Stories
Stories
June 2022 Alumni and Faculty Books
Topics: Information-BooksInformation-Information PublishingEducation-LearningEdited by Margie Kelley
Winslow Homer: American Passage
By William R. Cross (MBA 1986)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
In 1860, at the age of 24, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.” Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning. Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today.
How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives
By Brian Elliot (MBA 2008), Sheela Subramanian (MBA 2011), and Helen Kupp (MBA 2015)
Wiley
The way we work has changed. The era of toiling from nine-to-five, five-days-a-week in the office is now a relic of the past and is being replaced by a better way—flexible work. But flexibility means a lot more than a day or two a week to “work from home”: 93 percent of your employees want more flexibility in when, not just where, they work. They want choice and they are leaving their roles to find it. The most successful leaders will go much further than offering occasional remote workdays—they will redesign every aspect of how work gets done, from defining how they measure organizational success to training their managers to make it happen. How the Future Works offers a blueprint for using flexible work to unlock the potential of your people. The book offers the steps necessary to building the new principles and guardrails to empower flexible, high-performing teams. And it teaches readers to lead with purpose, to manage and measure differently, and to believe that by letting go, they’ll get more back than they thought possible. Using original research from Future Forum, a consortium by Slack, and global case studies from leading companies such as Levi Strauss & Co., Genentech, Royal Bank of Canada, and IBM, How the Future Works offers concrete solutions and practical steps for building high functioning teams of talented, engaged people by providing them with the flexibility and choice they need to do their best work.
We Refuse to Forget
By Caleb Gayle (MBA 2019)
Riverhead Books
In We Refuse to Forget, award-winning journalist Caleb Gayle tells the extraordinary story of the Creek Nation, a Native tribe that two centuries ago both owned slaves and accepted Black people as full citizens. Thanks to the efforts of Creek leaders like Cow Tom, a Black Creek citizen who rose to become chief, the United States government recognized Creek citizenship in 1866 for its Black members. Yet this equality was shredded in the 1970s when tribal leaders revoked the citizenship of Black Creeks, even those who could trace their history back generations—even to Cow Tom himself. Why did this happen? How was the US government involved? And what are Cow Tom’s descendants and other Black Creeks doing to regain their citizenship? These are some of the questions that Gayle explores in this provocative examination of racial and ethnic identity. By delving into the history and interviewing Black Creeks who are fighting to have their citizenship reinstated, he lays bare the racism and greed at the heart of this story. We Refuse to Forget is an eye-opening account that challenges our preconceptions of identity as it shines new light on the long shadows of white supremacy and marginalization that continue to hamper progress for Black Americans.
The Able Archers
By Brian J. Morra (AMP 177)
Koehler Books
In 1983, the world stands at the brink of nuclear annihilation, and only a few people are aware of it. A riveting story of how two men’s lives intersect in the midst of an existential crisis, The Able Archers is told through the eyes of two key participants: a young American intelligence officer, Captain Kevin Cattani, and his more experienced Soviet counterpart, Colonel Ivan Levchenko. The story plays out from the skies over Siberia to the gritty, dangerous streets of East Berlin. The radically different worldviews of Cattani and Levchenko punctuate the deep divisions of the Cold War. The evolving relationship between the two men also highlights the humanity common to both sides. Only by working together will Cattani and Levchenko find a way to prevent a global nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Shift Your Paradigm
By Dionis Rodriguez(MBA 2006)
New Degree Press
Are you ready to unlock your hidden potential? Do you want to empower yourself and discover how to manifest your definition of success regardless of your background or the specific obstacles holding you back? Shift Your Paradigm is a step in the right direction. Your empowered paradigms will significantly increase your ability to achieve success, have meaningful relationships, make a difference to society and secure a fulfilling and happy life.
This book will help you discover how your paradigm is created, what factors impact it, and how you can take control of it. It also explores the factors allowed Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders to become larger-than-life figures; why society works the way it does, and what you can do to positively impact it, and the importance and power of close relationships.
Fin Tales: Saving Cadillac, America’s Luxury Icon
By John Smith (MBA 1976)
Aviva Publishing New York
In Fin Tales, author and retired group vice president of General Motors John Smith tells the story of how he and his team sprouted new life and purpose into the storied Cadillac―once the quintessential expression of accomplishment and success in America. The book is a kind of “how to” guide for any CEO or CMO tasked with returning a key consumer brand to relevance. Fin Tales is also the rare book about leading business turnarounds not from the top, where most leaders control all the levers of change, but from the middle, where thoughtful navigation of internal decision-making is critical.
Pandora’s Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climate Intervention
By Wake Smith (MBA 1986)
Cambridge University Press
Reaching net-zero emissions will not be the end of the climate struggle, but only the end of the beginning. For centuries thereafter, temperatures will remain elevated; climate damages will continue to accrue, and sea levels will continue to rise. Even the urgent and utterly essential task of reaching net zero cannot be achieved rapidly by emissions reductions alone. To hasten net zero and minimize climate damages thereafter, we will also need massive carbon removal and storage. We may even need to reduce incoming solar radiation in order to lower unacceptably high temperatures. Such unproven and potentially risky climate interventions raise mind-blowing questions of governance and ethics. Pandora’s Toolbox offers readers an accessible and authoritative introduction to both the hopes and hazards of some of humanity's most controversial technologies, which may nevertheless provide the key to saving our world.
What the Heck Do I Do With My Life?
By Ravi Venkatesan (MBA 1992)
Rupa Publications India
Our world will change more in this century than in all of human history, driven by many factors including technology, climate change, demographics and inequality. Such extreme change is throwing up unprecedented opportunities and creating an ‘adaptive challenge’ for individuals, organizations and societies. Those who can adapt to a fast-flowing, complex, volatile and uncertain world will flourish. Those who cannot will suffer greatly. There are clear signs everywhere that we need new ways to think about the world and our place in it. Our old ideas about education, lifestyle, success and happiness no longer work. How is work changing? How can you know what skills will be useful when jobs of the future are still being invented? Will jobs even exist or are we moving to a world of projects and gig work? How do you make sense of all this and more? In What the Heck Do I Do With My Life? Ravi Venkatesan makes the case that successful adaptation in the new century requires a paradigm shift, a different mindset, new skills and new strategies. The author also reflects on how we will need to live life more intentionally, making deliberate choices about who we are, what we do and how we live rather than simply being carried along like a piece of driftwood.
See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success
By Danny Warshay (MBA 1994)
St. Martin’s Press
The Entrepreneurial Process, one of Brown University’s highest-rated courses, has empowered thousands of students to start their own ventures. You might assume these ventures started because the founders were born entrepreneurs. You might assume that these folks had technical or finance degrees, or worked at fancy consulting firms, or had some other specialized knowledge. Yet that isn’t the case. Entrepreneurship is not a spirit or a gift. It is a process that anyone can learn, and that anyone can use to turn a problem into a solution with impact. In See, Solve, Scale, Danny Warshay, the creator of the Entrepreneurial Process course and founding executive director of Brown’s Center for Entrepreneurship, shares the same set of tools with aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. He overturns the common misconception that entrepreneurship is a hard-wired trait or the sole province of high-flying MBAs, and provides a proven method to identify consequential problems and an accessible process anyone can learn, master, and apply to solve them. See, Solve, Scale debunks common myths about entrepreneurship and empowers everyone. Its lasting message: Anyone can take a world-changing idea from conception to breakthrough entrepreneurial success.
The Four Elements: Finding Right Livelihood in the 21st Century
By Timothy Butler, Senior Fellow and Director of Career Development Programs
Open Boundary Press
This is a book for all who are facing career and life transitions. At such junctures, our decisions require the full self, and astute thinking alone will not carry us into the new place that our lives demand. The Four Elements shares the recent research of Dr. Timothy Butler concerning the four archetypes of identity, community, necessity, and horizon, which are always active in our lives and must be addressed during times of significant change. This book will allow the reader to access and employ the deeper levels of both implicit and symbolic intelligence that are necessary when the issues at stake are a greater sense of meaning and commitment. The book leads the reader through a series of exercises designed to uncover a rich understanding and appreciation for what each of the Four Elements requires of us at this particular time in our lives.
A Political Economy of Justice
Edited By Danielle Allen; Yochai Benkler; Leah Downey; Rebecca Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor; and Joshua Simons
University of Chicago Press
If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and people interact in this next era of the world? A Political Economy of Justice considers the strained state of our political economy in terms of where it can go from here. The contributors to this timely and essential volume look squarely at how normative and positive questions about political economy interact with each other—and from that beginning, how to chart a way forward to a just economy. A Political Economy of Justice collects 14 essays from prominent scholars across the social sciences, each writing in one of three lanes: the measures of a just political economy; the role of firms; and the roles of institutions and governments. The result is a wholly original and urgent new benchmark for the next stage of our democracy.
Leadership to Last: How Great Leaders Leave Legacies Behind
By Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, and Tarun Khanna, the George Paulo Lemann Professor
Penguin Random House, India
Society tends to glorify the get-rich-quick entrepreneur who builds a company, takes it public and then (maybe) contributes to charity. In Leadership to Last, Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna discuss the interviews they and other Harvard faculty have undertaken with iconic leaders in India who have demonstrated leadership to last. There are leaders from South Asia and other emerging markets as well to illustrate that the ideas Indian entrepreneurs speak about are echoed by their counterparts in the Global South. All these magnates—Ratan Tata, Anu Aga, Adi Godrej, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Devi Shetty and Rahul Bajaj, to name a few—have built, to general acclaim and acknowledgement, organizations that are seen as forward-looking and innovative. They subscribe to a code of ethics and contribute to the betterment of society. The authors demonstrate that this is much harder to achieve than unicorn status. The authors show how these stories are less about building a get-rich-quick organization and more about triggering foundational and institutional change in society. These interviews, encapsulating the history of recent decades, eloquently lay out the opportunities and challenges of today and the future. The profiled leaders inspire awe by displaying audacity of intent, humility of demeanor and steadfastness of purpose.
The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI
By Paul Leonardi and Tsedal Neeley, Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration
Harvard Business Review Press
The digital revolution is here, changing how work gets done, how industries are structured, and how people from all walks of life work, behave, and relate to each other. To thrive in a world driven by data and powered by algorithms, we must learn to see, think, and act in new ways. We need to develop a digital mindset. But what does that mean? Some fear it means that we all need to become technologists who master the intricacies of coding, algorithms, AI, machine learning, robotics, and who-knows-what’s-next. That’s not the case. You can develop a digital mindset, and this book shows you how. It introduces three approaches—collaboration, computation, and change—and the perspectives and actions within each approach that will enable you to develop the digital skills you need. With a digital mindset, you’ll ask the right questions, make smart decisions, and appreciate new possibilities for a digital future. Leaders who adopt these approaches will be able to develop their organization’s talent and prepare their company for successful and continued digital transformation. The authors suggest that developing a digital mindset isn’t as hard as you think. Most people can become digitally savvy if they follow the “30 percent rule”—the minimum threshold that gives us enough digital literacy to understand and take advantage of the digital threads woven into the fabric of our world. A digital mindset will future-proof you, your career, and your organization.
Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know
By J.S. Nelson, Visiting Professor of Business Administration, and Lynn A. Stout
Oxford University Press
In today’s turbulent climate, business ethics are more important than ever. Surveys of employees show that misconduct is on the rise. News stories about indictments, prosecutions, and penalties imposed for unethical business conduct appear almost daily. Legislatures pass requirements elevating the levels of punishment and their enforcement against corporations and individuals. Organizations face pressure to design and implement effective ethics and compliance programs. As a result, businesses and businesspeople are increasingly worried that their conduct might cross lines that put their wealth and reputations at risk. Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know explains what those lines are, how not to cross them, and what to do when they are crossed. Written for both businesspeople facing real-life dilemmas and students studying ethical questions, this book surveys materials from moral philosophy, behavioral science, and corporate law, and shares practical advice. Experts J.S. Nelson and Lynn Stout cover a wide array of essential topics including the legal status of corporations, major ethical traps in modern business, negotiations, whistleblowing and liability, and best practices. Written in a short question-and-answer style, this resource provides engaging and readable introductions to the basic principles of business ethics, and an invaluable guide for dealing with ethical dilemmas.
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