Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It
Scott Kupor
Portfolio, June 2019, $39.00

What are venture capitalists (VCs) saying about your start-up behind closed doors? And what can you do to influence that conversation?

If Silicon Valley is the greatest wealth-generating machine in the world, Sand Hill Road is its humming engine. That’s where you’ll find the biggest names in venture capital (VC), including famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, where lawyer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist Scott Kupor serves as managing partner.

Whether you’re trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VC firms think. In Secrets of Sand Hill Road, Kupor explains exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest, and how entrepreneurs can get the best possible deal and make the most of their relationships with VCs. Kupor explains, for instance, why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category; what to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of the business; and why you need to build relationships with potential acquirers long before you decide to sell.

Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life
Alan B. Krueger
Crown Busines, June 2019, $37.009

The music industry is a leading indicator of today’s economy, as it was among the first sectors to be disrupted by the latest wave of technology. That’s why examining the ins and outs of how musicians create and sell new songs and plan concert tours can offer valuable lessons about what’s in store for businesses and employees in other industries that are struggling to adapt.

Drawing on interviews with leading band members, music executives, managers, and promoters, and using the latest data on revenues, royalties, streaming tour dates, and merchandise sales, Rockonomics takes readers backstage to show how the music industry really works—who makes money and how much, and how the economics of the music industry has undergone a radical transformation during recent decades.

Before digitalization and the ability to stream music over the Internet, rock stars made much of their income from record sales. Today, income from selling songs has plummeted, even for superstars like James Taylor and Taylor Swift. The real money nowadays is derived from concert sales: in 2017, for example, Billy Joel earned $27.4 million from his live performances and less than $2 million from record sales and streaming. Even Paul McCartney, who has written and recorded more No. 1 songs than anyone in music history, today earns 80 percent of his income from live concerts. In Rockonomics, Alan B. Krueger tackles commonly asked questions: How does a song become popular? How does a new artist break out in today’s winner-take-all economy? And how can musicians and everyday workers earn a living in the digital economy?

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
Michael O’Sullivan
PublicAffairs, May 2019, $39.00

The world is at a turning point. While globalization benefited many, it produced extremes with drastic wealth inequality, indebtedness, and political volatility among the most important. As the ground underneath globalization undergoes tectonic shifts, noisy, chaotic, and disorderly events—such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—are the first harbingers of a world being turned upside down.

In this book, Michael O’Sullivan shows the many ways the levelling of the 21st century will unfold: the levelling out of wealth between rich and poor countries; of power between nations and regions; of political accountability and responsibility between political leaders and “the people”; and of institutional power—away from central banks and defunct 21st-century institutions such as the WTO and IMF.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
Ben Mezrich
Flatiron Books, May 2019, $36.50

From Ben Mezrich—the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House—comes Bitcoin Billionaires, the fascinating story of Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires tells the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook.

Planning to start careers as venture capitalists, the brothers quickly discovered no one would take their money after their fight with Zuckerberg. While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally ran into an eccentric character who told them about a brand new idea: cryptocurrency. Immersing themselves in what was then an obscure and sometimes sinister world, they began to realize “crypto” is, in their own words, “either the next big thing or total bulls–t.” There was nothing left to do but make a bet.

From the Silk Road to the halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bitcoin Billionaires will take you on a wild and surprising ride while illuminating a tantalizing economic future.

How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers
Mihir A. Desai
Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019, $47.50

If you’re not a numbers person, then finance can be intimidating and easy to ignore. But if you want to advance in your career, you’ll need to make smart financial decisions and develop the confidence to clearly communicate those decisions to others.

In How Finance Works, Mihir A. Desai—a professor at Harvard Business School and author of The Wisdom of Finance—guides you into the complex but endlessly fascinating world of finance, demystifying it in the process. Through entertaining case studies, interactive exercises, full-colour visuals, and a conversational style that belies the topic, Desai tackles a broad range of topics that will give you the knowledge and skills you need to finally understand how finance works. These include how different financial levers can affect a company’s performance; the different ways in which companies fund their operations and investments; why finance is more concerned with cash flow than profits; how value is created, measured, and maximized; and the importance of capital markets in helping companies grow. Whether you’re a student, a manager, an aspiring CFO, or an entrepreneur, How Finance Works is the interactive guide you need to help you start thinking more deeply about the numbers.

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall
Harvard Business Review Press, April 2019, $40.50

You crave feedback. Your organization’s culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. Your competencies should be measured and your weaknesses shored up. Leadership is a thing.

These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today—but actually, they’re lies. As strengths guru and bestselling author Marcus Buckingham and Cisco Leadership and Team Intelligence head Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies—distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking—that we encounter every time we show up for work: nine lies, to be exact. These lies cause dysfunction and frustration, ultimately resulting in workplaces that are a pale shadow of what they could be.

But there are those who can get past the lies and discover what’s real. These freethinking leaders recognize the power and beauty of our individual uniqueness. They know that emergent patterns are more valuable than received wisdom and that evidence is more powerful than dogma.

With engaging stories and incisive analysis, Buckingham and Goodall reveal the essential truths that freethinking leaders will recognize immediately: it’s the strength and cohesiveness of your team, not your company’s culture, that matter most; we should focus less on top-down planning and more on giving our people reliable, real-time intelligence; rather than trying to align people’s goals, we should strive to align people’s sense of purpose and meaning; and people don’t want constant feedback—they want helpful attention.

This is the real world of work, as it is and as it should be. Nine Lies About Work reveals the few core truths that will help you show just how good you are to those who truly rely on you.

Detecting Accounting Fraud Before It’s Too Late
Oriol Amat
Wiley, April 2019, $59.99

Accounting fraud is the deliberate manipulation of accounting records in order to make a company’s financial performance seem better or worse than it actually is. Accounting scandals often have catastrophic consequences for shareholders and employees, and thus analysts and auditors must be equipped to detect this kind of fraud.

Oriol Amat provides a comprehensive guide to detecting accounting fraud for auditors investigating accounting fraud and analysts and managers seeking to prevent it. Amat describes a wide variety of warning signs, as well as several techniques for detecting and addressing fraud: understand the motivations and warning signs behind accounting fraud; get to know how accounting fraud is done and how to detect it; and avoid the losses that often come from accounting fraud.

It’s unfortunate that managers, auditors, and analysts must be wary of accounting fraud, but this book will equip them with the know-how to detect it before it’s too late.

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and how to fix it)
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Harvard Business Review Press, March 2019, $33.99

In this timely and provocative book, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic asks two powerful questions: Why is it so easy for incompetent men to become leaders? And why is it so hard for competent people— especially competent women—to advance?

Marshalling decades of rigorous research, Chamorro-Premuzic points out that although men make up a majority of leaders, they underperform when compared with female leaders. In fact, most organizations equate leadership potential with a handful of destructive personality traits, like overconfidence and narcissism. In other words, these traits may help someone get selected for a leadership role, but they backfire once the person has the job.

When competent women—and men who don’t fit the stereotype—are unfairly overlooked, we all suffer the consequences. The result is a deeply flawed system that rewards arrogance rather than humility, and loudness rather than wisdom.

There’s a better way. With clarity and verve, Chamorro-Premuzic shows us what it really takes to lead and how new systems and processes can help us put the right people in charge.

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What Would the Great Economists Do? How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today’s Biggest Problems
Linda Yueh
Picador, June 2019, $26.99

The problems economists have grappled have been familiar since the days of Adam Smith, but the ideas those economists have generated in response are often hard to digest—even before we try to apply them to today’s issues. Linda Yueh, an accomplished economist herself, is renowned for her combination of erudition and accessibility as a leading writer and broadcaster in this field. In What Would the Great Economists Do?, she explains the key thoughts of history’s greatest economists, how our lives have been influenced by their ideas, and how they could help us with the policy challenges we face today.

In the light of current economic problems, and that of economic growth in particular, Yueh explores the thoughts of economists from Smith and David Ricardo to contemporary academics Douglass North and Robert Solow. Along the way, she asks several questions: What do the ideas of Karl Marx tell us about the likely future for the Chinese economy? How do the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who argued for government spending to create full employment, help us think about state intervention? And with globalization in trouble, what can we learn about handling Brexit and Trumpism?

The Power of Kindness: Why Empathy Is Essential in Everyday Life
Brian Goldman
HarperCollins, April 2019, $19.99

In The Power of Kindness, Brian Goldman leaves the comfortable, familiar surroundings of the hospital in search of his own lost compassion. A top neuroscientist performs an MRI scan of his brain to see if he is hard-wired for empathy. A researcher at Ontario’s Western University tests his personality and makes a startling discovery. Goldman then circles the planet in search of the most empathic people alive, to hear their stories and learn their secrets. He visits a boulevard in São Paulo, Brazil, where he meets a woman who calls a homeless poet her soulmate and reunited him with his family; a research lab in Kyoto, Japan, where he meets a life-like, empathetic android; and a nursing home in rural Pennsylvania, where he meets a therapist who has an uncanny knack of knowing what’s inside the hearts and minds of people with dementia, as well as her protégé, a woman who talked a gun-wielding robber into walking away from his crime. Powerful and engaging, The Power of Kindness takes us far from the theatre of medicine and into the world at large, and investigates why kindness is so vital to our existence.