The Book Judge

How does a company or an industry face up to the digital disruption? Will Page's answer is that it has to recognise what is going on, take a leap of faith, discard the old model and go with something new. He knows a thing or two about this because he was the Chief Economist at Spotify, a company that has completely transformed the music industry through streaming. This change did not come easily and the music industry had to be dragged kicking and screaming to embrace streaming. Page argues that all companies need to learn the lessons from the music industry and think of how they are going to swing for something new.

The internet has made it so easy for anyone to get access to information and data. But that data and information by themselves don't translate to knowledge. If anything many people feel overwhelmed by data and the often contradictory conclusions that experts might draw from the same set of data. How can you cut through all that noise and gain insights that can translate to action? Scott E Page suggests building your own mental model Swiss Army knife. His book the Model Thinker introduces models that explain many aspects of society and economies, and he encourages you to use a battery of models to draw your own conclusions. You will learn about the friendship paradox, or why your friends are likely to be more connected than you are. Or how the composition of the compensation committee can explain why CEO pay has increased so much in the US compared to Germany. But most importantly, you will learn tools that can help you understand the world, and what you can do in your own personal life.

When you get into business school or enter business, people keep telling you to build your network to get ahead.. Networks are terribly important but if all you do is focus on the transactional nature of network building (think amassing lots of Linkedin connections) you lose out on building deep relationships. You don't have to make every network connection a deep relationship but you do need a small number of exceptional relationships to get further in your career and personal life. Carole Robin and David Bradford have taught Interpersonal Dynamics to Stanford GSB MBAs for decades. These highly-driven students call this the Touchy Feely course and consistently rate it a top course every year. Bradford and Robin have put their learnings from teaching the course in this book Connect. It isn't a book you are supposed to read from cover to cover (although I did do that for the purpose of this review) just like their course is not designed to be taught lecture-style. Instead, the book and course requires a huge amount of emotional investment on your part. So at the end of each chapter you have to do some self-reflection and go out to apply what you learn in a relationship of your choosing. It is daunting but decades of Stanford GSB MBAs have found this tremendously useful.

Digital transformation is a recurring theme in business cases, corporate bedrooms, and flip charts in consulting companies. Is there any hope for industries such as newspapers and higher education in the face of disruptions from companies such as Google, Facebook, the Khan Academy and Udemy? What explains the continued success of the New York Times and the Economist when so many other newspapers and magazines continue to lose market share and money? Bharat Anand argues that many people focus too much on product and not enough on the connections between users, products and functions. At best, this means leaving money on the table. At worst, it means your company no longer has a place at the table. The book the Content Trap looks at all this and more. This episode will look at why bundling works for suppliers and consumers, something I am painfully beginning to understand as I look at the number of streaming services I am paying for.

There is this saying that you are the average of your 5 best friends. If you think of your organisation, then hiring 5 best people would raise everyone's game. But how do you find one of these stars, let alone 5? Will stars in another company necessarily be good for your organisation? Were they actual talents or supported by the unique environment in their previous company? Claudio Fernandez-Araoz is an expert in spotting and recruiting talent. The book It's Not the How or the What but the Who captures his wisdom from years with McKinsey and Egon Zehnder. This episode highlights lessons like what kind of talent does your organisation need at this stage in its development, what are key leadership assets you need to look for, and answers the question : are survivors of near death experiences good leaders for your organisation. Spoiler :- they are good, but not in the ways you think.

We have all watched movies where a good but flawed individual gives in to some impulse and commits a crime that causes his or her life to spiral out of control. Most of us think that we are moral individuals that will make the right decision and stop ourselves from crossing the line. But will we? Eugene Soltes takes an interesting look at white collar crime. He interviewed many executives convicted of white collar crime with his academic lens. He does not try to cast moral judgement on them but examines what led them to make that fateful decision to commit a crime. And the reasons are things that you and I could be subjected to : meeting investor expectations ahead of a quarterly earnings call, trying to keep a company afloat in the face of the better-funded establishment. And he made me think :- what is the difference between an executive exaggerating or not being clear about the impact of a clinical trial vs Steve Jobs' reality distortion field everytime he stepped on stage to introduce a new Apple product. Most importantly, this book made me more aware of the situations where I could make an immoral decision and what I could do to stop myself crossing the line. For that reason, this book deserves to be on the Book Judge,

You might be making plans to change some aspect of your life or career. The first thing you will need to do is re-prioritise other aspects of your life. For most of us, having a better relationship with the technology that we use is the best way to free up time and energy to do the things that really matter to us. I am a gadget guy and I love tech. But I have also caught myself mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin or even Netflix. Cal Newport, a computer science professor, writes in Digital Minimalism that these activities are not just time sucks. They also delude us into thinking we are doing something of value. Newport is not arguing that we return to some Amish, Luddite lifestyle, although he does make an argument why the Amish have a better approach to technology adoption. He is suggesting we think more carefully about how we use technology to get the most out of our lives and relationships. So if you want to make a career switch, you can still use platforms such as Linkedin or Twitter to do research. But sending an inMail or a connection request through Linkedin is not enough. I always hear from students who are stuck in a careers rut saying, “But I sent out 200 emails and Linkedin messages this week.” That’s what happens when you confuse a message on social media with authentic connections. You need to go further and set up a face-to-face meeting or a Zoom call. This approach will give you a much better chance of making that career switch. I am adopting Newport's suggestions for decluttering so from now on, the best way to give me comments about the show will be by leaving a review. No more posting on Twitter or Instagram. You can leave a comment here on Apple Podcast if you wish. I will respond to the comments in future episodes. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-book-judge/id1523686044

It’s the end of a crazy year and you might be looking to 2021 with renewed optimism that the pandemic will play itself out. This week’s Book Judge takes a longer look. Mauro Guillen looks at what the world might look like in 2030. I am sure Guillen did not expect all the trends he writes about sound so tame compared to a global pandemic. But I think that makes the book more compelling. After the year that was 2020, it is easier to see these long-running trends play out because after a global pandemic, people are beginning to accept that anything is possible. The pandemic has poured accelerant on some of these trends. Like how the developed world, especially Europe, has to confront tough choices on inter-generational wealth transfers. Or how companies will have to think about China as a growing market just as protectionist barriers are being erected. How will countries approach immigration when populations are decreasing everywhere. 2030 is written with a positive, optimistic tone. And one trend I am keen to see play out is how seniors will embrace learning and entrepreneurship. Seniors are living longer and many have large amounts of disposable income. As far as I can see, not many of them are going to spend that money on leisure cruises, so why not go back to school. That will bring immediate benefits to universities but it could have huge secondary effects on the economy as seniors pick up useful skills or start new businesses. And yes, if there is one thing for sure, we will all be seniors at some point in our lives.

Social networks play an outsized role in societies and economies. No filter by Sarah Frier looks at the influence of Instagram and how its early idealism was lost after its acquisition by Facebook. You get a front row seat to the unfolding drama between the King of Social Media Mark Zuckerberg and the upstart Kevin Systrom. And while there are lots of lessons here for entrepreneurs, co-founders, or early employees in a startup, the biggest lessons for us is how the personalities at the top of these companies make decisions that have huge unintended consequences for all of us.

2020 is turning out to be one big screwup after another. If you are lucky, you can just shrug off these failures and have a good laugh about them. But if you are affected, or responsible for these failures, then this is not a laughing matter. How do business leaders manage their organisations to minimise a catastrophic failure? Almost by definition these failures don't happen very often so you don't know if you are doing the right thing or not. But you do know the costs of getting things wrong can be huge. Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik look at failure from a systems level. How do different organisations approach and avoid the unthinkable. How did a Starbucks social media campaign go wildly out of control? How did the wrong movie get the Academy Award for Best Picture? And how did a piece of code bring down an entire financial trading company. Their book Meltdown contains a serious warning for all of us. That because companies, economies and societies are becoming more complex and inter-related, the potential for catastrophic failures is increasing. We just don't know it yet. But there are things that we can do to minimise those risk.

On the eve of the 2020 US Presidential elections, I am choosing the Plot Against America by Philip Roth, a work of fiction that imagines what would have happened if the 1940 US Presidential elections had gone a different way. In this book, the US elects Charles Lindbergh who sets America on an isolationist, anti-Semitic path. The Plot Against America is an essential read even if you are not an American because it drives home the importance and fragility of the democratic process. Citizens and businesses need to understand the role they play in the democratic process and exercise their right to vote responsibly. Other than this being a gripping read, you will also learn a lot about the American political and business leaders in the early 1940s, and realise just how many of them, such as Henry Ford, were anti-Semitics in real life. It is the history lesson that I wish I had gotten about the Second World War.

For Black History Month, I am introducing Franchise The Golden Arches in Black America by Marcia Chatelain. It is a fascinating look at the complex relationship between McDonalds and the black community in America and the naive hope that black capitalism would magically solve racial inequality in the absence of a major change in policies and attitudes. This is a story of how a global icon reluctantly embraced black franchisees and customers, and found that this became a huge driver of profits in their American operations. While McDonalds did a lot to support local communities, they are also guilty of drinking their Kool Aid and believing that they occupy a privileged position in the black community. At a time when businesses are rightly asked to take on a greater role to solve social issues, this is a useful reminder that businesses can’t achieve racial equality by themselves.

I am recording this in October 2020 when most of the world is at some stage of returning to work after the largest experiment ever in remote working. But what kind of office are we returning to? Why is an office built the way it is? Why do we even need offices if most of us will work sometime in the week at home? To understand all this, we have to learn about how the modern office got to where it is. Cubed by Nikil Saval brings us on a fascinating journey through the evolution of the office. From rail companies to the skyscraper and how the office reflected social attitudes. How did grand designs for the office get distorted into cubicle farms and open plan hell? This episode and Saval’s book will change the way you look at your office desk/cubicle/room. Hopefully you can change your office for the better.

If top athletes spend hours every day perfecting their skills, why do we spend so little time improving our writing skills when everyone knows written communication is a vital skill for leadership? Ann Handley gives you practical tips to write better, whether you are writing a letter to shareholders, a blog post, a tweet or your great American novel. There are also tips on how to improve your LinkedIn profile and posts which are so important now.

How many times do we consider the impact that business decisions have on the local communities? In the book Janesville, Amy Goldstein shows how the closure of the General Motors plant in the city of Janesville has deep, long-lasting effects on the community. You become a fly on the wall as families make some very painful decisions. You will feel sad, angry and inspired by the end of the book. And if you think this is a story of white middle America being abandoned and supporting Trump, think again. You can find me on twitter @chuakh16 or on Instagram @chuakh

Is there more to the story of the large corporate incumbent than a bureaucratic monolith crushing more deserving startups? Gary Pisano thinks so. He argues that an innovative culture can exist regardless of the size of an organisation. In this book, he describes the innovation DNA, how they exist in pairs that not everyone likes. He also talks about how existing technologies can survive and even flourish for a surprisingly long time in the face of new exciting but unproven technologies. In the Do You Know section, you learn about product innovation strategies that you can use at your next business case study. And my author question for Gary Pisano is about how creative construction in a large organisation applies to decisions about anti-trust.

Finance has developed a bad reputation since the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, with even many insiders decrying the very questionable practices within the industry. But can finance be principled and noble? Mihir Desai certainly thinks so. Drawing on a wealth of knowledge of finance, classic novels and popular culture, he shows how finance addresses the key issues that individuals and societies have faced over the centuries. Whether that be how to finance a very costly war, to guarding against living too long, or the marriage choices of an 18th century woman. The Wisdom of Finance is a must-read book for anyone who is interested in business, regardless if you are a finance practitioner.

Have you tried to convince someone to change their behaviour or viewpoint lately? It happens more often than you think. Whether it be giving feedback at a performance appraisal, discussing which projects to cut at an annual review, or just getting your child to eat their vegetables. Did it work? Jonah Berger (@j1berger) gives you a framework to try the next time you fail to get someone to change. His latest book the Catalyst introduces the REDUCE framework :- He also has some great case studies to illustrate these points. I highlight the example of a rabbi persuading the leader of the local Klu Klux Klan to resign. These, and more, are useful lessons if you are in business, or in business school.

A brand new podcast introducing books that you should read if you want to get ahead in business. If you are a student in business school, consider this your essential reading list. I've lost count of the number of students who get stumped when asked at an interview what books they are reading. I am not giving you the Cliff Notes to business books but you will get my handpicked curation of the books you should read.