New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

The Price is Right is television's longest-running game show. Since its inception in 1956, contestants have won cars, tropical vacations, diamond jewelry, even a live horse, and the hosts' excited catchphrase "come on down!" has become part of our everyday vernacular. Part of the program's enduring appeal is the apparent ease of the game, guessing the cash value of certain prizes. But, if that's the case, then why do so many contestants come away from the show empty-handed? Solving The Price is Right (Prometheus Books, 2023) is an in-depth exploration of the underlying probability theory of the popular television program that explores how biases and behavioral pitfalls limit our ability to successfully apply logic and math both on and off the show. With rigorous data and analysis compiled from Seasons 47 and 48 (356 total episodes), investor and math practitioner Justin L. Bergner draws strategic and mathematical insights from all facets of the show, from Contestant's Row bidding to the Showcase Showdown, and all 77 Pricing Games, using a combination of game theory, probability theory, statistics, and pattern recognition. In each section, Bergner summarizes contestant performance, highlights the biases leading to sub-par outcomes, and shows how outcomes can be improved by executing the right strategies while avoiding cognitive biases. Throughout, Bergner applies the lessons learned to the fields of business, finance, and our real lives, shedding light on themes of reverse psychology, strategic patience, and the importance of establishing what is sufficient for success in our pursuits. The result is a truly unique and meticulously researched book that uses Solving The Price is Right as a lens to examine our own choices - and how to make better ones. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Tiago Forte about his new book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential (Atria Books, 2022).For the first time in history, we have instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge. There has never been a better time to learn, to contribute, and to improve ourselves. Yet, rather than feeling empowered, we are often left feeling overwhelmed by this constant influx of information. The very knowledge that was supposed to set us free has instead led to the paralyzing stress of believing we’ll never know or remember enough.Now, this eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you can easily create your own personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain. As a trusted and organized digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes, and creative work synced across all your devices and platforms, a Second Brain gives you the confidence to tackle your most important projects and ambitious goals. Tiago Forte is the Second Brain Guy. Here's how he describes himself:"I am a first-generation American, born and raised in Orange County in Southern California. I grew up in a mixed Brazilian and Filipino household with two brothers and a sister. Our home was filled with culture and the arts for as long as I can remember. My mother is a talented musician and singer who exposed us to the distinct rhythms of Brazilian music and the Portuguese language from our earliest years. My father is a professional artist who covered every wall of our home with his paintings and sketches."Joseph Fridman is a researcher, science communicator, media producer, and educational organizer. You can follow him on Twitter @joseph_fridman, or reach him at his website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Public companies now face constant pressure to meet investor expectations. A company must continually deliver strong short-term performance every quarter to maintain its stock price. This valuation treadmill creates incentives for corporations to deceive investors. Published more than twenty years after the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley, which requires all public companies to invest in measures to ensure the accuracy of their disclosures, The Valuation Treadmill: How Securities Fraud Threatens the Integrity of Public Companies (Cambridge University Press, 2022) shows how securities fraud became a major regulatory concern. Drawing on case studies of paradigmatic securities enforcement actions involving Xerox, Penn Central, Apple, Enron, Citigroup, and General Electric, the book argues that corporate securities fraud emerged as investors increasingly valued companies based on their future performance. Corporations now have an incentive to issue unrealistically optimistic disclosure to convince markets that their success will continue. Securities regulation must do more to protect the integrity of public companies from the pressure of the valuation treadmill.James J. Park is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Tessa West about her book Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them (Portfolio, 2022).This conversation explores the seven types of jerks that West has diagnosed: the kiss-up / kiss downer, the credit stealer, the bulldozer, the free rider, the micromanager, the neglectful (boss) and the gaslighter. The last type is, in West’s words, almost “clinically” an evil spirit, even more cleaver and intent on doing harm than the kiss up / kick downer, both of whom are united in feeling contempt for their victims on the job. Sometimes each type has a subspecies categorization: for instance, some bulldozer are rough and obvious from their in-the-mouth machinations. Other bulldozers can be smoother and more subtle. Whatever the manifestation, however, each of these seven types are best handled by developing an array of allies at work who can help give advice and documents the bad behavior you’re experiencing. As to executives, they’re too busy and too eager to see themselves above the fray, West counsels; so you’ve got to make your own way forward.Tessa West is an associate professor of psychology at New York University. She has published over 60 articles in psychology’s most prestigious journals and has received multiple grants, including from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, in addition to writing regularly about her research in The Wall Street Journal.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, 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