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Hardcover
274 pages
ISBN 9781401322908 Published July 2009
Hyperion Books
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Posted Nov. 25, 2009 4:52 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
The strategy + business annual books list is always one of the finest and most anticipated of the year. They get really smart and talented people who know how to pick 'em, and have them write (always highly intelligent and insightful) essays on their category—and, of course, the books in it. I've listed the picks below, but it really is worth heading over to strategy + business for the essays. (The links to the individual essays are in the headings below.)
Clive Crook picks the best books on The Meltdown:
- In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business
- Financial Shock: Global Panic and Government Bailouts—How We Got Here and What Must Be Done to Fix It by Mark Zandi, FT Press*mdash;2nd edition
- Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis by John B. Taylor, Hoover Institution Press
- Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press
- House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan,
- A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression by Richard A. Posner, Harvard University Press
- Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America by Gerald F. Davis, Oxford University Press
Charles Handy picks the Leadership books:
- The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream amidst Global Financial Chaos by Kenneth Hopper & William Hopper, I. B. Tauris & Company—revised edition
- Transparency: How Leaders Create a Culture of Candor by Warren Bennis, Daniel Goleman & James O’Toole with Patricia Ward Biederman, Jossey-Bass
- Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help by Edgar H. Schein, Berrett-Koehler
- Walk the Walk: The #1 Rule for Real Leaders by Alan Deutschman, Portfolio
- Charisma and Compassion: Cheng Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement by C. Julia Huang, Harvard University Press
Phil Rosenzweig picks the books on Strategy:
- The Invisible Edge: Taking Your Strategy to the Next Level Using Intellectual Property by Mark Blaxill and Ralph Eckardt, Portfolio
- Dynamic Capabilities and Strategic Management: Organizing for Innovation and Growth by David J. Teece, Oxford University Press
- Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse by Malcolm S. Salter, Harvard University Press
Ayesha Khanna and Parag Khanna take on Globalization:
- The New Silk Road: How a Rising Arab World Is Turning Away from the West and Rediscovering China by Ben Simpfendorfer, Palgrave Macmillan
- Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation by Nandan Nilekani, Penguin Press
- India’s Global Powerhouses: How They Are Taking On the World by Nirmalya Kumar, with Pradipta K. Mohapatra and Suj Chandrasekhar, Harvard Business Press
- The Fat Tail: The Power of Political Knowledge for Strategic Investing by Ian Bremmer & Preston Keat, Oxford University Press
- Riches Among the Ruins: Adventures in the Dark Corners of the Global Economy by Robert P. Smith with Peter Zheutlin, AMACOM
Judith F. Samuelson picks the Management books:
- The Upside of the Downturn: Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath by Geoff Colvin, Portfolio
- Managing by Henry Mintzberg, Berrett-Koehler
- Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life by John C. Bogle, Wiley
- The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman, Doubleday
Catharine P. Taylor finds the best books on Marketing:
- Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel, Portfolio
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, Hyperion
- The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It by John Gerzema and Ed Lebar, Jossey-Bass
Steven Levy looks at the best books on Technology:
- Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America by Julia Angwin, Random House
- Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig, Penguin
- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg, Crown
James O'Toole picks the best Biographies:
- John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves, Overlook
- The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles, Knopf
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, Bantam
As Theodore Kinni writes in the introduction to this year's essays:
This year’s best business books help us understand current conditions and chart a secure course forward. With luck, next year’s best books will offer similar insight into a recovery of historic proportions.
You can read the full feature here.
We've been following this list since 2003. The previous years' lists are below.
2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008
Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year - The Longlist
Posted Aug. 12, 2009 10:40 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
The longlist for the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award has been announced. The press release states that "The award is designed to highlight the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance, and economics."
The books on the longlist are:
- Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A Akerlof, Robert J Shiller
- Clever: Leading Your Smartest, Most Creative People by Rob Goffee, Gareth Jones
- Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson
- Good Value: Reflections on Money, Morality and an Uncertain World by Stephen Green
- House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street By William D Cohan (Cohan won the award two years ago for his first book, The Last Tycoons.)
- How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give in by Jim Collins
- Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation by Nandan Nilekani
- In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel
- Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed
- The Match King: Ivar Kreuger, the Financial Genius Behind a Century of Wall Street Scandals by Frank Partnoy
- The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox
- Supercorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter
- This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff
- Why Your World Is about to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization by Jeff Rubin
The shortlist will be announced in September, and the overall winner will be announced at gala dinner in London at the end of October. We will, of course, keep you informed of further developments.
Kevin Kelly weighs in on Free
Posted July 22, 2009 10:21 a.m. by dylan
In Internet - 800 CEO Read Blog
The brilliant Kevin Kelly, author of Out of Control: The New Biolgy of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World and founder of Cool Tools, offered his take on Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price earlier this week. Somewhat coincidentally, Kevin Kelly is the author of a recent and popular ChangeThis manifesto entitled Better Than Free. And, though that title might suggest a momentous throwing down with Chris Anderson, Gladwell style, maybe even resorting to fisticuffs, it it no such thing. Put simply, he's a fan of Anderson's and the book, writing:
Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired, offers the best utilitarian knowledge about the economics of the free I've seen yet. I believe this book will clear up many misunderstandings about this "radical price" and assist creators (that's us these days) in pricing our offerings in a world of "freeconomics."
To read more of his thoughts on the topic, and an excerpt from the book, head on over to Cool Tools. The conversation in the comments of the post is rather vigorous, and with drastically opposing viewpoints.
Disagreement seems to be the natural state surrounding the book, with Malcolm Gladwell penning a New Yorker piece earlier this month that Seth Godin disagreed with (as, unsurprisingly, did Chris Anderson himself). When it comes to this idea and this book, great minds certainly don't think alike.
Here are a few opinions:
Alan Webber | Tim Sanders | Mark Cuban | Chris Brogan | Anil Dash
Anderson added to the conversation when he sat down with Charlie Rose last night.
Jack Covert Selects - Free
Posted July 13, 2009 3:38 a.m. by dylan
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson, Hyperion, 288 pages, $26.99, Hardcover, July 2009, ISBN 9781401322908
In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, declared the dawn of a new era. Diseases would cease to exist. Travel would be effortless. And electricity would become "too cheap to meter."
Strauss's vision has yet to become reality, but Chris Anderson, in his new book Free, asks us to take a mental leap and imagine for a moment that electricity were free. All of our buildings would be heated by electric coil. Everyone would drive electric cars. Deserts would be turned into fertile fields with the water produced by massive desalinization plants powered by an energy source with no cost. Everything that electricity touched would be dramatically altered.
Free electricity may be just a dream, but Anderson points to another area where free has become reality—bits. Moore's Law and its many corollaries describe the phenomenon that processing power, memory and bandwidth keep getting cheaper and, in fact, have already reached a point where they are too cheap to meter—the effects of which we are only beginning to see and feel.
This is merely one sightline made apparent in Free. Anderson gathers history, economic theory, and thought-provoking examples from around the world to make one powerful point: Free is all around us.
The free sample at your local bakery is just a cross-subsidy to encourage your purchase. The magazines sitting on your coffee table wouldn't get there on twelve-dollar subscriptions. Third party advertisers heavily subsidize their production and delivery (and your payment merely acts as a qualifier of your interest).
The fastest growing model online is "freemium," in which software companies entice customers with a no-cost version of a product, adding more valuable features for those willing to pay. My favorite personal example of this is Prezi, an outstanding presentation tool that works completely inside your web browser. The service is free to use, but if you need more storage or the ability to present without an Internet connection, you’ll pay a fee.
Free needs to be on your summer reading list. Entire industries are in the process of being changed and, in the extreme case, destroyed by Free. As Anderson puts it, "Once you switch from shipping atoms to transmitting bits, Free become inevitable." How will the flow of free bits affect your business? Or, how can you use Free to help it prosper? Pick up Free by Chris Anderson and start figuring it out.
