next? Going beyond the message of Lean In and The Confidence Code, Joanne Lipman, Gannett’s chief content officer, offers solutions to help professionals solve gender gap issues and achieve parity at work in this inclusive and realistic handbook. Newly updated by the author to include a cheat sheet for taking positive action now, this timely, essential book also offers tools for having tough—but necessary—discussions.

Companies with more women in senior leadership perform better by virtually every financial measure, and women employees help boost creativity and can temper risky behaviour—such as the financial gambles behind the 2008 economic collapse.

Lipman raises intriguing questions to find workable solutions that individual managers, organizations, and policy-makers can employ to make work more equitable and rewarding for all professionals.