Read these top 10 business books to be ready for 2023.
Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology
Problems with the supply chain keep a lot of managers up at night. Unfortunately, people who need semiconductors might be the ones who don't get enough sleep. This book is not going to make them feel better, though.
Miller shows us the industry's history in a skillful way and concludes that few industries are as vulnerable to rising geopolitical tensions as the oil and gas industry. More and more executives realize that there is a Taiwan risk they haven't taken into account in their plans. In response to security concerns, Washington is trying to move jobs back to the United States. However, this is not always an easy move from an economic point of view.
This book is different from the others on the list because its primary goal is not to teach managers how to do their jobs better. This doesn't make it less valuable, though, because you will leave with a deep understanding of a fundamental issue that will likely affect your business.
Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies
Old habits are hard to break, and most people didn't find it surprising that stakeholders often didn't matter as much as short-term profits.
In his book, Gulati makes clear distinctions between different kinds of goals, and he talks about how to find a deep purpose and how that can lead to better long-term performance.
He started to talk about what was going on on Mars. At first glance, it seems like he uses Mars as an example of a company with a purpose by pointing out things that most companies do. Then, though, his story takes a strange turn. Mars hasn't just been interested in purpose on the side, but as long as it keeps making money from unhealthy snacks, its big goal of making the world a better place doesn't seem very real. Of course, this is a shallow reason, not a deep one. To reach the deep goal, Mars' product lines would have to change a lot.
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence
Twenty years after Thomas Edison made the light bulb, only 3% of homes in the US had electricity. Few factories switched to new sources of power. Over the next 20 years, this started to change as entrepreneurs devised new ways to use the new power source.
AI today is in a similar "in-between" stage.
In this book, Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb look at what this means. So how do we make the best use of AI? Fundamentally, they say that the chance of AI lies in the fact that it can separate prediction from making decisions.
Quit: The Power of Recognizing When to Walk Away
The idea that losses seem bigger than gains goes back to some of Daniel Kahneman's early work, which won him the Nobel Prize: Quitting is hard.
Even more so because the business press loves to praise people who don't give up. Duke says this comes from a wrong understanding of popular books like Grit. Angela Duckworth, who wrote the book, is very clear about trying different things and giving up on the ones that don't work.
But what is the right way to quit? Duke looks into the things that make us not want to quit and how to get past them.
Shared Sisterhood: How to Take Collective Action for Racial and Gender Equity at Work
In the summer of 2020, Opie's email box became busy. Racial and gender equity were on the agenda because of protests all over the country, and many executives needed her help. They wondered, "What to say and do?"
The book suggested both inspiring and valuable techniques. One technique it suggested is called "amplification." Before you say something in a meeting, ask two people you trust to back you up. So as soon as you start talking, one of them says, "That's a great idea," and the other does the same. A simple but powerful way.
Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success
The lack of workers didn't happen overnight. It was clear from the start that baby boomers would retire. So the answer has also been clear for a long time: Most Western economies need more immigration. A lot more! But this is a very controversial subject.
Abramitzky and Boustan use machine learning to sort through millions of immigrant stories and get a complete picture of immigration.
This book will help you do that by showing you how immigration affects us over a whole generation, not just for a few years.
The Burnout Challenge: Managing People's Relationships with Their Jobs
Even though companies work hard to make jobs more meaningful, complaints about rudeness, bullying, and abuse are at an all-time high.
The book's most important idea is that we can't find long-term solutions if we think of burnout as a personal problem (instead of the workplace cultural issue). A well-written and thought-out book about a critical issue at the heart of the Great Resignation.
This book will help you create a work environment that doesn't overwhelm people.
The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists.
Tired of all the problems your company has to deal with? Don't worry, Rumelt's new book is out now.
He says that strategy is all about finding problems that can be solved. How it works is as follows:
Start by making a list of all the possible problems.
Then give them a score between 1 and 10 on two things:
How important is the problem?
How easy is it to solve?
Last, make a map of the results.
Choose the one that is both important and can be solved.
When you take this approach, you come up with unique ways to win.
For example, when Netflix NFLX +0.4% had to deal with competition from new streaming services, it decided to start making its own content in a very specific way. Knowing that Disney and other companies would stop licensing movies, they used their international network to make movies like "Squid Game," "Money Heist," and "Germany's Got Talent," which were big hits all over the world (Dark).
The Unicorn Within: How Companies Can Create Game-Changing Ventures at Startup Speed
Established organizations develop new disruptive technology but fail to turn it into a viable businesses. This is where new companies enter the picture. The successful ones lately had valuations of $1 billion and were dubbed "unicorns."
The disease was apparent, but the cure was less so. So here, the book takes center stage: it offers an actionable playbook for large corporations. It describes how precisely you can leverage the "mothership advantage" through the customer-driven, repeatable, sellable methodology and careful navigation of the frictions.
The Upside of Uncertainty: A Guide to Finding Possibility in the Unknown
This book talks about how to deal with problems on a more personal level. We are all hard-wired to hate uncertainty, but the authors want us to look at the other side of the coin. They help us go from being afraid of and trying to avoid uncertainty to seeing it as the source of all possibilities.
This can be done with many tools, each explained in a short chapter. Among them are framing, which helps you anticipate gain, adjacent possibilities, which let you hover at the edge of your awareness and teach you to question the limits and rules of the games you play.
Read more about strategy here.
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