Edited by Margie Kelley

The World’s Littlest Book on Climate: Ten Facts in Ten Minutes About CO2
By Mike Nelson, Pieter Tans, and Michael Banks (MBA 1983)
Independently Published
In this updated edition of the world’s smallest book on the world’s biggest problem, CO2 and climate change, the authors provide a quick and entertaining introduction to the science of climate change. It is a concise primer for anyone interested in how CO2 impacts our climate. Even knowledgeable readers will learn something new about climate change.

The Startup Lottery
By Gus Bessalel (MBA 1988)
Jones Media Publishing
In The Startup Lottery, veteran entrepreneur and Inc. 500 CEO Gus Bessalel provides an insider’s view of venture-capital-backed companies. You will learn how to navigate your startup career through stories, examples, and decision frameworks. This book will help you decide whether, when, and why working in a startup is right for you; evaluate the viability of a startup you are considering joining; learn how startup dynamics and rules benefit investors, not employees; negotiate a better job offer and manage stock-based compensation; and know when it is time to move on to other opportunities. Startup life is exciting, but full of uncertainty. You need the best information possible to make smart choices. The Startup Lottery is for anyone who wants to maximize their likelihood of success.

Smart Startups: What Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know—Advice from 18 Harvard Business School Founders
By Catalina Daniels (MBA 1991) and James H. Sherman (MBA 1991)
Harper Business
Would-be-entrepreneurs Catalina Daniels and James Sherman studied the nuts-and-bolts of entrepreneurship as classmates at HBS. Years later, after successfully founding and exiting several companies, they were surprised to realize that their experiences greatly differed from what they had been taught in school. There was so much they had learned the hard way that they wished they’d known before starting up. Inspired, Daniels and Sherman interviewed 18 HBS graduates and entrepreneurs about their experiences founding companies such as Blue Apron, Rent the Runway, Gilt, and AdoreMe, asking what they discovered along the way and what they wish they had known beforehand. The authors showcase the founders in their own words and give readers the experience of chatting with these remarkable entrepreneurs over a cup of coffee. Starting a business is hard. Seventy percent of startups today fail after their seed round, and less than ten percent achieve success for founders and investors. Faced with such a daunting threshold, aspiring entrepreneurs need all the advice, wisdom, and inspiration they can get. Smart Startups is written for them—a timeless record of essential knowledge that can help them achieve success.

It’s Time for Strategic Scheduling: How to Design Smarter K-12 Schedules That are Great for Students, Staff and the Budget
By Nathan Levenson (MBA 1987) and David James
ASCD
A school’s schedule can be as important to education outcomes as its budget or strategic plan. The secret to making the schedule a tool for school improvement is to approach schedule design not as a technical task, centered on making everything fit like Tetris blocks, but as a strategic one. In this book, informed by research and their work with hundreds of schools, scheduling experts Nathan Levenson and David James explore how strategic scheduling can turn a “good enough” schedule into one that supercharges learning and engagement without additional costs or more FTEs. Offering targeted advice for best-practice scheduling at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, this book will help school and district leaders—and the teachers and students they serve—make the most of every school day and year.

Higher Purpose Venture Capital
By Ron Levin (MBA 2008)
MindStir Media
Since time immemorial, human beings have faced a litany of existential hurdles that individuals have struggled to overcome. The inability or unwillingness to address both the root causes and symptoms of poverty and inequality ranks among the greatest failures of societies across the world. Thankfully, a new generation of dynamic socially conscious entrepreneurs is stepping in to fill gaps that governments have been unable to address. Whether it is solving deficiencies and injustice in healthcare, education, jobs, housing, food security, or simply having access to a bank loan when it is needed, there are founders and innovators who are creating and implementing new solutions to these daunting challenges. The only barrier to empowering many of these entrepreneurs is the availability of funding to ensure that their ideas can get off the ground and eventually scale to serve the vast “bottom of the pyramid.” This is where venture capitalists, angel investors, and other funders of early stage businesses can and must step up to make a difference. Higher Purpose Venture Capital dives into 50 business ventures that serve the “double bottom line” of profit and purpose and are backed by venture capital funding. They have helped fuel the growth of ventures that are making a difference in the lives of more and more people every day. This collection demonstrates the kind of impact that VCs have the power to make when they choose to back founders who are solving the world’s most pressing challenges.

America: Underwater and Sinking
By James B. Lockhart (MBA 1974)
Koehler Books
Author James B. Lockhart is a former submarine officer with the United States Navy who went on to play a large part in the government’s response to the global financial crisis. In America: Underwater and Sinking, he tells an important story about managing government agencies that—in submarine parlance—are deep underwater, then provides solutions to help them and the overall government surface.

Talent Disruption: People Are the Brands
By Alexander Mirza (MBA 1997)
Business Expert Press
In Talent Disruption: People Are the Brands, author Alexander Mirza proposes a solution to the human capital challenges faced by service industries amidst unprecedented labor shortages, and technological and geopolitical shifts, and offers a framework for diagnosing the root causes of talent disruption. He then provides a detailed roadmap and tools for building a talent engine powered by AI, big data, and analytics. The results are a growing talent pipeline, greater productivity, and higher profit margins.

Writing for Busy Readers
By Todd Rogers (PhD 2008) and Jessica Lasky-Fink
Dutton
Writing well is for school. Writing effectively is for life.

In Writing for Busy Readers, authors Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink build on their research in behavioral science, to outline cognitive facts about how people actually read, and distill them into six principles that will transform the power of your writing. Including many real-world examples, a checklist and other tools, this guide will make you a more successful and productive communicator. Rogers and Lasky-Fink bring Strunk and White’s core ideas into the 21st century’s attention marketplace. When the influential guides to writing prose were first published, the internet hadn’t been invented. Now, the average American adult is inundated with digital messages each day. With all this correspondence, capturing a busy reader’s attention is more challenging than ever.

How the Harvard Business School Changed the Way We View Organizations
By Jay W. Lorsch, Professor of Human Relations at Harvard Business School
Business Expert Press
Listen, observe, test—these three words lie at the heart of a powerful method for business transformation. Behind this method is a deceptively simple idea: managers and management scholars must first take the pulse of a real business, get its case history, diagnose its problems, and only then solve them. Invented by the scholars who launched Harvard Business School, this medical model will still cure companies today. During the last 30 years, business schools embraced the presumptions of economists, game theorists, and other calculators of abstraction. The solving of real-world, real-time problems has atrophied and stagnated. In this book, renowned scholar and emeritus professor Jay W. Lorsch marshals evidence, history, and insights from his more than 50-year career at Harvard Business School to make the case for a return to the medical model–the practices of listening, observing, and testing in which the fields of human relations and organizational behavior are rooted. By telling the history of the development of his field, Lorsch demonstrates how the medical model emerged in the years before World War II and, for decades, helped managers, management scholars, and consultants diagnose and solve the problems besetting companies large and small. Explaining the case studies that define the practice, he discusses how the model has been refined and reapplied by later generations and how it can continue to address issues such as diversity, leadership, competition, and optimal corporate board structures.

A La Latina Podcast
Hosted by Cynthia Kleinbaum (MBA 2008) and Claudia Romo Edelman
Despite Latinas representing 9 percent of the US population, they hold a mere 2 percent of senior executive roles. This podcast spotlights Latinas making waves in the corporate realm and a deep dive into their authentic journeys, with wisdom from industry behemoths like Coca-Cola, NFL, and Spotify, and delivers actionable strategies tailored for success—the Latina way.

Top of the Game
Hosted by Javier Saade (MBA 2000)
This podcast features “lightning-round talks with amazing people at the top of their games.” Meet impactful leaders, thinkers, and doers from all walks of life pushing humankind forward.

The Art of Excellence
Hosted by Glenn Zweig (MBA 1995)
Zweig has interviewed close to 100 guests on his podcast—all among the most accomplished people in their respective fields. They include Neil deGrasse Tyson, David Copperfield, and Deepak Chopra, and many more. Zweig finds and shares the common threads of “excellence” across these ultra-talented people so listeners can all apply them to their own careers and daily lives.

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