New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

In From Big Oil to Big Green: Holding the Oil Industry to Account for the Climate Crisis (MIT Press, 2022), Professor Marco Grasso examines the responsibility of the oil and gas industry for the climate crisis and develops a moral framework that lays out its duties of reparation and decarbonization to allay the harm it has done. By framing climate change as a moral issue and outlining the industry's obligation to tackle it, Grasso shows that Big Oil is a central, yet overlooked, agent of climate ethics and policy.Isobel Akerman is a History PhD student at the University of Cambridge studying biodiversity and botanic gardens. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

An Imperfect Leader: Leadership in (After) Action (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) tells the story of a superintendent from his first days to the pandemic. In each chapter, he responds to a series of questions to prompt genuine reflection. This book is structured to give leaders the tools to become predictably successful leaders. Peter Stiepleman, the 2021 Missouri Superintendent of the Year, lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. He serves as an advisor to leaders and hosts a weekly podcast where he talks to leaders across the nation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is the best way for a company to innovate? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. The Innovator's Hypothesis addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. Michael Schrage advocates a cultural and strategic shift: small teams, collaboratively--and competitively--crafting business experiments that make top management sit up and take notice. He introduces the 5x5 framework: giving diverse teams of five people up to five days to come up with portfolios of five business experiments costing no more than $5,000 each and taking no longer than five weeks to run. Successful 5x5s, Schrage shows, make people more effective innovators, and more effective innovators mean more effective innovations.Michael Schrage is a Research Fellow at the Center for Digital Business at MIT Sloan School of Management. A sought-after consultant on business innovation, he is the author of Serious Play: How the World’s Best Companies Simulate to Innovate and What Do You Want Your Customers to Become? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Investors in stocks are faced with two major problems: How to find and interpret the most useful data from company accounts. How to whittle down the list of thousands of public companies into a smaller pool of candidates for further research.In Four Ways to Beat the Market: A Practical Guide to Stock-Screening Strategies to Help You Pick Winning Shares (Harriman House, 2023), experienced financial journalist Algy Hall provides the solution to both problems and helps investors in their quest to pick winning shares. The answer lies in stock screens. Over a decade, the four stock screens described here outperformed the market by 270% to 336%. These stock screens are ridiculously powerful – but staggeringly simple. Algy starts with four strategies for equity investing: Quality, Value, Income and Momentum.He shows how to construct four stock screens and use data from company accounts, including common accounting ratios, to filter stocks on the criteria that each of these strategies is looking for. And once the shortlist of screened stocks is produced, Algy explains how to use that shortlist as a basis for further analysis and research, before making an investment.Along the way, Algy also reveals the logical and empirical basis behind Quality, Value, Income and Momentum strategies, to help investors understand why they work and give them the confidence that they will continue to work in the future. Many other hints, tricks and tactics for investors are revealed, to help investors spot the best stocks and avoid the duds.With Algy Hall as your guide, discover the surprising ideas and stories that lie behind these strategies, while building the necessary know-how to improve your investment returns.John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma. john@ktdpod.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do experts perform better than generalists? In the midst of the fraught 2016 Brexit campaign one of the most British senior British politicians arguing that the UK should leave the EU said “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts “– and was widely derided for doing so. Amanda Goodall thinks he was wrong, as she explains to Owen Bennett-Jones. Goodall is the author of Credible: The Power of Expert Leaders (PublicAffairs, 2023).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

​This is not a typical investment book. It is an experiential guide on cultivating the mindset and behavior necessary to weather inherently uncertain and unpredictable markets. It doesn't just tell you how to invest but how to think better about investing. Referencing studies on psychology, decision making, and investment behavior, Jennings provides a no-nonsense analysis of the financial markets and a road map to navigating its inevitable twists and turns.Jennings uses mental models to create a latticework of wisdom that will help you evaluate investment advice and learn better behavior in the face of uncertainty. To name a few: ignore expert predictions, be wary of stories, and try to invest like a dead person.An engaging dive into investing psychology and best practices, The Uncertainty Solution: How to Invest with Confidence in the Face of the Unknown (Greenleaf Book Group, 2023) is an authoritative, accessible guide for both lay investors and professionals inundated with financial news and data. Read this book to improve your thinking about investing, practice better investment behavior, and ultimately, have more money. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By providing capital to back the ideas and efforts of others, venture capitalists can make absurd amounts of money. But there is another way of looking at it – venture capitalists take huge risks and produce great benefits. Many of the companies we rely on today began with a punt by a venture capitalist. Sebastian Mallaby discusses venture capitalists with Owen Bennett Jones. Mallaby is the author of The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (Penguin, 2022) among other books. Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Although each instance of creativity is singular and specific, Kyna Leski tells us, the creative process is universal. Artists, architects, poets, inventors, scientists, and others all navigate the same stages of the process in order to discover something that does not yet exist. All of us must work our way through the empty page, the blank screen, writer's block, confusion, chaos, and doubt. In The Storm of Creativity, Leski draws from her observations and experiences as a teacher, student, maker, writer, and architect to describe the workings of the creative process.Leski sees the creative process as being like a storm; it slowly begins to gather and take form until it overtakes us--if we are willing to let it. It is dynamic, continually in motion; it starts, stops, rages and abates, ebbs and flows. In illustrations that accompany each chapter, she maps the arc of the creative process by tracing the path of water droplets traveling the stages of a storm.Leski describes unlearning, ridding ourselves of preconceptions; only when we realize what we don't know can we pose the problem that we need to solve. We gather evidence--with notebook jottings, research, the collection of objects--propelling the process. We perceive and conceive; we look ahead without knowing where we are going; we make connections. We pause, retreat, and stop, only to start again. To illustrate these stages of the process, Leski draws on examples of creative practice that range from Paul Klee to Steve Jobs, from the discovery of continental drift to the design of Antoni Gaudí's Sagrada Familia.Creativity, Leski tells us, is a path with no beginning or end; it is ongoing. This revelatory view of the creative process will be an essential guide for anyone engaged in creative discovery.Kyna Leski is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and a Founding Principal of 3six0 Architecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should we separate decisions related to love and money, approaching finance and career-related decisions solely in a rational way while relying more on our emotions in the personal domain? Perhaps it's time to start using both our heads and hearts together when making life's most significant decisions.Myra Strober is an emerita Professor at the Schools of Education and Business at Stanford University. She also sits on the board of journal Feminist Economics and is the former president of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Abby Davisson is a social innovation leader and career development expert. She is a senior leader on global retailer Gap Inc.'s Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) team and is President of Gap Foundation. She is also an alumni career advisor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business.Together they wrote the book Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions, exploring how to navigate life’s most consequential and daunting decisions.Myra, Abby, and Greg discuss the importance of incorporating decision-making into an interdisciplinary curriculum at an early stage for students to equip them with the skills to make optimal strategic choices while avoiding the need to compromise their professional or personal lives.Gregory LaBlanc is a lifelong educator with degrees in History, PPE, Business, and Law, Greg currently teaches at Berkeley, Stanford, and HEC Paris. He has taught in multiple disciplines, from Engineering to Economics, from Biology to Business, from Psychology to Philosophy. He is the host of the unSILOed podcast. unSILOed is produced by University FM. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you keep promising yourself to write but never quite get around to it? Do you delete almost as many words as you write? Do you write things that never get shared?Nobody is born knowing how to write. Like any skill, writing improves with deliberate practice and attention. With growing skill often comes heightened enjoyment. This book will help you develop writing skill so you can share your message.There is no single writing recipe that works for everybody, but successful writers rely on common ingredients. Play with the experiments in this book to find what works for you. There is a free workbook to take stock and find the next best experiment for you, available at the book web site, sitwriteshare.com. 13 Sit experiments will help you get your writing started, escape writers' block, defeat internal gremlins, build habits, and find inspiration. 26 Write experiments will help you imagine your message, create a rough draft, and then edit in phases until your polished version emerges. 16 Share experiments will help you get support, publish, and spread your message to those who need it. Sit Write Share: Practical Writing Strategies to Transform Your Experience Into Content that Matters (Theano Press, 2022) will help you build your own unique writing practice.Kathryn Britton's clients call her the brilliant midwife of words. She has helped hundreds of people become word crafters who complete writing projects, big and small. Her own publications include books and articles about computer science, coaching, and applied positive psychology. After earning a Master of Applied Positive Psychology degree at the University of Pennsylvania, she founded Theano Coaching LLC to coach writers and run writing workshops. Kathryn has witnessed the power of her writing experiments to help authors find joy, build confidence, and get writing done that changes the world.For more information and for a workbook to help you move through the 55 experiments, go here.Elizabeth Cronin, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher with offices in Brookline and Norwood, MA. You can follow her on Instagram or visit her website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices