New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

Jack discusses different health care markets around the globe, including why there are 20 markets he would sooner want to enter than the European market.Evolution Surgical owns the full value-chain from end-to-end, meaning they are a manufacturer and a distributor. This allows them to more sensitively listen to customer feedback, which allows them, as as smaller company, to compete with big, multinational corporations.Founded in 2014, Evolution Surgical was never meant to grow to the size it is today. The original founder, intending to work with just a few clients, quickly found that there was significant demand for the products Evolution Surgical designed. This rapid growth is what lead Jack to be able to come in as the new owner and CEO. The founder is able to focus on working directly with surgeons, allowing Jack to focus on management.Evolution Surgical makes tools for spinal fusion, customizing devices to the exact specifications as requested by surgeons in Australia.In this wide-ranging conversation, Richard and Kimon explore what it takes to run a company that makes critical devices for people in need. Jack is insightful, modest, and an example of a great entrepreneur.Jack Lancaster is a highly experienced healthcare leader with a broad background across the sector globally. He is currently CEO Evolution Surgical, an Australian manufacturer and distributor of spinal devices. He is passionate about the role private sector organisations can play in improving outcomes and value for Australian patients.Evolution Surgical uniquely works across the full device value chain in Australia of design, manufacture, regulate, and distribute; and is very closely involved with the Australian clinical, academic, and manufacturing sectors to enable this success.Jack spent the early parts of his career working with the NHS deploying efficiency initiatives as well as in developing countries setting up programmes for large-scale disease elimination. Prior toEvolution Surgical he worked in the Sydney office of Boston Consulting Group in the healthcare practice. Jack has an undergraduate degree with Honours from St Andrews, and an MBA with a concentration in health strategies from Cambridge University.www.evolutinosurgical.com.auStanford Resources on Search FundsBuying your way into entrepreneurshipAbout NBN: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.Find links to past episodes here.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

An explosive, deeply reported exposé of McKinsey & Company, When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Doubleday, 2022) by Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe (Doubleday, 2022) highlights the often drastic impact of the most prestigious consulting company in the world. McKinsey's vaunted statement of values asserts that its role is to make the world a better place, but what does it actually do? Often McKinsey's advice boils down to major cost-cutting, including layoffs and maintenance reductions, to drive up short-term profits, thereby boosting a company's stock price and the wealth of its executives who hire it, at the expense of workers and safety measures. McKinsey also collects millions of dollars advising government agencies. Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining thousands of revelatory documents, and following the money. When McKinsey Comes to Town is a landmark work of investigative reporting.Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Hermes in Pittsburgh. He can be reached at DanielxPeris@gmail.com or via Twitter @HistoryInvestor. His History and Investing blog and Keep Calm & Carry On Investing podcast are here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to James Hurman about his new book Future Demand: Why Building Your Brand among Tomorrow’s Customers Is the Key to Start-Up Success (Previously Unavailable, 2022).Marketers aren’t always very good at marketing, ironically enough, as today’s guest candidly admits. Among the most amorphous terms tends to be branding, for which James Hurman has a pithy, memorable and very practical definition: “The simple idea at the heart of a company,” an idea that informs all the decisions the company subsequently makes. To succeed, what’s necessary? Clarity and an animating purpose, certainly, as well as at least two other key qualities. The first is not giving in to short-term thinking, whereby the pursuit of profit and the churning rotation of ever new campaign ideas mean that nothing gets the chance to sink in and resonate with the target market. Second, the need to develop a sense of what emotional space or category you’re operating in as a company. In other words, what emotion are you “selling” or nurturing, e.g., in the way that Dove emphasizes inclusivity.James Hurman is the founding partner of the innovation studio Previously Unavailable and the co-founder and director of TrackSuit, a brand health tracking company. An award-winning ad agency planning director, James is also the author of a previous book, The Case for Creativity: The Link Between Innovative Marketing and Commercial Success.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

What exactly can artificial intelligence do? It’s an issue some of the professions are grappling with – on the face of it, law is an area that rests on fine human judgment – but in fact many of tasks it involves can be performed by AI and if that is true for law then presumably it is also true for many other areas too. Daniel Susskind of Oxford University discusses his book The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the World of Human Experts (Oxford UP, 2022),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

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