New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

John and Elizabeth continue their conversation with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan’s work fits into a newish approach in anthropology of researching people with greater power and influence than the researchers themselves. That's...

Should we love work? In The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality (U California Press, 2021), Erin Cech, an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, demonstrates how having passion for work fosters and reinforces a wide range of social inequalities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and data analysis, the book combines qualitative and qu...

Using “community” as a tool to strengthen and enhance the value a company or organisation delivers to its stakeholders is a concept and idea that entrepreneurs need to understand. Richard Millington is both an entrepreneur and a world expert in online community management. FeverBee uses proven social science to develop successful online and offline communities for B2B organisations around the worl...

Today I talked to Jamie Mustard about his new book The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out (BenBella Books, 2019). Ever feel like you’re “screaming” to be heard but in a world saturated by social media messages, et cetera, your “messages” are falling on deaf ears? If so, Jamie Mustard has a solution to propose. In short, you need to follow the Primal Laws of Attention. In essence, that me...

By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks, production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of C...

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military’s most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist S...

Since 2011, Kevin Rabinovich has been working in youth civic engagement, community organizing, and design thinking. He is the founding organizer of TEDxYouth@Columbia, South Carolina’s TEDxYouth event. In this episode you hear Richard interviewing Kevin, and learn how his decision to found a TEDx Youth turned a young teenager into a formidable leader. It’s a deep dive into the world of TEDx organi...

In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world...

Today I talked to David Avrin about his new book Why Customers Leave (And How to Win Them Back) (Career Press, 2019). There are three central themes to this book: immediacy (customers want instant gratification), individuality (offer flexible, customized assistance) and humanity (show interest and concern for those you are assisting). Of them, as David Avrin notes in this pleasing, semi-rant of an...

David Troy is a serial entrepreneur and community activist in Baltimore, Maryland. This podcast was recorded in 2019 for Project Kazimierz. Dave is CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tools Mailstrom.co and Chuck. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” wh...

The key to successful dialogue starts and ends with changing the conversation. Recognizing that it takes two people to engage in meaningful outcomes, Can We Talk?: Seven Principles for Managing Difficult Conversations at Work (Kogan Page, 2021) outlines what each contributor needs to do to achieve the best possible result. Using examples from everyday work situations, this book offers guidance on...

Creating a Culture of Predictable Outcomes: How Leadership, Collaboration, and Decision-Making Drive Architecture and Construction (Routledge, 2020) demonstrates the importance of creating cultures in the design and construction industries grounded in sophisticated-caring leadership, high-performing collaborative teams, and master-level decision-making discipline, informed by values, to finally ad...

Today I talked to Christine Kane about her book The Soul Sourced Entrepreneur: An Unconventional Success Plan for the Highly Creative, Secretly Sensitive & Wildly Ambitious (BenBella, 2020). Sick of the frequent images of entrepreneurs as machismo, take-no-prisoner, Rambo-like action figures? Look no farther than this episode, in which Christine Kane admits that bulimia was her first business men...

Under Bill Carroll’s leadership, Benedictine University, in Lisle Illinois became the fastest growing university in the U.S. from 2000-12. Carroll describes how Benedictine was able to expand from 1400 to over 10,000 students and become one of the most diverse universities in the US by “adding multiple legs to the table”, with each leg being a new type of student served through a new program. Thes...

In this episode Marcus shares the story of his highly programmed upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, with significant sporting achievements somewhat hiding his challenges in conventional learning environment because he is and was a “learner by doing”. We hear how he was challenged by freedom of the world of university education: dropped out, dived into the world of hip hop and failed to make a go of...

Just about everyone knows correlation does not equal causation, and probably that a randomized controlled experiment is the best way to solve that problem, if you can do one. If you’ve been following the economics discipline you will have heard about the Nobel Prize given to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their work applying the experimental method to test real-world policy...

I recently sat down with Josep M. Coll to discuss his new book Buddhist and Taoist Systems Thinking: The Natural Path to Sustainable Transformation (Routledge, 2021). This book is the latest and final in a series published by Routledge that includes titles by some brilliant systems thinkers I have had the fortune to interview previously on this podcast (Managing Creativity, Córdoba-Pachón; Systems...

Many Western entrepreneurs and businesses have foundered in trying to set up shop in China. Different expectations, different ways of doing business, different institutions and platforms—all come together to remove any pretensions that one can easily transplant a foreign business model into the Chinese market. One of these entrepreneurs was Xavier Naville, who moved to China in 1997 where he built...

Today I talked to April Rinne about her new book Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2021) What’s your relationship to change? Do you embrace it, filled with hope for the future? Or are you somebody who’s more cautious, even worried about what change might portend? In this episode, April Rinne offers advice based on her 8 rules for navigating change more adroitly....

David Nothacker, the founder Sennder - a logistics startup from Berlin that is now valued more than a billion Euros. This podcast was recorded back in 2016, way before the idea that this might be worth more than a billion Euro. Learn about the four “Fs” of fund-raising, and how supportive Roland Berger were when David decided not to return their after business school. Sennder took an innovative ap...

Today I talked to Nika Kabiri about her new book Money off the Table: Decision Science and the Secret to Smarter Investing (Houndstooth Press, 2020). Adam Smith not only helped to create the field of economics; the guy was also a moral philosopher who readily accepted the role of emotions in decision-making. How surprised he might have been to discover that it took decades upon decades for the fie...

In this episode we dig into Grzegorz Róg’s history and background, and how he established the largest Polish online education platform, and many other ventures. The biggest lesson to take from this podcast is important. Automation has explosive potential to transform organisations. The move towards No Code and APIs which connect “best of class” software applications creates tremendous opportunitie...

Today I talked to Michele Wucker about her new book You Are What You Risk: The New Art and Science of Navigating an Uncertain World (Pegasus Books, 2021) Your risk fingerprint is a mixture of how personality traits, experiences, and social context have shaped how you approach risk and uncertainty in life. Also crucial is your risk empathy and the degree to which you are risk-savvy, both of which v...

Supply chains - and, especially, their points of failure - have become a global hot topic, encouraging us all to take a closer look at how goods move around the globe. Dr. Gero Leson has spent the better part of his career developing supply chains from the ground up, modeling a community-driven approach that holds a vision of interconnection and a broader understanding of success for Western cultu...

In Part II of this interview, TCS Education Founder Michael Horowitz discusses the evolution of the TCS system from its origins in Chicago to a national system that now includes students from all 50 states pursuing a wide range of undergraduate and professional degrees. He provides multiple examples of the benefits of TCS’s model of “radical cooperation”, while also discussing why there have been...