For two hundred years the pessimists have dominated public discourse, insisting that things will soon be getting much worse. But in fact, life is getting better—and at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people’s lives as never before.
In his bold and bracing exploration into how human culture evolves positively through exchange and specialization, bestselling author Matt Ridley does more than describe how things are getting better. He explains why. An astute, refreshing, and revelatory work that covers the entire sweep of human history—from the Stone Age to the Internet—The Rational Optimist will change your way of thinking about the world for the better.
2. Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible – and Other Journeys by James Burke
Picking up the theme of his bestselling Connections and utilizing cross-chapter margin references that imitate computer hypertext, Burke investigates the dynamic interplay of scientific discovery, technological innovation and social change in a dizzying, mind-expanding adventure that explores the crosscurrents of history. One chapter follows a trail from slavery in America to English Quaker abolitionist Sampson Lloyd’s nail-making business to German-American immigrant engineer John Roebling’s wire suspension bridges (including the Brooklyn Bridge) to rustproofing with cadmium to nuclear reactors. Accident, luck, greed, ambition and mistakes abound as Scientific American columnist Burke tries to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all things. Another typical chapter unravels the serendipitous interactions among Cyrus Dalkin’s invention of carbon paper, Edison’s telephone (which used sooty carbon black in the transmitter), the rise of suburbs, X-ray crystallography and DNA. Often as maddening as a pinball game, this nevertheless unique and exciting odyssey may change the way you look at the world.
3. Engaged Leadership: Building a Culture to Overcome Employee Disengagement by Clint Swindall
When Engaged Leadership was first published in 2007, a majority of employees in the United States had already mentally checked out on the job—and that was before the ax came down in 2008 and 2009. Without a doubt, employee disengagement still exists, and if you want your business to survive, you need a plan to overcome it.
High unemployment and a limping recovery have provided even more reasons for building a culture of engagement. Those left in the workforce—now doing the work of two or more people and living in fear of a pink slip—may be more productive, but you can’t call them engaged. As the economy turns around, your industrious workers will have options they haven’t had in years—and if they’re unhappy, they’ll jump ship.
Engaged Leadership offers both a fable and a step-by-step blueprint to ensure a culture of engagement that will draw employees out of their rut and keep your best and brightest. Learn how to:
- Recruit support from the top 29 percent—those employees who are engaged—to influence others to get on board with the new culture
- Prepare your organization for change and provide open and honest communication with employees about the company’s performance and their own
- Motivate employees by celebrating small successes, encouraging work-life balance, and creating a fair work environment
- Lead across generational divides
- Identify and recruit appropriate talent, according to their needs and yours
With job satisfaction in the United States at its lowest level in two decades, disengagement has reached epidemic proportions. The key to your company’s recovery—and that of the entire economy—lies in everyone’s willingness to join a new culture of engagement.
4. Winning Investors Over: Surprising Truths About Honesty, Earnings Guidance, and Other Ways to Boost Your Stock Price by by Baruch Lev
Pleasing Wall Street used to be easy for executives. Not anymore. The stock market is an uncertain place, and every day executives have to figure out what investors really want. There are right ways and wrong ways to do this. Get it wrong, and you risk alienating investors as well as employees, consumers, and suppliers—which can erode your earnings and stock price.
In Winning Investors Over, Baruch Lev draws on his own and other finance scholars’ research to present authoritative, often surprising instructions for dealing intelligently with Wall Street—and boosting your company’s earnings and stock price. Through rigorous data analysis and real-life cases, Lev shows how to:
• Understand and address investors’ concerns to secure ongoing funding and support from the capital markets
• Deliver disappointing news effectively to investors
• Build, rebuild, and maintain credibility on Wall Street
• Buy time for your company’s recovery from activist shareholders and hedge fund raiders
• Structure your compensation to win shareholders’ support
Winning Investors Over demonstrates that despite the uncertainty that characterizes Wall Street today, you can still craft a mutually beneficial, long-term partnership with investors.
umerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape
