New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

​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

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

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

Every time we make a choice, our minds go through an elaborate process most of us never even notice. We’re influenced by subtle aspects of the way the choice is presented that often make the difference between a good decision and a bad one.How do we overcome the common faults in our decision-making and enable better choices in any situation? This question and more are answered in our guests latest book, The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters.Eric Johnson is a faculty member at the Columbia Business School at Columbia University where he is the inaugural holder of the Norman Eig Chair of Business, and Director of the Center for Decision Sciences. His research examines the interface between Behavioral Decision Research, Economics and the decisions made by consumers, managers, and their implications for public policy, markets and marketing.Eric and Greg analyze choice architecture from many angles in this episode, as well as touching on menu science, the problem with alphabetizing, and the impacts of good choice architecture on education.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

When we think about the greatest innovators of our time (Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Frank Lloyd Wright) we often hear about their work ethic. But one thing that all of these innovators have in common is their ability to walk away from the work. They nap, they garden, and they go shopping to give themselves a break from the problem they are working on and look for inspiration in the real world. They gave themselves space to let inspiration come to them, rather than trying to force it.In this episode of unSILOed, Greg talks with Stanford professor Jeremy Utley about his new book (co-authored with Perry Klebahn) Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters (Portfolio, 2022), which gives readers a strategy to come up with better ideas and determine which ones are worth pursuing.Jeremy Utley is a Director of Executive Education at Stanford's renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (the d.school) and works with leaders around the world to untap their abilities to innovate better and more effectively.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

In a world of either/or tradeoffs, it sometimes pays to explore the possibility of and/or. By changing our perspective and embracing paradox, we can see possibilities that were obscured by our tendency to see only tradeoffs.Wendy K. Smith is the Dana J. Johnson Professor of Business at the University of Delaware and co-founder of the Women's Leadership Initiative. She is also an author, and with Marianne Lewis, their latest book is Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems, about how to navigate the inevitable paradoxes and demands of life and the world.Wendy and Greg discuss Wendy’s book and what she has learned about paradoxes and the changes made possible when you replace ‘Either/Or thinking with ‘Both/And’ thinking. They discuss this approach and how you can learn from fields as diverse as philosophy, therapy, and improv, as well as Wendy’s three conditions of Change, Plurality, and Scarcity.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

Today I talked to Adam Kingl about his new book Sparking Success: Why Every Leader Needs to Develop a Creative Mindset (Kogan Page, 2023).Most or, indeed, basically all of us start out being highly creative kids filled with wonderment, only to often have that spark “knocked out” of us by the straight jacket of the status quo. This guest aims to change that scenario by drawing on his theater and general, artistic background. The bulk of this episode explores a variety of exercises to stimulate innovation and empathy. For instance, why not host a failure party to generate learnings as well as recognition that, of course, not every new initiative will succeed? Likewise, how about imagining if, say, a Salvador Dali or Jackson Pollack was in charge of product development or next your ad campaign; what might it look like then? From the marketplace to the workplace, Kingl takes us on a journey to . . . what might be, if we only dare.Adam Kingl is a speaker, educator, advisor and author who is an expert on leadership, creativity, innovation and adaptability. He’s an adjunct faculty member at the UCL School of Management and at Hult International Business School. He’s also an instructor at the University of Cambridge, and at institutions of higher learning in Sweden and Ireland.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His latest two books are Blah Blah Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Lingo and Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did we miss a fork in the road somewhere? What if our lives are going just fine, but we still want to hunt for the pieces of ourselves we’ve dropped along the way? Is it too late to claim more for ourselves?CEO and author Alisha Fernandez Miranda joins us to talk about what she gained by loosening her grip on deliverables, deadlines, and external affirmations of success. In this episode we explore the value of internships, mishaps, and what it means to trust in your dreams and in yourself.Today’s book is: My What If Year (Zibby Books, 2023) a memoir by Alisha Fernandez Miranda, about pausing her career to take four internships in three different countries, and finally explore the “What If” of her once-discarded—but still very real—dreams. With the tentative blessing of her husband, her parents, and her kids, she spent one year asking “What if?” and getting far more answers to that question than she ever expected. In My What If Year, she begins to question if exhaustion is a reasonable price to pay for anything, why she was so afraid of failure, and what success could look like on her own terms. For anyone who’s ever felt stuck, My What If Year proposes that it’s not too late to look for roads untraveled.Today’s guest is: Alisha Fernandez Miranda, who is a graduate of Harvard, and the London School of Economics. She is the author of My What If Year, and the co-author of 50 Years: Kinloch Lodge. She is the ex-CEO and current Chair at I.G. Advisors, and is the host of Quit Your Day Job, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of your dream jobs. Alisha is a Cuban-American, born and raised in Miami, and has spent her adult life in New York and London; she is currently based in Scotland. She speaks and writes regularly on women’s empowerment, social impact and sustainability. Her writing has been published in Vogue, Romper, The Good Trade, Insider and more.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is a freelance book editor. She has served as content director and producer of the Academic Life podcast since she launched it in 2020. The Academic Life is proud to be an academic partner of the New Books Network.Listeners to this episode may be interested in: Podcast on the benefits of doing less, and stressing less Podcast on living the "good-enough" life Podcast on why a DIY retreat might help you Podcast on difficult conversations Podcast asking about quitting a PhD program How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship and Community, by Mia Birdsong Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World, by Olga Khazan You Could Make This Place Beautiful: A Memoir, by Maggie Smith What If Year reading guide Welcome to the Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world, and embrace the broad definition of what it truly means to live an academic life. Missed any of the 150+ Academic Life episodes? You can find them all archived here. And check back soon: we’re in the studio preparing more episodes for your academic journey—and beyond! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices