One Step Ahead: Mastering the Art and Science of Negotiation
David Sally
St. Martin’s Publishing Group, May 2020, $39.99
One Step Aheadoffers the fundamental wisdom that elevates the sophisticated negotiator above everyone else. Readers will gain the advantage in everything from determining when to negotiate and how to decipher a game strategically, to understanding which personality traits matter, why emotions are not necessarily to be avoided, and how to be tough and fair. You’ll learn to be round on the outside and square on the inside, how to command the idiom, why you should avoid bumping into the furniture, and how to achieve mastery of the word and the number. While all of life is not a negotiation, Sally says, a negotiation incorporates all of life.

One Step Ahead is for anyone and everyone who bargains, parents, manages, buys, sells, emotes, and engages.

Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Public Affairs, January 2020, $38.00
Over a decade ago, renowned innovation expert Rosabeth Moss Kanter co-founded and then directed Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative. Her breakthrough work with hundreds of successful professionals and executives, as well as aspiring young entrepreneurs, identifies the leadership paradigm of the future: the ability to “think outside the building,” to overcome establishment paralysis, and produce significant innovation for a better world.

When traditional approaches are inadequate or resisted, advanced leadership skills are essential. In this book, Kanter shows how people everywhere can unleash their creativity and entrepreneurial adroitness to mobilize partners across challenging cultural, social, and political situations, and innovate for a brighter future.

The Sleep-Easy Retirement Guide: Answers to the 12 Biggest Financial Questions That Keep You Up at Night
David Aston 
Milner & Associates, January 2020, $26.95
The Sleep-Easy Retirement Guide is written by David Aston, a personal finance and investments journalist who is also a CFA charterholder and member of CFA Society Toronto. The book sets out to help middle-class Canadians answer the big, pressing financial questions associated with retirement, including figuring out how big a nest egg they’ll need, how long they will need to continue to work, how much they can draw from their portfolio each year in retirement, and when they should start drawing government pensions.

While the main intended readership is middle-class Canadians themselves, the author hopes the book will also prove useful to financial advisors helping clients address these questions. While the book deals broadly with retirement planning, it includes chapters that focus more specifically on the unique challenges of investing in retirement and making effective use of investment advice. In a section on advisors, the author helps Canadians understand the different kinds of advisors (mutual fund advisors, brokers, portfolio managers, robo-advisors, financial planners), how much Canadians should typically pay for their services, and the key ways to potentially find value from advice in relation to fees paid.

Creating Healthy Organizations: Taking Action to Improve Employee Well-Being (revised and expanded)
Graham Lowe
Rotman-UTP Publishing, May 2020, $34.95
How can you future-proof your organization by making it humanly sustainable? Creating Healthy Organizations answers this question, showing how to forge stronger links between employee well-being and the future success of any organization. The book makes a compelling case for resilient and humanly sustainable businesses by focusing on improving employees’ well-being.

More companies are addressing mental-health issues, and striving to make workplaces psychologically healthy and safe. Expanded environmental sustainability frameworks provide an opening for the more sustainable use of human resources. As well, extensive tools are now available in many countries to guide actions aimed at developing healthy, safe, and thriving workplaces.

These recent workplace trends and resources highlight the need for an updated, concise, integrated, and practical analysis of the challenges of creating a healthier organization, the hurdles that must be overcome along the way, and the key success factors that can guide the improvement process. This revised and expanded edition of Creating Healthy Organizations fills this gap in knowledge and practice, guiding those committed to making their organizations healthier.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (revised and expanded edition)
Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
HarperCollins, May 2020, $21.00
The legendary bestseller that made millions look at the world in a radically different way returns in a new edition, now including an exclusive discussion between the authors and bestselling professor of psychology Angela Duckworth.

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? Which should be feared more: snakes or french fries? Why do sumo wrestlers cheat? In this groundbreaking book, leading economist Steven Levitt—professor of economics at the University of Chicago and winner of the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal for the economist under 40 who has made the greatest contribution to the discipline—reveals that the answers. Joined by acclaimed author and podcast host Stephen J. Dubner, Levitt presents a brilliant—and brilliantly entertaining—account of how incentives of the most hidden sort drive behaviour in ways that turn conventional wisdom on its head.

Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life 
Richard Thaler
Free Press, May 2020, $23.00
While the rationale behind economics always seems to be at the forefront of political and institutional life, many economic theories in relation to consumer behaviour have not been studied in detail. Here, in The Winner’s Curse, Richard Thaler challenges today’s accepted economic wisdom by revealing many of the anomalies that abound even in simple economic transactions. He presents literate, challenging, and often funny examples of such variances as why the winners at auctions are often the real losers—they pay too much and suffer the “winner’s curse”—why gamblers bet on long shots at the end of a losing day, why shoppers will save on one appliance only to pass up the identical savings on another, and why sports fans who wouldn’t pay more than $200 for a Super Bowl ticket wouldn’t sell one they own for less than $400. He also demonstrates that markets do not always operate with the trap-like efficiency we impute to them.

Thaler argues that recognizing these sometimes counter-intuitive facts of economic behaviour will compel economists to adopt a more balanced view of human nature, one reflected in Adam Smith’s belief that, despite our selfishness, there is something in our nature that prompts us to enjoy, even promote, the happiness of others.

Creating Gender-Inclusive Organizations: Lessons from Research and Practice 
Ellen Ernst Kossek and Kyung Hee Lee 
Rotman-UTP Publishing, May 2020, $32.95
This book examines key themes relevant to advancing women in organizations and the need for individual and organizational mechanisms to foster career agility, with a constant focus on how to bridge research to practice. Providing insights on gender inclusion, mentoring, team diversity, and female leadership, Creating Gender-Inclusive Organizations provides actual hands-on advice from experts on how to leverage human resource and organizational strategies to advance women and close the gender gap. It is a must-read for management leaders, HR professionals, and gender and diversity organizational scholars of all levels.

Dear Shareholder: The Best Executive Letters from Warren Buffet, Prem Watsa and Other Great CEOs
Lawrence Cunningham
Harriman House, April, 2020, $26.99
The shareholder letters of corporate leaders are a rich source of business and investing wisdom. There is no more authoritative resource on subjects ranging from leadership and management to capital allocation and company culture. But with thousands of shareholder letters written every year, how can investors and students of the corporate world sift this vast pile to unearth the best insights? Dear Shareholder is the solution. Lawrence A. Cunningham, editor of The Essays of Warren Buffett, presents the finest writers in the genre of the shareholder letter, and the most significant excerpts from their total output.  These letters showcase the ultimate in business and investment knowledge from an all-star team. Dear Shareholder holds letters by more than 20 different leaders from 16 companies. These leaders include Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Tom Gayner (Markel), Kay Graham and Don Graham (the Washington Post and Graham Holdings), Roberto Goizueta (Coca-Cola), Virginia Rometty (IBM), and Prem Watsa (Fairfax). Topics covered in these letters include the long-term focus, corporate culture and commitment to values, capital allocation, buybacks, dividends, acquisitions, management, business strategy, and executive compensation. As we survey the corporate landscape in search of outstanding companies run by first-rate managers, shareholder letters are a valuable resource. The letters also contain a wealth of knowledge on the core topics of effective business management.   

Capital and Ideology 
Thomas Piketty. Belknap Press
March 2020, $ 57.95
The epic successor to one of the most important books of the century is at once a retelling of global history, a scathing critique of contemporary politics, and a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In this audacious follow-up, Piketty challenges us to revolutionize how we think about politics, ideology, and history. He exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision Making Beyond the Numbers 
John Kay and Mervyn King
W.W. Norton, March 2020, $40.00
Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless.

The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.ng in our nature that prompts us to enjoy, even promote, the happiness of others.