Global Business

Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World: Thriving in the New VUCA Context is the thoughtful analysis of nine expert authors from around the globe who put VUCA under the microscope and take the listener on a journey that looks at VUCA from a number of different leadership perspectives. Through their research and writing these nine authors seek to provide sense-making and insights that are combined with practical tips and frameworks to help leadership embrace this new VUCA context and learn how to thrive within it.

How do you find talent with a creative spark? To what extent can you predict human creativity, or is human creativity something irreducible before our eyes, perhaps to be spotted or glimpsed by intuition, but unique each time it appears? Obsessed with these questions, renowned economist Tyler Cowen and venture capitalist and entrepreneur Daniel Gross set out to study the art and science of finding talent at the highest level: the people with the creativity, drive, and insight to transform an organization and make everyone around them better.

From the man who was in the very middle of this perfect economic storm, On the Brink is Paulson's fast-paced retelling of the key decisions that had to be made with lightning speed. Paulson puts the listener in the room for all the intense moments as he addressed urgent market conditions, weighed critical decisions, and debated policy and economic considerations with of all the notable players.

Contending with the 24/7 news cycle and an endless barrage of choices and information has stymied leadership and decision-making strategies. The broad-based reaction to this chaotic, unmanageable assault has been to retrench, and to focus on immediate, controllable decisions. In the process, we lose sight of the horizon. More dangerous still, is the shift we've seen from value creation to wealth creation, in a transaction-based society in which the "deal" is more important than the value it drives or the relationships it is based on.

All of us have been in a situation where we have to manage or lead a group of people. No matter if you are the owner of a small startup, a supervisor, or the head of a million dollar company, you know managing a group of people is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Just think about how hard it is to organize and satisfy a whole family on vacation. This should be a piece of cake compared to the challenges someone in a management position is facing. As a higher-up, you don't want to be the authoritarian bad guy everyone uses to point fingers at.

Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional. Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three 30-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. became one of the hottest enterprise software companies, rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined.

What do Disney, Bollywood, and "the Batkid" teach us about how to create celebrity experiences for our audiences? How can a vending machine inspire world peace? Can being "imperfect" make your business more marketable? Can a selfie improve one's confidence? When can addiction be a good thing?

This book brings unique perspectives to this key debate by exploring the history of green entrepreneurship since the nineteenth century, and its spread globally in industries including renewable energy, organic food, natural beauty, ecotourism, recycling, architecture, and finance. The book uses the lens of the extraordinary and often eccentric men and women who defied convention and imagined that business could help save the planet, rather than consume it. The social and religious beliefs that drove many of these individuals are explored.

Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world's most influential and widely known corporations, the Coca-Cola Company. It tells the story of how, over the past 130 years, the corporation has tried to make its products and brands physically and culturally a central part of global daily life in over 200 countries. Through this story of Coca-Cola, Amanda Ciafone reveals the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations-liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal - of the 20th and 21st centuries. A story of global capitalism, it is not without contest.

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue”—an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

In 2010, Bruce Poon Tip shut down his human resources department. After building G Adventures from his garage into the world’s largest adventure travel company with over 1,500 employees around the world, it was a controversial decision. Poon Tip is a sought-after speaker whose unconventional management practices have helped him build an adventure travel company with $200 million in revenue and consistent and unprecedented growth for over two decades.

Many of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth.

Gupta and Wang explain how many MNCs view China and India solely from the lens of off-shoring and cost-reduction, and focusing their marketing strategies on only the top 5-10% of the population. This is a missed opportunity. China and India are the only two countries that constitute four realities that are strategically crucial for the global enterprise.

COVID-19 has caused fundamental shifts in attitudes around remote and office work. And in The New Normal in IT: How the Global Pandemic Changed Information Technology Forever, internationally renowned IT executive Gregory S. Smith explains how and why companies today are shedding corporate office locations and reducing office footprints.

Brand Renegades shows listeners how to develop a nontraditional success formula to disrupt and innovate their industry. Club Tattoo founders and industry disruptors Sean and Thora Dowdell share their experience as a woman-run company in the male-dominated world of tattoos and piercings. The lessons taught in this book are about learning to admit failure and learning to fail forward.

From family and friends, to romantic partners, professional interactions, and community connections, relationships are an integral part of life. Just as our heart pumps blood throughout our physical bodies to keep us alive, relationships are the lifeblood that helps keep our social and emotional worlds going. Despite the importance of relationships, many of us struggle when it comes to creating healthy and meaningful ones. We are incredibly advanced in science, technology, and medicine – yet when it comes to getting along with others we struggle.

A new edition of the bestseller that has helped aspiring leaders worldwide advance their careers and step up to larger leadership roles. Updated with new examples and self-assessments, this book gives you the tools to start acting like a leader and advancing your career to the next level.

In today's fast-paced world, leaders need to move at speed. The rate of innovation and change in organizations and the challenges of impatient investors or shareholders mean leadership decisions must be quick, smart, and deliver real impact. Superfast provides cutting-edge inspiration and a host of exciting ideas about how to accelerate performance in an agile and thoughtful way, shedding new light on leading in a world which is fluid and uncertain. You'll learn the practical solutions to leadership questions which the most savvy global leaders employ.

In From Ideas to Impact, Michael Sheldrick delivers an inspiring and insightful discussion on how to implement social impact by driving policy change.

Digital platforms are changing the rules of competition in the global economy. Until recently, it took Fortune 500 companies an average of 20 years to reach billion-dollar market valuations. Successful platforms now reach that milestone in an average of four years. In The Platform Paradox, Wharton professor Mauro F. Guillén highlights a key incongruity in this new world. Most platforms considered to be successful have triumphed in only some, rather than all, parts of the world. There are very few truly global digital platforms.