Edited by Margie Kelley

The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution
By Joel Bines (MBA 1999)
McGraw-Hill
Armed with computers, tablets, smartphones, and social media, today’s consumers have revolted against the marketplace status quo. Demanding a voice and sometimes a hand in the products they buy, these digitally empowered consumers― “Me’s”―have inverted the traditional power dynamics of retail into metail. To put it simply, your customers are now in charge, and you must recognize and embrace this fact in order to survive in new economy. The Metail Economy provides innovative methods for connecting with the Me-centric consumer and shows how to thrive in this consumer revolution. Joel Bines provides examples of companies that have failed to address the metail paradigm, along with those that are on the right path, clearly illustrating how the traditional power dynamic has inverted and why it matters for business survival. Bines offers six proven models you can use to cultivate and serve highly informed and empowered customers.

Influence Is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen
By Zoe Chance (DBA 2011)
Random House
You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, follow the rules, wait your turn, not make waves. Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life; move past common misconceptions—such as the idea that asking for more will make people dislike you—and understand why your go-to negotiation strategies are probably making you less influential; discover the one thing that influences behavior more than anything else; and learn to cultivate charisma, negotiate comfortably and creatively, and spot manipulators before it’s too late.

HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose
By John Coleman (MBA 2009)
Harvard Business Review Press
We’re living through a crisis of purpose. Surveys indicate that people are feeling less connected to the meaning of their work, asking, “How do I find my purpose?” That’s the wrong question. You don’t find your purpose—you build it. The HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose is packed with stories, tips, and activities to teach you how to cultivate more meaning in your life and work and endow everything you do with purpose. You’ll learn how to find the reason behind your work; identify what makes you feel happy and fulfilled; use job crafting to transform your role; build positive, fulfilling relationships; and connect your work to service. Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business.

Building a Winning Career: A complete guide to securing and thriving in your ideal senior role
By William Cowan (MBA 1972)
Stradis Pty LTD
Do you know how to seek out and win your next executive role? Are you prepared to take the next steps in your career? Most career advice available today does not address the needs of senior job seekers. Building a Winning Career sets out a proven process that has worked for hundreds of senior executives, delivering superior results for those considering their next career move. William Cowan describes strategies that best position you for success while avoiding common traps. Filled with practical examples, this book will help you prepare and manage your job search; build your network to be an exponential multiplier for you; be ready when you meet recruiting teams; and launch yourself in a new role.

Remarkable Retail: How to Win and Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption
By Steve Dennis (MBA 1984)
LifeTree
Physical retail isn’t dead—but boring retail is. Remarkable Retail equips the savvy retailer with eight strategies to bounce back from the COVID-19 downturn and thrive in the years to come. Digital technology has profoundly altered the competitive landscape for retailers. Although the shutdown of 2020 didn’t cause this trend, it has dramatically accelerated it, collapsing retailers’ transformation timeline into a matter of months, not years. In Remarkable Retail, Steve Dennis argues that it’s no longer enough to offer convenience, decent prices, or an okay shopping experience. Even very good is no longer good enough. To win and keep customers today, retailers must be nothing short of remarkable. Packed with case studies from some of modern retail’s biggest success stories, quick pivots, and impressive rebounds, Remarkable Retail is a guide to creating the powerful retail experience that keeps your customers coming back for more.

Competing in the New World of Work: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest
By Keith Ferrazzi (MBA 1992), Kian Gohar (MBA 2005), and Noel Weyrich
Harvard Business Review Press
You’ve shed antiquated systems and processes. You went all-in on digital. Your teams settled into new, often better, ways of doing things. But did your organization change enough to stay competitive in the post-pandemic world? Did you fully leverage the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leap forward and grow stronger? Are you shaping the new environment to your advantage? If not, it’s not too late. New York Times bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi, along with coauthors Kian Gohar and Noel Weyrich, shows leaders how to shape their organizations and practices to remain competitive in a new, post-pandemic context. Based on an ambitious global research initiative involving thousands of executives, innovators, and changemakers who redefined their strategies, business models, organizational systems, and even their cultures, Competing in the New World of Work offers a bold new vision for the organization of the future; reveals the workplace innovations that emerged during the pandemic; and defines the new model of leadership for sustaining continuous change throughout the coming years of opportunity and transformation.

Little Messy Marcy Su
By Cherie Fu (MBA 2005), Illustrated by Julie Kwon
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
This children’s book by Cherie Fu is a pitch-perfect rhyming text about messiness that any child and parent can relate to, featuring a unique Chinese-American, intergenerational twist. Marcy Su couldn’t help make messes, track mud on the floors, and get stains on her dresses.
But Marc’s Mama has had enough! Waipo and Waigong are visiting today, and Marcy’s room is a disgrace. What will her grandparents think? Not to worry—Marcy knows just what to do. From doing the laundry to getting herself dressed, little Marcy Su will certainly go above and beyond than what Mama asked. Fu’s playful humor and bouncy rhythms, set against Julie Kwon’s expressive illustrations, perfectly captures how a plucky daughter’s exuberance and a tired mom come together amidst the beautiful chaos that surrounds them.

The Leadership Guide: Unleashing the Power Within and in Others
By Dr. Srikanth Gaddam (OPM 43)
Independently Published
From vision setting and decision-making to creative thinking and risk-taking, you need to juggle numerous demands at once to become an effective and thriving leader. This book will help you better understand the concept of leadership and discover the leader hidden in you.

Level Up: Rise Above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back
By Stacey Abrams, Lara Hodgson (MBA 1998)and Heather Cabot
Penguin
It’s never been easier to start a business—and it’s never been harder to scale it. Half of new businesses in America don’t make it past five years. Stacey Abrams and Lara Hodgson want to help today’s entrepreneurs beat the odds by revealing the unseen tethers that keep small businesses from growing and thriving. Drawing on firsthand experience starting and scaling multiple companies over nearly two decades, NOW Corp. cofounders Abrams and Hodgson crystallize their hard-won advice into a single how-to guide for small business owners. In Level Up, they share behind-the-scenes stories of building their own businesses, as well as actionable, get-it-done principles for founders looking to propel their ventures forward. Abrams and Hodgson also elevate and share the experiences of other successful founders including, Jules Pieri of The Grommet, Alisa Clark of Glory Professional Services, and Sheila Jordan of Knowledge Architects.

Aramco Brat: How Arabia, Oil, Gold, and Tragedy Shaped My Life
By Richard P. Howard (MBA 1971)
Boiling Point Editions
This story depicts a youth’s journey set in the turbulent Middle East and spiked with tragedy, wrong turns, unforced errors, luck, espionage, and family love. Life can either grind you down or polish you—it depends on what you’re made of.

The Great Lockdown
By Janesh Janardhanan (GMP 30)
Wiley
In The Great Lockdown: Lessons Learned During the Pandemic from Organizations Around the Globe, expert strategists Shivaji Das, Aroop Zutshi, and Janesh Janardhanan deliver an insightful exploration of this once-in-a-lifetime event to unearth invaluable learnings for the future. Told through the experiences of CXOs at billion-dollar companies, star start-ups, and non-profits from around the world, the book chronicles the ups and downs of sophisticated organizations as they navigated the COVID-19 crisis through initiatives impacting people, processes, and technology.

The Numerate Leader: How to Pull Game-Changing Insights from Statistical Data
By Thomas A. King (MBA 1987)
Wiley
Using a qualitative approach to introduce statistical reasoning, The Numerate Leader: How to Pull Game-Changing Insights from Statistical Data helps the reader extract information from unfamiliar data sets. Combining introductory statistics with a few ideas from the philosophy of science, this work helps generalists find patterns that may be expected to recur in the future. Identifying one or two such relationships can be a game-changer. Historical examples and humorous anecdotes illuminate technical concepts. A natural teacher, King emphasizes that complex software is unnecessary for success in this field. Readers will find real-life examples that help put statistical concepts into an understandable context; a glossary of important statistical terms and their use; and an appendix detailing 10 math facts numerate people should know. Perfect for undergraduate and graduate students entering advanced data analytics courses, as well as data analysts and C-suite executives just starting out, The Numerate Leader can help develop the skills to identify provisional relationships between disparate data sets and then assess the significance of conclusions reached.

Fast Start to Career Success: Making the Most of Your First Job
By Ron Kurtz (MBA 1967)
Outskirts Press
Your first job is a time to develop habits and intuition for making good decisions, thus building a strong foundation for career success. Author Ron Kurtz first developed these 36 common-sense tips to guide his own children in making the most of their firsts job, and has compiled them for anyone just starting their career. This book will help you make the most of your personal attributes, take advantage of challenges and opportunities, interact effectively with people within and outside of your organization, and, importantly, achieve work-life balance while managing your career advancement. Applying these tips will instill habits of immediate value in your first job and throughout your career. Not limited to college graduates or people in business, this book reveals practices relevant to anyone starting their career in an organization, whether it be nonprofit, professional, or governmental.

From Startup to Exit: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Scaling Your Tech Business
By Shirish Nadkarni (MBA 1987)
HarperCollins Leadership
Tech entrepreneurs, make your startup dreams come true by utilizing this founder-to-founder guide to successfully navigating all phases of the tech startup journey. With the advent of the internet, mobile computing, and now AI/machine learning and cloud computing, the number of new startups has accelerated over the last decade across tech centers in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, and China. From Startup to Exit shares the knowledge that serial entrepreneur Shirish Nadkarni has gained from over two decades of success, detailing the practical aspects of startup formation from founding, funding, management, and finding an exit. With successful tech entrepreneurs interviewed and featured throughout, From Startup to Exit will help you understand exactly what tech startups must do to succeed in all phases, from idea stage to IPO.

Search Funds and Entrepreneurial Acquisitions: The Roadmap for Buying a Business and Leading It to the Next Level
By Jan Simon (AMP 199)
TellWell Talent
In the mid-1980s, a group of enterprising and industrious MBA students at Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business pioneered an experiment that today we call “Search Funds.” Captained and inspired by visionary Leader Irv Grousbeck, they designed a track that allowed them to acquire a company, become its CEO, and, if well executed, also be its largest shareholder. Supported by strong boards and a solid process, it turned an inexperienced entrepreneur into a successful business leader. In this book, Jan Simon, Managing Partner of Vonzeo Capital and Academic Director of the International Search Fund Center at IESE Business School, presents a best-practices-based roadmap for searchers, acquisition entrepreneurs, investors and board members. Drawing on generous contributions from the search fund community as well as his own experience, he sheds light on how this community converted $1.4 billion of investments into $8.7 billion, with $1.8 billion going to the entrepreneurs.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire
By Caroline M. Elkins, Professor of Business Administration
Alfred A. Knopf
Sprawling across a quarter of the world’s landmass and claiming nearly 700 million people, Britain’s twentieth-century empire was the largest in human history. For many Britons, it epitomized their nation’s cultural superiority, but what legacy did the island nation deliver to the world? Covering more than 200 years of history, author Caroline Elkins reveals an evolutionary and racialized doctrine that espoused an unrelenting deployment of violence to secure and preserve the nation’s imperial interests. She outlines how ideological foundations of violence were rooted in Victorian-era calls for punishing recalcitrant “natives,” and how, over time, its forms became increasingly systematized. Elkins makes clear that when Britain could no longer maintain control over the violence it provoked and enacted, it retreated from empire, destroying and hiding incriminating evidence of its policies and practices. Drawing on more than a decade of research on four continents, Legacy of Violence implicates all sides of Britain’s political divide in the creation, execution, and cover-up of imperial violence. By demonstrating how and why violence was the most salient factor underwriting Britain’s empire and the nation’s imperial identity at home, Elkins upends long-held myths and sheds new light on empire’s role in shaping the world today.

Time for Reparations: A Global Perspective
By Jaqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache, and Caroline M. Elkins, Professor of Business Administration,Editors
University of Pennsylvania Press
With a sweeping international perspective, Time for Reparations makes the case that past state injustice—be it slavery or colonization, forced sterilization or widespread atrocities—has enduring consequences that generate ongoing harm, which needs to be addressed as a matter of justice and equity. Time for Reparations provides a wealth of detailed and diverse examples of state injustice, from enslavement of African Americans in the United States and Roma in Romania to colonial exploitation and brutality in Guatemala, Algeria, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Guadeloupe. From many vantage points, contributing authors discuss different reparative strategies and the impact they would have on the lives of survivor or descent communities. One of the strengths of this book is its interdisciplinary perspective—contributors are historians, anthropologists, human rights lawyers, sociologists, and political scientists. Many of the authors are both scholars and advocates, actively involved in one capacity or another in the struggles for reparations they describe. The book, therefore, has a broad and inclusive scope, aided by an accessible and cogent writing style. It appeals to scholars, students, advocates and others concerned about addressing some of the most profound and enduring injustices of our time.

Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third Word
By Jeremy Friedman, Marvin Bower Associate Professor
Harvard University Press
In the first decades after World War II, many newly-independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism.

Author Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over 40 years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model. Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High Performance Companies
By Ranjay Gulati, Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration
Harper Business
Deep Purpose offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand the full potential of a purpose, and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Based on extensive field research, author Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

Making Meritocracy: Lessons from China and India, from Antiquity to the Present
By Tarun Khanna, Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor, and Michael Szonyi, Editors
Oxford University Press
How do societies identify and promote merit? Enabling all people to fulfill their potential, and ensuring the selection of competent and capable leaders are central challenges for any society. These are not new concerns. Scholars, educators, and political and economic elites in China and India have been pondering them for centuries and continue to do so today, with enormously high stakes. In Making Meritocracy, Tarun Khanna and Michael Szonyi have gathered experts from a range of intellectual perspectives—political science, history, philosophy, anthropology, economics, and applied mathematics—to discuss how the two most populous societies in the world have addressed the issue of building meritocracy historically, philosophically, and in practice. They focus on how contemporary policy makers, educators, and private-sector practitioners seek to promote it today. Though the past, present, and future of meritocracy-building in China and India have distinctive local inflections, their attempts to enhance their power, influence, and social well-being by prioritizing merit-based advancement offers rich lessons both for one another and for the rest of the world—including rich countries like the United States, which are currently witnessing broad-based attacks on the very idea of meritocracy.

Effective Fundraising: The Trustee’s Role and Beyond
By F. Warren McFarlan, Albert H. Gordon Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus
Wiley
Effective Fund Raising: The Trustee’s Role and Beyond is the result of author F. Warren McFarlan’s two decades of research at Harvard Business School, along with over 40 years of active social enterprise board service. This book offers a depth of knowledge and insight that will prove invaluable for trustees, donors, and others related to and responsible for the success of social enterprise. Social enterprise organizations have played a vibrant and important role in the USA for the past century. And yet, the business of fundraising has not become any easier or more elegant. In this book, you will discover how to help raise the financial resources that your organization needs to perform its good deeds.

Learn why an effective, sustainable revenue model is critical to the success of even the most exciting mission-driven organization. Understand the core elements of the revenue model, including governance, fees, the annual fund, capital fundraising campaigns, planned gifts, and more. Develop a plan for sustaining your organization’s revenue, regardless of organization size. Build the skill of asking for money and lead your organization to a revenue and philanthropy orientation.

Many social enterprise CEOs spend over half of their time on fundraising. Why? Simply put: without a sustainable revenue model, even the most exciting mission-driven organization will collapse. The dirty truth is that, with no fundraising, there is no social enterprise or enduring mission. This book will help you shoulder the burden of fundraising and ensure the long-term success of your venture.

The Future of Executive Development
By Mihnea C. Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas, Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration
Stanford Business Books
Executive development programs have entered a period of rapid transformation, driven by digital disruption and a widening gap between the skills that participants and their organizations demand, and those provided by their executive programs. This work delves into the objective functions of the organizations that pay for the programs, and the ways in which business schools and other providers deliver (or not) on the promises they make regarding skill development and the continued value of learning to the organization. Authors Mihnea C. Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas show how a trio of disruptive forces (disintermediation, disaggregation, and decoupling), which have figured prominently in industries disrupted by digitalization, are reshaping the structure of demand for executive development. The authors also look at the future of executive development in the era of self-refining algorithms (aka machine learning) and wearable sensors and computers, and offer a compass for making the right choice for CEOs and CLOs who are guiding executive program design. Ultimately, this book serves as a guide to optimize the learning production function for both skill acquisition and skill transfer—the two charges that the new skills economy has laid out for any educational enterprise.

Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game
By Andrew Binns, Charles A. O’Reilly III, and Michael L. Tushman, Baker Foundation Professor; Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus and Charles B. Thornton Chair, Advanced Management Program at HBS
Wiley
Innovation used to be seen as a game best left to entrepreneurs, but now a new breed of corporate managers is flipping this logic on its head. Part entrepreneurs, and part change leaders, these corporate explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations. Corporate Explorer is a guidebook to the practices that enable these managers to go from idea into action. It demonstrates how success is not only possible but may offer entrenched companies better odds than venture-capital backed startups. This actionable and proven framework explains how managers can become successful corporate innovators, and offers tools to apply innovation practices with greater discipline; turn great ideas into a full-time job as an innovation leader; experiment with, and scale, original business models; transform innovation programs into a thriving source of new business; attract, retain, and motivate entrepreneurial talent; and energize employees by creating a realistic way to innovate. These lessons come from the trailblazers of corporate innovation―Andrew Binns, of Change Logic, Charles O’Reilly of Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Michael Tushman of Harvard Business School―who have decades of experience helping entrepreneurial-minded executives activate employees to become corporate explorers.

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