Inclusive Leadership: The Definitive Guide to Developing and Executing an Impactful Diversity and Inclusion Strategy: Locally and Globally
Charlotte Sweeney and Fleur Bothwick
FT Press, November 2016, $43.99

The most successful organizations are those with the most diverse and engaged workforces. Studies show an 80 percent improvement in business performance among those organizations with high diversity levels. When people feel included and able to reach their full potential, they’re more engaged, more productive, and often more creative.

Inclusive Leadership will help you drive culture change using organizational development principles. It takes you through the key components of leading change throughout the employee lifecycle and your supply chain, and through product development. Crucially, it will help you make a genuine impact on your business through your people, both now and in the future.

It’s Not Complicated: The Art and Science of Complexity in Business
Richard Ronald Nason
Rotman-UTP Publishing, May 2017, $32.95

In the new knowledge economy, traditional modes of thinking are no longer effective. Compartmentalizing problems and solutions and assuming everything can be solved with the right formula can no longer keep pace with the radical changes occurring daily in the modern business world.

It’s Not Complicated offers a paradigm shift for business professionals looking for simplified solutions to complex problems. Richard Ronald Nason introduces the principles of “complexity thinking,” which empower managers to understand, correlate, and explain a diverse range of business phenomena—for example, why some new products go viral while others remain unnoticed, how office cliques develop despite collaborative work policies and spaces, and how economic bubbles form. Rather than consider complicated and complex as interchangeable terms, Nason explains what complexity is and how it arises, and the errors in solving complex situations with complicated thinking.

Gen Z @ Work: How the Next Generation Is Transforming the Workplace
David Stillman and Jonah Stillman
Harper Business, March 2017, $35.99

A generations expert and author of When Generations Collide and The M-Factor teams up with his 17-year-old son to introduce the next influential demographic group to join the workforce: Generation Z.

Based on the first national studies of Gen Z’s workplace attitudes; interviews with hundreds of CEOs, celebrities, and thought leaders on generational issues; cutting-edge case studies; and insights from Gen Zers themselves, Gen Z @ Work offers the knowledge today’s leaders need to get ahead of the next gaps in the workplace and how best to recruit, retain, motivate, and manage Gen Zers.

The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History
David Enrich
HarperCollins, March 2017, $36.99

The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning business reporter unveils the bizarre and sinister story of how a math genius named Tom Hayes, a handful of outrageous confederates, and a deeply corrupt banking system ignited one of the greatest financial scandals in history.

In 2006, an oddball group of bankers, traders, and brokers from some of the world’s largest financial institutions made a startling realization: Libor—the London interbank offered rate, which determines the interest rates on trillions in loans worldwide—was set daily by a small group of easily manipulated functionaries, and they could reap huge profits by nudging it to suit their trading portfolios. Hayes, a brilliant but troubled mathematician, became the lynchpin of a wild alliance. Eventually known as the Spider Network, Hayes’s circle generated untold riches—until it all unravelled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

The Spider Network is not only a rollicking account of the scam but also a provocative examination of a financial system that was crooked throughout, designed to promote envelope-pushing behaviour while shielding higher-ups from the consequences of their subordinates’ rapacious actions.

The Thoughtful Leader: A Model of Integrative Leadership
Jim Fisher
Rotman-UTP Publishing, July 2016, $32.95

Leadership is a quality that’s difficult to define. Some believe it’s innate, the gift of a selected few. Others believe it’s a skill that can be learned but don’t agree on what, exactly, should be taught. Jim Fisher has incorporated various apparently opposing leadership ideas into an integrated model. In order to successfully meet the challenges of a fast-changing world, leaders can no longer choose between managing, directing, or engaging. The thoughtful leader is someone who simultaneously, consistently, and coherently manages, directs, and engages their followers. The framework provides a way for anyone who is motivated to lead, has the courage to act, and is willing to think about their actions to become more effective.

Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle
Mark Braude
Simon & Schuster, April 2017, $23.00 (now in paperback)

Monte Carlo has long been known as a dazzling playground for the rich and famous. Less well known are the shrewd and often ruthless strategies that went into creating such a potent symbol of luxury and cosmopolitan glamour. As historian Mark Braude reveals, the world’s first modern casino-resort started as an unlikely prospect—with the legalization of gambling in tiny Monaco in 1855—and eventually emerged as the most glamorous gambling destination of the Victorian era. The resort declined in the wake of WWI and was reinvented, again, to suit the styles and desires of the new Jazz Age tastemakers, such as F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sarah Murphy, and Coco Chanel.

A rollercoaster history of how a small rural town grew into the prosperous resort epicentre of the late 19th century and rose again to greatness out of the ashes of WWI, Making Monte Carlo is a classic rags-to-riches tale.

Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street
Sheelah Kolhatkar
Random House, February 2017, $37.00

Black Edge offers a revelatory look at the grey zone in which so much of Wall Street functions. It’s a riveting, true-life legal thriller that takes readers inside the government’s pursuit of Steven A. Cohen and his employees, and raises urgent and troubling questions about the power and wealth of those who sit at the pinnacle of modern Wall Street.

Cohen changed Wall Street. He and his fellow pioneers made their billions through speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than wrong—and for this, they gained not only extreme personal wealth but also formidable influence throughout society.

Cohen was one of the industry’s biggest success stories, the person everyone else in the business wanted to be. On Wall Street, Cohen was revered as a genius: one of the greatest traders who ever lived.

That image was shattered when SAC Capital became the target of a sprawling seven-year investigation, led by a determined group of FBI agents, prosecutors, and SEC enforcement attorneys. SAC Capital was indicted and pleaded guilty to charges of securities and wire fraud in connection with a vast insider trading scheme, even as Cohen himself was never charged.

After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality
Heather Boushey, J. Bradford DeLong and Marshall Steinbaum
Harvard University Press, May 2017, $47.50

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 tackles 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.

After Piketty does not shy away from the seemingly intractable problems that made Capital in the Twenty-First Century so compelling for so many.