Business Society

In Nature’s Fortune, Mark Tercek, CEO of The Nature Conservancy and former investment banker, and science writer Jonathan Adams argue that nature is not only the foundation of human well-being, but also the smartest commercial investment any business or government can make. The forests, floodplains, and oyster reefs often seen simply as raw materials or as obstacles to be cleared in the name of progress are, in fact as important to our future prosperity as technology or law or business innovation.

Transformations: How New Developments in Science, Technology, Business, and Society Are Changing Your Life features short commentaries on new developments that are changing everyone's life. The book was inspired by a series of articles on these topics, initially published in the Huffington Post, which have been turned into a book with 21 changes and what to expect.

Case studies of business and management success tend to focus on factors such as leadership, innovation, competition, and geography, but what about good fortune? This book highlights luck as a key idea for business and society. The author provides insights from economics, sociology, political science, philosophy, and psychology to create a brief intellectual history of luck.

The world often falls short of how we'd like it to be, and our ability to make even just a little difference can seem limited. Sometimes it feels like you need to be a super-hero to achieve anything meaningful. But what if by re-conceiving what you do, you could change the world for the better? In The Regenerative Life, Carol Sanford shows you how to fundamentally change the roles you play in society, enabling you to do more than you ever believed possible.

Developed by experienced professors and professionally narrated for easy listening, this course is a valuable tool when preparing for your Society for Human Resource Management Certified Professional or SHRM-CP Exam. The audio is focused and high-yield, covering the most important topics you need to know to succeed on the SHRM-CP Test.

DEI work is getting a bad reputation. But that’s because it’s not being done right, say veteran diversity consultants James O. Rodgers and Laura Kangas. Too many organizations are treating diversity training as a quick-hit, low-cost, check-the-box activity. Effective diversity training involves behavioral change based on adult learning theory. It is rigorous, deeply personal, experience based, and, if done well, life changing. Rodgers and Kangas offer a complete guide, from design to implementation to results.

Although most Americans attribute shifting practices in the financial industry to the invisible hand of the market, Mark H. Rose reveals the degree to which presidents, legislators, regulators, and even bankers themselves have long taken an active interest in regulating the industry.

An innovation expert illuminates why your power to make a difference is no longer bound by your status. In The Power of Onlyness, Nilofer Merchant, one of the world's top-ranked business thinkers, reveals that we have now reached an unprecedented moment of opportunity for your ideas to "make a dent" on the world.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have tried to achieve their goals in the most optimal way possible by developing long-term strategies and plans. However, as the social beings we are, our goals are often that others act or think in a certain way. How can we solve this problem? One of the methods that can be used to this end is to try to change the behaviour, affection, or opinion of others in a way that promotes their own interests. That is, use persuasion.

The future is an uncertain, uncomfortable prospect for employees, employers, and society at large. A flurry of unprecedented events have proven that, despite what some politicians and economists may tell us, the future is not set in stone. In light of this uncertainty, The Future Starts Now looks toward the various innovations and technologies that may shape our future. Authors Theo Priestley and Bronwyn Williams have brought together the world's leading futurists to articulate and clarify the current trajectories in technology, economics, politics, and business.

Breakthroughs such as personalized genomics, drones, self-driving vehicles, and artificial intelligence could make our lives healthier, safer, and easier. On the other hand, the same technologies raise the specter of a frightening future - eugenics, a jobless economy, a complete loss of privacy, and ever-worsening economic inequality. Wadhwa says that we need to ask three questions about every emerging technology: Does it have the potential to benefit everyone equally? What are the risks and the rewards? And does it promote autonomy or dependence?

What to Do When Machines Do Everything is a guidebook to succeeding in the next generation of the digital economy. When systems running on artificial intelligence can drive our cars, diagnose medical patients, and manage our finances more effectively than humans, it raises profound questions on the future of work and how companies compete.

Time is the ultimate scarce resource and thus quintessentially a topic for economics, which studies scarcity. Starting with the observation that time is increasingly valuable given competing demands as we have more things we can buy and do, Spending Time provides engaging insights into how people use their time and what determines their decisions about spending their time.

In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, best-selling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt. Will this be an age of prosperity or of calamity?

With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take listeners beyond "design thinking" to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation. From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas.

In Competition Is Killing Us, top business and competition lawyer Michelle Meagher establishes a new framework to control capitalism from the inside in order to make it work for the many and not just the few. Meagher has spent years campaigning against these multi-billion- and trillion-dollar mammoths that dominate the market and prioritise shareholder profits over all else; leading to extreme wealth inequality, inhumane conditions for workers and relentless pressure on the environment.

It has long been recognized that most standard of living increases are associated with advances in technology, not the accumulation of capital. Yet it has also become clear that what truly separates developed from less developed countries is not just a gap in resources or output but a gap in knowledge. In fact the pace at which developing countries grow is largely determined by the pace at which they close that gap. Therefore, how countries learn and become more productive is key to understanding how they grow and develop, especially over the long term.

If you want blind reassurance, affirmations of your inherent worth, or politically correct niceties, look elsewhere. Ethos of Men is a sobering account of what men are up against in today’s sociopolitical climate. More than an abstract survey of this climate, however, Ethos of Men is filled with practical advice on the development of healthy masculinity which inevitably leads to a better quality of life for any man who is willing to put in the work.

In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers.

With the exception of sleep, humans spend more of their lifetimes on work than any other activity. It is central to our economy, our society, and the family. It underpins our finances and our sense of meaning in life. Given the overriding importance of work, we need to recognize a profound transformation in the nature of work that is significantly altering lives: the incoming tidal wave of shadow work. Shadow work includes all the unpaid tasks we do on behalf of businesses and organizations.