New books

You can find the complete list of new acquisitions on the New books page. The list includes all English-language books bought by the Library in the last two month (and published in the last five years), the books are grouped according to theme and title.

Here you can read selected book recommendations from the list of the new books.

Becoming Hewlett Packard: Why strategic leadership matters

Becoming Hewlett Packard: Why strategic leadership matters / Robert A. Burgelman, Webb McKinney, Philip E. Meza
New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2017. 384 p.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented the model of the Silicon Valley start-up and set in motion a process of corporate becoming that made it possible for HP to transform itself six times over the 77 years since its founding in the face of sweeping technological changes that felled most of its competitors over the years. Today, HP is in the throes of a seventh transformation to secure its continued survival by splitting in two independent companies: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Based on extensive primary research conducted over more than 15 years, this book documents the differential contribution of HP's successive CEOs in sustaining the company's integral process of becoming. It uses a comprehensive strategic leadership framework to examine and explain the role of the CEO: (1) defining and executing the key tasks of strategic leadership, and (2) developing four key elements of the company's strategic leadership capability.
The study of the strategic leadership of HP's successive CEOs revealed the paradox of corporate becoming, the existential situation facing successive CEOs (that justifies the book's empathic approach), and the importance of the CEO's ability to harness the company's past while also driving its future. Building on these novel insights, the book shows how the frameworks used to conceptualize the tasks of strategic leadership and the development of strategic leadership capability can serve as steps toward a dynamic theory of strategic leadership that animates an evolutionary framework of corporate becoming. This framework will be helpful for further theory development about strategic leadership and also offers practical tools for founders of new companies and CEOs and boards of directors of existing companies who intend to create, run or oversee companies built for continued relevance, longevity and greatness

 

catalogue

Herding tigers: Be the leader that creative people need

Herding tigers: Be the leader that creative people need / Todd Henry
New York: Portfolio Penguin, 2018.  259 p.

The old adage that leading creative people is like herding cats is wrong. It’s more like herding tigers. Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You’re juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you’re managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives. Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work. Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.

Contents:
Introduction: How To Draw Darth Vader - A primer on the definition of good creative leadership.
1: What Creative People Need - Creative people need two things more than anything else: stability and challenge. Part I Your Mind-Set:
2: Stop Doing The Work - To create stability, shift your mind-set from doing the work to leading the work
3: They Broke It, You Bought It - To create freedom, shift your mind-set from control to influence and from personal to total accountability
4: Level Up - To create stability, you need to distance yourself (a bit) from your team.
5: Lead Brilliance - To challenge your team, you need to help people see those aspects of their abilities to which they are blind. Part II Your Mechanics:
6: Earn The Right - To provide stability, you must earn, manage, and strive to maintain your team’s trust.
7: Prune Proactively - To create stability, you have to actively grow a healthy culture.
8: Stay On Target - To challenge your team, boldly and effectively channel its collective attention.
9: Defend Their Space - To create stability, manage your team’s margin by aggressing protecting “white space”.
10: Be The Muse - To challenge your team members, push them outside of their comfort zone.
11: Fight Well - To create stability, recognize that conflict isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it’s a sign of a healthy and productive team.
12: Be A Leader Worth Following - Your greatest impact comes not from the work you do — it comes from changing lives, including your own.

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management
business strategy

The power of little ideas: A third way to innovate for market success

The power of little ideas: A third way to innovate for market success / David Robertson with Kent Lineback
Boston, US: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.  236 p.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage.
This distinctive approach has three key elements:
- It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive.
- The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose.
- Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way.
In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges.

Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.

 

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management
business strategy

Creating great choices: A leader's guide to integrative thinking

Creating great choices: A leader's guide to integrative thinking / Jennifer Riel, Roger L. Martin.
Boston, US.: Harvard Business Review Press, 2017. 242 p.

 

Move Beyond Trade-Off Thinking. When it comes to our hardest choices, it can seem as though making trade-offs is inevitable. But what about those crucial times when accepting the obvious trade-off just isn't good enough? What do we do when the choices in front of us don't get us what we need? In those cases, rather than choosing the least worst option, we can use the models in front of us to create a new and superior answer. This is integrative thinking. First introduced by world-renowned strategic thinker Roger Martin in "The Opposable Mind," integrative thinking is an approach to problem solving that uses opposing ideas as the basis for innovation. Now, in "Creating Great Choices," Martin and his longtime thinking partner Jennifer Riel vividly illustrate how integrative thinking works, and how to do it. The book includes fresh stories of successful integrative thinkers that will demystify the process of creative problem solving, as well as practical tools and exercises to help readers engage with the ideas. And it lays out the authors' four-step methodology for creating great choices, which can be applied in virtually any context. The result is a replicable, thoughtful approach to finding a "third and better way" to make important choices in the face of unacceptable trade‐offs. Insightful and instructive, "Creating Great Choices" blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

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psychology

The European handbook of media accountability

The European handbook of media accountability / ed. by Tobias Eberwein, Susanne Fengler & Matthias Karmasin
London, GB: Routledge, 2018. 340 p.

 

In recent years, the Leveson Inquiry in Great Britain, as well as the EU High-Level Group on Media Freedom and Pluralism, have stirred heated debates about media accountability and media self-regulation across Europe. How responsible are journalists? How well-developed are infrastructures of media self-regulation in the different European countries? How much commitment to media accountability is there in the media industry – and how actively do media users become involved in the process of media criticism via social media? With contributions from leading scholars in the field of journalism and mass communication, this handbook brings together reports on the status quo of media accountability in all EU members states as well as key countries close to Europe, such as Turkey and Israel. Each chapter provides an up-to-date overview of media accountability structures as well as a synopsis of relevant research, exploring the role of media accountability instruments in each national setting, including both media self-regulation (such as codes of ethics, press councils, ombudspersons) and new instruments that involve audiences and stakeholder groups (such as media blogs and user comment systems). A theoretically informed, cross-national comparative analysis of the state of media accountability in contemporary Europe, this handbook constitutes an invaluable basis for further research and policy-making and will appeal to students and scholars of media studies and journalism, as well as policy-makers and practitioners.

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media, communication

The tyranny of metrics

The tyranny of metrics / Jerry Z. Muller
Princeton, US: Princeton Univ. Press, 2018. 220 p.

 

Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions. In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing - and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test."

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economics

Marx's inferno: The political theory of capital

Marx's inferno: The political theory of capital / William Clare Roberts
Princeton, US: Princeton Univ. Press, 2017. 282 p.

 

Marx’s Inferno reconstructs the major arguments of Karl Marx’s Capital and inaugurates a completely new reading of a seminal classic. Rather than simply a critique of classical political economy, William Roberts argues that Capital was primarily a careful engagement with the motives and aims of the workers’ movement. Understood in this light, Capital emerges as a profound work of political theory. Placing Marx against the background of nineteenth-century socialism, Roberts shows how Capital was ingeniously modeled on Dante’s Inferno, and how Marx, playing the role of Virgil for the proletariat, introduced partisans of workers’ emancipation to the secret depths of the modern “social Hell.” In this manner, Marx revised republican ideas of freedom in response to the rise of capitalism. Combining research on Marx’s interlocutors, textual scholarship, and forays into recent debates, Roberts traces the continuities linking Marx’s theory of capitalism to the tradition of republican political thought. He immerses the reader in socialist debates about the nature of commerce, the experience of labor, the power of bosses and managers, and the possibilities of political organization. Roberts rescues those debates from the past, and shows how they speak to ever-renewed concerns about political life in today’s world.

catalogue

economics

Excuse me: The survival guide to modern business etiquette

Excuse me: The survival guide to modern business etiquette / Rosanne J. Thomas
New York: Amacom, 2017. 269 p.

Blending different generations, genders, and cultures brings energy and fresh perspectives to the workplace. But the flip side is an environment ripe for confusion and social blunders. Mix in increasingly open-plan workplaces and constant connectivity, and the chance that we'll unintentionally annoy or offend others increases exponentially.
Exactly what are the rules these days? Is it acceptable to text your boss at home? What is the polite way to ask a colleague to take a distracting conversation behind closed doors? What about the use of smartphones in meetings? Merging classic rules of behavior with new realities of modern business, Excuse Me spotlights dozens of puzzling situations, with suggestions for bridging divides. The book untangles the nuances of:
Meeting etiquette - Interview expectations - Proper office attire - Electronic manners - Privacy in tight spaces - Eye contact and nonverbal cues - Small talk - Business dining - Social media use - Working remotely and flexibly - And more.
While the youngest employees might seem unruly, the oldest can seem rigid. Good manners create an atmosphere of respect, and smooth the way for everyone to succeed

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business strategy
management

The art of revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning

The art of revolt: Snowden, Assange, Manning / Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2017. 120 p.

Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are key figures in the struggles playing out in our democracies over internet use, state secrets, and mass surveillance in the age of terror. When not decried as traitors, they are seen as whistle-blowers whose crucial revelations are meant to denounce a problem or correct an injustice. Yet, for Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, they are much more than that. Snowden, Assange, and Manning are exemplars who have reinvented an art of revolt. Consciously or not, they have inaugurated a new form of political action and a new identity for the political subject. Anonymity as practiced by WikiLeaks and the flight and requests for asylum of Snowden and Assange break with traditional forms of democratic protest. Yet we can hardly dismiss them as acts of cowardice. Rather, as Lagasnerie suggests, such solitary choices challenge us to question classic modes of collective action, calling old conceptions of the state and citizenship into question and inviting us to reformulate the language of critical philosophy. In the process, he pays homage to the actions and lives of these three figures.

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politics

Mastering 'metrics: The path from cause to effect

Mastering 'metrics: The path from cause to effect / Joshua D. Angrist, Jörn-Steffen Pischke
Princeton, US: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015. 282 p.

Applied econometrics, known to aficionados as 'metrics, is the original data science. 'Metrics encompasses the statistical methods economists use to untangle cause and effect in human affairs. Through accessible discussion and with a dose of kung fu–themed humor, Mastering 'Metrics presents the essential tools of econometric research and demonstrates why econometrics is exciting and useful.

The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five--random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences--are illustrated through well-crafted real-world examples (vetted for awesomeness by Kung Fu Panda's Jade Palace). Does health insurance make you healthier? Randomized experiments provide answers. Are expensive private colleges and selective public high schools better than more pedestrian institutions? Regression analysis and a regression discontinuity design reveal the surprising truth. When private banks teeter, and depositors take their money and run, should central banks step in to save them? Differences-in-differences analysis of a Depression-era banking crisis offers a response. Could arresting O. J. Simpson have saved his ex-wife's life? Instrumental variables methods instruct law enforcement authorities in how best to respond to domestic abuse.

Wielding econometric tools with skill and confidence, Mastering 'Metrics uses data and statistics to illuminate the path from cause to effect.

  •     Shows why econometrics is important
  •     Explains econometric research through humorous and accessible discussion
  •     Outlines empirical methods central to modern econometric practice
  •     Works through interesting and relevant real-world examples

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quantitative methods

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