New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

Today I talked to Chris De Santis about his new book Why I Find You Irritating: Navigating Generational Friction at Work (Ampify, 2022).Soon, those who qualify as Millennials or part of Gen Z will constitute 70% of the workplace in America. What kinds of work environments and interactive styles will appeal or repel them most? Among the suggestions that Chris De Santis makes is to have a mentor or mentors with whom you feel an organic connection help you “interpret” your latest performance review. Why? The answer is that such reviews are by their very nature political documents, a set of opinions as more or more than they tend to be a helpful pathway forward in your career. Rather than numbers that deliver a series of grades, better would be comments or adjectives that serve as dialogue cues, as in you’re “good” at this and this, with both of those instances being ways in which you’re “lopsided” in favor of what you enjoy doing well and will be well-served to do more of. In this and other ways, the author’s goal as evidenced in this interview is to create a more democratic, more just work environment.Chris De Santis is an organizational behavior practitioner, speaker, podcaster, and author, working primarily with clients in professional services firms worldwide. Chris holds degrees from Notre Dame, the University of Denver, and Loyola University.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Digital platforms controlled by Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Tencent and Uber have transformed not only the ways we do business, but also the very nature of people's everyday lives. It is of vital importance that we understand the economic principles governing how these platforms operate. Paul Belleflamme and Martin Peitz's book The Economics of Platforms: Concepts and Strategy (Cambridge UP, 2021) explains the driving forces behind any platform business with a focus on network effects. The authors use short case studies and real-world applications to explain key concepts such as how platforms manage network effects and which price and non-price strategies they choose. This self-contained text is the first to offer a systematic and formalized account of what platforms are and how they operate, concisely incorporating path-breaking insights in economics over the last twenty years.Martin Peitz is professor of economics at the University of Mannheim (since 2007), a director of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation – MaCCI (since 2009). He has been member of the economic advisory group on competition policy (EAGCP) at the European Commission (2013–2016), an academic director of the Centre on Regulation in Europe, CERRE (2012–2016) and head of the Department of Economics (2010–2013). Martin has widely published in leading economics journals. He also frequently trains and advises government agencies in Europe and abroad on competition and regulation issues.Peter Lorentzen is economics professor at the University of San Francisco. He heads USF's Applied Economics Master's program, which focuses on the digital economy. His research is mainly on China's political economy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Handbook of Banking Technology (John Wiley & Sons, 2021), Walker and Morris provide a first comprehensive view of the systems that support a bank. During the interview, they bring out the interactions of these components and how the themes they touch on in the book come together. Years of first-hand experience combined with detailed research come together to explain the intricacies of the technological architecture of modern banking. Quite often the authors provide a long-term perspective of how these applications develop in order to provide a better understanding of how we got to where we are. The other podcast mentioned in this interview is James Bessen "The New Goliaths". Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently straddling between Newcastle and Mexico City. You can find him on twitter on issues related to business history of banking, fintech, payments and other musings. Not always in that order. @BatizLazo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)—or both.In Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back (Beacon, 2022), scholar Dr. Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of “chokepoint capitalism,” with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere.By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct “anti-competitive flywheels” designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices.In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away—before it’s too late.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis speak with Krzysztof Zdanowski, language and technology entrepreneur. Krzysztof argues that entrepreneurship is about emotional and social intelligence. He discusses the ups and downs on the road to building Summa Linguae Technologies, a company with yearly revenue of $35 million. Krzysztof studied applied linguistics in college, which helped lay the groundwork for his initial career as an interpreter. He first worked night shifts at a steel plant in Krakow. The factory had workers from different backgrounds, giving Krzysztof experience translating between workers and the international managers. Not long after, Krzysztof was fired from his job, which gave him the perfect opportunity to explore starting his own business.Krzysztof created a translation company and experienced several challenges in the effort to find the perfect business partner. He describes the important lessons he learned in these initial struggles. For Krzysztof, the most important things when it comes to a business partner are a "match in values" and complementary skills. Krzysztof also discusses the role of luck in creating a business. As he states, in the early days, he gave away half his business, only to buy it back shortly after. Krzysztof also experienced personal setbacks, dealing with a severe illness that left him partially paralyzed and in and out of the hospital for several years. He finally began to recover after a series of treatments in 2015, which allowed him to refocus on growing the business. That year, the company went public on an alternative stock exchange in Poland and made its first acquisition of a translation company based in India. At this point in time, the company's yearly revenue was $1 million a year. Summa Linguae was able to more than 30x by acquiring other companies. For Krzysztof, this period was filled with stress. To fund these acquisitions, he had to spend a significant amount of time raising money and hiring talent to grow the company.This period of "crazy growth," from 2016 to 2019, was the "death valley" for Summa Linguae. In 2019, Summa Linguae sold a portion of its equity, giving both the company and Krzysztof breathing room. In recent years, Summa Linguae has begun pivoting from translation to data services. Specifically, they use their data built up from many languages to help train AI voice assistants and other language assistant tools. Krzysztof spends much of his free time helping to build the entrepreneurship scene in Poland through the Entrepreneurs' Organization. Krzysztof Zdanowski is an entrepreneur. As CEO of Summa Linguae Technologies, he has built a language and technology company with revenue of more than $35 million per year.The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate, inform and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal stories of carefully selected guests—all in an informal atmosphere of unscripted conversations and open, personal accounts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we make the finance industry fair? In Highly Discriminating: Why the City Isn’t Fair and Diversity Doesn’t Work (Bristol UP, 2022), Louise Ashley, Associate Professor and IHSS Fellow at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Business and Management, explores the history and practice of social mobility into one of Britain’s key professions. The book offers a history of the City and its evolution from a closed world of gentlemen to a seemingly open meritocracy. At the same time, the book destroys the myth of merit, demonstrating how where people went to school, the place they did a degree, who they know, and how they present themselves still determine who is a success. Offering a critique of the City’s superficial attempts to increase its class, race, and gender diversity, the book is essential reading across the social sciences, as well as for anyone wishing to understand how inequalities continue in contemporary society.Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Sheffield. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Victoria Grady about her book (co-authored with Patrick McCreesh) Stuck: How to WIN at Work by Understanding LOSS (Productivity Press, 2022)The attachment styles we form by eight months of age can endure our entire lives, with an appreciable impact on how we relate to both our boss and the physical environment at work. A case in point is the famous Peanuts character Linus Van Pelt, as he lugs around his “security blanket.” Grady has made the importance of connection her mission, whether it be leaders responsible for cultivating a healthy company culture or managers trying to engage and motivate their staffs.Victoria Grady is the academic director of the MSM Graduate Program and associate professor of Management/Organizational Behavior in the School of Business at George Mason University. She’s also a professor in residence for Forvis. Besides other previous books, Grady has written articles for publications like the Harvard Business Review and the Journal of Change Management.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alongside rapid socio-economic development, China has achieved remarkable gains in gender equality on metrics like health, education, and labor force participation. Yet, the glass ceiling phenomenon and the underrepresentation of women in management has worsened. Sisi Sung's The Economics of Gender in China (Routledge, 2022) develops a cross-disciplinary paradigm, with economics at its core, to better understand gender in China and women in management in the Chinese business context. In addition to its theoretical advancements, The Economics of Gender in China uses in-depth interviews with managers in China’s largest enterprises to form rich qualitative insights on women’s managerial experiences and career choices. The book also focuses on the enduring power of stereotypes that specify women’s roles in the family, organization, and society. The book's multi-disciplinary approach allows readers across disciplines with an interest in gender studies to find it useful as an introductory reference.Sisi Sung is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt, Germany, and a research fellow at Tsinghua University, China. This interview was conducted by Kelsi Caywood, a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Michigan, who researches comparative gender inequality in the United States and East Asia.Kelsi Caywood is a PhD Student in Sociology at the University of Michigan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The contemporary internet's de facto business model is one of surveillance. Browser cookies follow us around the web, Amazon targets us with eerily prescient ads, Facebook and Google read our messages and analyze our patterns, and apps record our every move. In Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet (U Minnesota Press, 2021), Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising.The first institutional and political history of internet advertising, Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. Crain considers the social causes and consequences of the internet's rapid embrace of consumer monitoring, detailing how advertisers and marketers adapted to the existential threat of the internet and marshaled venture capital to develop the now-ubiquitous business model called "surveillance advertising." He draws on a range of primary resources from government, industry, and the press and highlights the political roots of internet advertising to underscore the necessity of political solutions to reign in unaccountable commercial surveillance.The dominant business model on the internet, surveillance advertising is the result of political choices--not the inevitable march of technology. Unlike many other countries, the United States has no internet privacy law. A fascinating prehistory of internet advertising giants like Google and Facebook, Profit over Privacy argues that the internet did not have to turn out this way and that it can be remade into something better.Peter C. Kunze is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Will Guidara, author of Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect (Optimism Press, 2022).Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world. How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality. Guidara’s team surprised a family who had never seen snow with a magical sledding trip to Central Park after their dinner; they filled a private dining room with sand, complete with mai-tais and beach chairs, to console a couple with a cancelled vacation. And his hospitality extended beyond those dining at the restaurant to his own team, who learned to deliver praise and criticism with intention; why the answer to some of the most pernicious business dilemmas is to give more—not less; and the magic that can happen when a busser starts thinking like an owner. Today, every business can choose to be a hospitality business—and we can all transform ordinary transactions into extraordinary experiences. Featuring sparkling stories of his journey through restaurants, with the industry’s most famous players like Daniel Boulud and Danny Meyer, Guidara urges us all to find the magic in what we do—for ourselves, the people we work with, and the people we serve.Christopher Russell (Host) spent 35 years working for some of the leading hospitality groups in the country, starting with the Clyde’s Restaurant Group in his native Washington D.C. and with Union Square Hospitality Group, Patina Restaurant Group, and Restaurant Associates in New York City. He is honored to have been director of restaurant operations at both Mets (Opera and Museum), and to have been entrusted with roles at Gramercy Tavern where he was a member of the opening service team and Union Square Cafe (16th Street) where he served as General Manager. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices