New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

In this episode, Kimon and Richard speak with Nick Sonnenberg, CEO and Founder of Leverage. He is also the author of the book, Come Up For Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work (HarperCollins, 2023).Nick began his career as a high-frequency trader. He learned to build algorithms to trade stocks, which allowed him to build a nest egg over the course of eight years. At this point, he became interested in start-ups. He left his job as a trader, and created an app that helped with organizational and scheduling issues.The company faced severe financial struggles, which also took a significant toll on Nick. He worked hard to push through the difficulties and learned a great deal about organizational management and efficiency. From this experience, he began consulting with the likes of Tony Robbins, the Ethereum Foundation, and consumer goods companies.This period of struggle saw Leverage decline in headcount from 150 to 50 employees. Losing more than 40% of revenue per month, Nick knew that serious changes would be necessary for the company to survive. Leverage stopped focusing entirely on attracting and converting new customers. Instead, Leverage went all in on customer retention.Leverage’s focus is on teaching founders, executives, and employees how to most effectively use every organizational tool available to companies. These tools include email, Asana, Slack, Teams, and others. Leverage’s specialty is in conducting a broad overview of organizational efficiency. Then, they gave advice and education using a fully-designed framework. The focus is not on individual productivity but rather ‘productivity at scale.’Instagram: @NicholasSonnenbergTwitter: @Nick_SonnenbergLinkedInLink to the bookAbout our Hosts:Kimon Fountoukidis:Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR.Richard Lucas:Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

JoAnne Yates, Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita and Professor of Managerial Communication and Work and Organization Studies at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, talks about her classic and award-winning 1989 book, Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Johns Hopkins University Press), with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Control Through Communication tells the fascinating story of how corporations came to adopt modern communications systems, including typewriters, filing cabinets, card catalogs, memos, and reports. Over the past twenty years, the book has been hugely influential in history, communications, and media studies. Yates and Vinsel also talk about how Yates came to move from literature to business history and organization studies, what it was like working as a woman in a business school in the 1980s, how she managed to have a dual writing career in history and business school journals, and much more.Lee Vinsel is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Kimon and Richard speak with Sameer Narula, Managing Partner of August One, a private investment firm. Despite self-identifying as an engineer, Sameer has an entrepreneurial mind. Prior to starting August One, Sameer founded two companies, selling one in the early 2000s. His first ever venture was at the age of 13 when he and several friends started writing and drawing comic books. They used the school Xerox and sold copies to other students. Eventually, his parents became worried about the operation distracting Sameer from his schoolwork. Like most childhood pursuits, this project fizzled out.Sameer describes August Ones as akin to a family office. His family, along with four others, jointly pursue investments together for a multitude of objectives. He has known the other families for decades, and in some cases, his family has known the others for generations. In addition to these family offices, they also work with government funds and other investors. The nature of each investment varies, though Sameer and his main partners are as hands-on as possible. In one venture, August One is investing in carbon-neutral, real estate development in rural Europe. Sameer works directly with the architects and visits the building sites. In another–– a brewery–– Sameer has personally delivered barrels of beer.The three main areas that they focus on are real estate, energy, and food. Growing up in New Delhi, Sameer experienced firsthand the pollution that comes from these three areas. As a result, he is driven to invest in companies and projects that seek to reduce their carbon footprint. Sameer also discusses the promises and perils of working with governments. As he describes, working with Portugal has been a pleasure and Singapore is more efficient than any company or government he’s ever seen.Later in the interview, Sameer describes some of the challenges he’s faced as an entrepreneur and investor. He cautions that investors should fear zombie companies more than companies that try and fail. A company that fails allows you to cut your losses, whereas a zombie company can drain capital over a long period of time.Sameer also discusses the personal values necessary to succeed in the business world. He talks about the importance of working with people you trust. Values matter in addition to grit.Currently, Sameer splits his time between Helsinki, Lisbon, and Singapore. His reasons are both business-related and personal. All three are international, port cities. In Sameer’s view, all three are poised for growth and many of his clients operate in those regions.Sameer's LinkedInAugust OneAbout our Hosts:Kimon Fountoukidis:Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Richard Lucas:Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Having lived through both China’s Great Leap Forward during primary school, then the Cultural Revolution and the closing of schools for ten years, Beijing-born Weijian Shan, instead of a secondary school education spent six hard years in the Gobi Desert with the Army Construction Corps.Remarkably, the young Shan made it to a PhD program at UC Berkeley where he met his academic advisor, then Professor Janet Yellen, later U.S. Treasury Secretary. (Somewhat ironically now attending to the insolvencies of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank). Shan goes on to become a Wharton School business professor before moving into investment banking and private equity investing making financial business history with the successful takeover and turnaround of failed banks in South Korea and China.Both generous with his time and patient with my questions, Dr. Shan is currently the CEO at PAG, a private equity firm managing assets of some $50 billion. We discussed the books in chronological order with a few tangents that Shan used to both clarify and instruct such as: his 2006 public debate with World Bank economists about Chinese profitability; why his generation truly is a ‘Lost Generation’; his career and transitions including, among other things, the connection between recent financial crises and the basics of sound financial banking systems; lessons from and advice for business negotiation; the importance of leadership, and his two keys to an ‘ownership’ mentality. All within the context of his well-written and interesting narratives providing personal accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution period in China, as well as historic overseas private equity bank deals as described by the publisher, Wiley and Sons, adapted below: Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America draws a vivid picture of the raw human energy and the will to succeed against all odds. Shan, a former hard laborer who is now one of Asia's best-known financiers, is thoughtful, observant, eloquent, and brutally honest, making him well-positioned to tell the story of a life that is a microcosm of modern China, and of how, improbably, that life became intertwined with America. This powerful and personal perspective on China and America will inform Americans' view of China, humanizing the country, while providing a rare view of America from the prism of a keen foreign observer who lived the American dream. (2019) Money Games: The Inside Story of How American Dealmakers Saved Korea’s Most Iconic Bank is a riveting tale of one of the most successful buyout deals ever: the acquisition and turnaround of what used to be Korea's largest bank by the Asian arm of an American firm, Newbridge Capital. Full of intrigue and suspense, this insider's account is told by the chief architect of the deal itself, the celebrated author and private equity investor Weijian Shan. With billions of dollars at stake, and the nation's economic future on the line, Newbridge Capital sought to become the first foreign firm in history to take control of one of Korea's most beloved financial institutions. (2020) In Money Machine: A Trailblazing American Venture in China, Weijian Shan delivers a compelling account of one of the most significant deals in private equity history: the first and only foreign acquisition of control of a Chinese national bank. Money Machine is the fascinating inside story of the transaction as told by the man who led it, from the intrigues of dealmaking to the complex and uncharted process of securing control by a foreign investor of a Chinese nationwide financial institution, a feat that had never before been attempted, nor has it been repeated. (2023) Keith Krueger teaches at the Sydney Business School at Shanghai University - can be reached at keith.krueger1@uts.edu.au or keithNBn@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Ayelet Fishbach about her book Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation (Little, Brown Spark, 2022)The key to motivating yourself is to change your circumstances. You can do so by the goals you set, how you accept feedback in pursuing them, the flexibility you show in making progress, and how well you leverage social support. Each of those four aspects has its own pitfalls, and today’s interview explores in depth a number of challenges. To harness the value of intrinsic motivation, can you stay attuned to the values and benefits that matter to you most? Likewise, can you demonstrate patience—not giving in to temptation or ceasing to engage because you don’t trust that the benefits you count on will actually be there at the end of the journey? Dr. Fishbach offers insights on all of these issues, and more, in a manner that recognizes the vulnerabilities people contend with daily.Dr. Ayelet Fishbach is an award-winning psychologist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the past president of the Society for the Science of Motivation. Her scientific findings are regularly featured in the media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and NPR.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

In this episode of High Theory, Eli Cook tells us about choice architecture. The term was invented by behavioral economists in 2008 who proposed it as a soft-power model of “libertarian paternalism” to influence consumer choice. Eli traces their concept through a twentieth-century history of structured choices, from personality tests and the five-star rating to the swipes and likes of platform capitalism. He shifts our attention from the rhetoric of consumer choice as freedom to the power of “choice architects” who determine the options for us.Eli takes the term “choice architecture” from Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale UP, 2008). He mentions the industrial psychologist Walter Dill Scott and the inventors of behavioral economics, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Amusingly, there is a New Yorker article about Tversky and Kahneman written by Thaler and Sunstein, called “The Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About How We Think.” (New Yorker 7 Dec 2016). In the full version of our conversation, Eli referenced the work of Sophia Rosenfeld on the longue durée history of choice.Eli Cook is a historian of American capitalism. He works as a Senior Lecturer in History and as head of the American Studies Program at the University of Haifa in Israel. His first book The Pricing of Progress: Economic Indicators and the Capitalization of American Life was published by Harvard University Press in 2017. Last year, he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center where he worked on his new book about choice architecture.Image: © 2023 Saronik Bosu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, I interview Professor Geoffrey Jones about his new book  Deeply Responsible Business: A Global History of Values-Driven Leadership (Harvard University Press, 2023). For an extraordinary introduction to the content of the book, please visit deeplyreponsible.com .Professor Christopher Marquis, author of Better Business: How the B Corp Movement Is Remaking Capitalism (Yale University Press, 2020) also joined our conversation.Deeply Responsible Business is a global history of deeply responsible business leaders. It offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Geoffrey Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.Interview by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves and each other.Drawing on dozens of in-depth interviews with leading social media influencers, brand executives, marketers, talent managers, trend forecasters, and others, Emily Hund shows how early industry participants focused on creating and monetizing digital personal brands as a means of exerting control over their professional destinies in a time of acute economic uncertainty. Over time, their activities coalesced into an industry whose impact has reached far beyond the dreams of its progenitors--and beyond their control. Hund illustrates how the methods they developed for creating, monetizing, and marketing social media content have permeated our lives and untangles the unforeseen cultural and economic costs.The Influencer Industry reveals how, in an increasingly fractured and profit-driven communications environment, the people we think of as "real" are merely those who have learned to exploit the industry's ever-shifting constructions of authenticity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimon and Richard speak with Christian Arno, founder and CEO of Pawprint, about how companies can effectively achieve sustainability goals.As a young child growing up in Aberdeen, Christian was interested in pursuing entrepreneurship. His first venture was in comic book sales, and his first clients were his parents and schoolmates on the bus. When his father learned more about the finances of Christian’s venture, he shut the enterprise down, an early lesson in “regulation.”For university, Christian attended Oxford, where he studied languages. At around this time, the Dotcom boom began, and Christian created a website advertising translation services. He began to receive customer inquiries, and soon enough, was able to establish a revenue stream from recurrent clients.The most important thing that Christian learned while building Lingo24 was how to take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization). Christian was able to land bigger companies despite a lack of experience. Searchers would find his professionally-created website, purchase services, eventually leading Christian to start hiring employees to accommodate the growing demand.In the 20 years of running the company before exiting, Christian was able to grow Lingo24 to a maximum size of 230 people with a peak revenue of around $50 million in a year. Despite this success, Christian felt it was time to move on to another venture.In the mid-2010s, Christian’s father, formerly an oil and gas entrepreneur, reversed course and became a climate activist with Extinction Rebellion. Through conversations with his father, Christian came to believe that the second act of his career should attempt to address the environmental issues that threaten him, his father, and billions around the world.Christian’s new company is a software platform, Pawprint, that educates, motivates, and aligns employees of companies around sustainable development goals. The CEO of a company signs up, creating accounts for employees. The employees are placed into teams where they compete to reduce their CO2 emissions. The CEO is able to set various financial or non-financial awards for the best-performing employees.Pawprint doesn’t just track the results. It also gives employees various actions and pieces of advice, over 500 in total, to improve their environmental impact.Christian talks about his passion for Pawprint and the excitement of working on project with social impact. His big piece of advice for entrepreneurs: Start doing what you care about as early possible. Don’t wait!Links UN SDGs BCorp movement Unbabel Buys Lingo24 Pawprint About our Hosts:Kimon Fountoukidis:Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. He founded both companies in the mid-90s with zero capital, and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. He is passionate about sharing his success with others and working entrepreneurs of all kinds to help them achieve their goals.Richard Lucas:Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser for years, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels. He was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991, where continues to invest in promising companies and helps other entrepreneurs realise their dreams. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Communication researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt talks about her book, The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication, as well as some of her recent and forthcoming pieces on the digital technology industry with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Weiss-Blatt’s work examines both the rise of the “techlash”—the development of negative public and expert sentiment about the digital technology industry—and how company public relations efforts responded to this development. Weiss-Blatt and Vinsel also talk about how some claims about the negative impacts of social media do not seem to hold up to empirical scrutiny and what all of this means for regulation of the digital technology industry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices