The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down 

Jonathan Gottschall

Basic Books
November 2021, $35.00

Storytelling, a tradition that built human civilization, may soon destroy it.

We are storytelling animals. No other tool is as essential to human civilization as stories. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But in The Story Paradox, Jonathan Gottschall argues that there is a dark side to storytelling that we can no longer ignore.

Stories tend to be divisive, and they are especially good at short-circuiting rational thought. Societies can succeed or fail depending on how they manage these problems. Now, new technologies that amplify the effects of disinformation campaigns, cultural tribalism, conspiracy theories, and fake news have made separating fact from fiction nearly impossible.

With clarity and conviction, Gottschall reveals why our biggest asset is also our greatest threat, and what, if anything, can be done. 

Risk: A User’s Guide

Stanley McChrystal and Anna Butrico

Portfolio
October 2021, $40.00

In this new book, General Stanley McChrystal offers a battle-tested system for detecting and responding to risk. Instead of defining risk as a force to predict, McChrystal and coauthor Anna Butrico show that there are in fact ten dimensions of control we can adjust at any given time. By closely monitoring these controls, we can maintain a healthy “risk immune system” that allows us to effectively anticipate, identify, analyze, and act on the ever-present possibility that things will not go as planned.

Drawing on examples ranging from military history to the business world and offering practical exercises to improve preparedness, McChrystal and Butrico illustrate how these ten factors are always in effect and how, by considering them, individuals and organizations can exert mastery over every conceivable sort of risk that they might face.

Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know 

J. S. Nelson and Lynn A. Stout

Oxford University Press
January 2022, $18.95

In today’s turbulent business climate, business ethics are more important than ever. Surveys of employees show that misconduct is on the rise. Cover stories reporting indictments, prosecutions, and penalties imposed for unethical business conduct appear almost daily. Legislatures pass requirements elevating the levels of punishment and their enforcement against corporations and individuals. Organizations face pressure to design and implement effective ethics and compliance programs. As a result, businesses and businesspeople are increasingly worried that their conduct might cross lines that put their wealth and reputations at risk.

Written in a short question-and-answer style, this resource provides engaging and readable introductions to the basic principles of business ethics and is an invaluable guide for dealing with ethical dilemmas.

Fake Money, Real Danger: Protect Yourself and Grow Wealth While You Still Can 

David Wiedemer, Robert A. Wiedemer and Cindy S. Spitzer

Wiley
December 2021, $35.99

Fake Money, Real Danger reveals how the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s response of massive money printing and borrowing is putting us on a faster track to the coming aftershock.

What is “fake money”?
“Fake money” refers to massive money printing by the US government that increased the US money supply by more than 800 percent since 2008—printing more money in just two months of 2020 than during the entire financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.

What is the “real danger”?
“Real danger” comes from the fact that all US economic growth since the financial crisis is entirely due to government borrowing.  All of it. Without massive government borrowing they would have no growth at all. Stock markets will likely continue to rise because of “fake money,” but will face an inevitable crisis when continued massive money printing creates serious inflation.

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What it Should Be

Diane Coyle

Princeton University Press
October 2021, $33.50

Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems and opportunities facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world’s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency.

Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are “cogs”: self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by “monsters”: untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. What is worse, by treating people as cogs, economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces. In response, 

Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether economics can ever be objective, as it influences what it analyzes. The discipline needs to correct its striking lack of diversity and inclusion if it is to be able to offer new solutions to new problems.

The Car That Knew Too Much: Can a Machine Be Moral? 

Jean-François Bonnefon

MIT Press
October 2021, $29.95

Human drivers don’t find themselves facing such moral dilemmas as, “Should I sacrifice myself by driving off a cliff if that could save the life of a little girl on the road?” Human brains aren’t fast enough to make that kind of calculation; the car is over the cliff in a nanosecond. A self-driving car, on the other hand, can compute fast enough to make such a decision, to do whatever humans have programmed it to do. But what should that be? This book investigates how people want driverless cars to decide matters of life and death.

In The Car That Knew Too Much, psychologist Jean-François Bonnefon reports on a groundbreaking experiment that captured what people think cars should do in situations where not everyone can be saved. Sacrifice the passengers for pedestrians? Save children rather than adults? Kill one person so many can live? Bonnefon and his collaborators Iyad Rahwan and Azim Shariff designed the largest experiment in moral psychology ever: the Moral Machine, an interactive website that has allowed people—eventually, millions of them, from 233 countries and territories—to make choices within detailed accident scenarios. Bonnefon discusses the responses (reporting, among other things, that babies, children, and pregnant women were most likely to be saved), the media frenzy over news of the experiment, and the scholarly responses to it.

Supporters of driverless cars argue that they will be in fewer accidents than human-driven cars. It’s up to humans to decide how many fatal accidents we will allow these cars to have.

HBR’s 10 Must Reads 2022: The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review

Harvard Business Review Press
October 2021, $33.50

A year’s worth of management wisdom, all in one place: Here are the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With insights from an impressive compilation of authors and company examples from UPS to Apple, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

The Definitive Management Ideas of the Year from Harvard Business Review:

• Includes the leading ideas of the year, all in one place, selected by HBR’s editors
• Gives readers the opportunity to catch up on a year’s worth of recent ideas from HBR quickly—or to collect articles over time
• Offers articles on leadership, strategy, and management by top thinkers in business today
• Includes an introduction written by HBR’s editors

Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers 

Chip Heath and Karla Starr

Simon & Schuster
January 2022, $29.99

Understanding numbers is essential—but humans aren’t built to understand them. Until very recently, most languages had no words for numbers greater than five—anything from six to infinity was known as “lots.” While the numbers in our world have gotten increasingly complex, our brains are stuck in the past. How can we translate millions and billions and milliseconds and nanometers into things we can comprehend and use?

Author Chip Heath excels at teaching others about making ideas stick, and here, in Making Numbers Count, he outlines specific principles of how to translate a number into our brain’s language. This book is filled with examples of extreme number makeovers, vivid before-and-after examples that take a dry number and present it in a way that makes people click in and say, “Wow, now I get it!”

The Power of Pressure: Why Pressure Isn’t the Problem, It’s the Solution

Dane Jensen

HarperCollins
August 2021, $29.99

What’s the most pressure you’ve ever been under? How did you react? What helped? What didn’t? Over the past five years, Dane Jensen has asked these questions of thousands of high performers.

What has emerged from these conversations is that while everyone’s experiences under pressure are unique, pressure follows patterns and develops in predictable ways. If we can recognize the patterns, we can improve our ability to sidestep the biological traps that can sabotage us—and instead use the energy that accompanies pressure to thrive. The Power of Pressure combines the insights gathered from Jensen’s work with the latest research in biology and neuroscience to help you:

• Understand and use the “pressure equation” of importance, uncertainty, and volume

• Escape the traps of pressure with effective tools and tactics

• Be ambidextrous so that you can handle pressure both in peak pressure moments and over the long haul

• Reduce tension, sleep better, and have more energy so that you can meet challenges head-on

• Recognize pressure moments so that you can prepare for those times you are likely to feel the heat 

• Leverage strategies so that you can give everything you’ve got when it’s most important 

Brenda Bickram is the manager responsible for special orders and corporate sales at Books for Business online store.