WINTER 2012

Dan Roam:

In this time of grave economic and political uncertainty, our gnat-like instant brain takes over, leading us toward whatever light looks brightest at the moment—which is almost never our best strategic option. In his magnificent Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, Joshua Foer reminds what it means to remember. Better, he walks us step-by-step through the two thousand-year-old secret of how to remember anything. Quick and easy answers? Forget it. Long-term smarts? Remember this.

Mr. Roam is a San Francisco-based consultant and author of The Back of the Napkin, Unfolding the Napkin, and, most recently, Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work.

Robert Frisch:

In The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World, Walter Kiechel tells how frameworks emerged to allow management teams to analyze and discuss their challenges, with their consulting partners and more importantly among themselves. The ability to think about difficult strategic issues using standard methods—primitive before Bruce Henderson in the 1970s—has become widespread, driven both by the major business schools and the strategy consulting firms. When I joined Boston Consulting Group in 1982, there were three hundred consultants in the United States; now there are 4,800 just at BCG. Kiechel’s book is the story of this thirty-year surge, in terms of the people and the ideas that drove it. At one level, it’s the history of what is still a very young industry. At another, it tells how corporate strategy has become a serious intellectual pursuit. At still another, it’s a useful primer on the major strategy frameworks that have been developed over the past few decades.

I facilitated an offsite for a client at IBM’s Armonk, N.Y., conference center a few weeks ago. There are signs around, and T-shirts for sale in the employee gift shop emblazoned with the corporate motto: THINK. Reading Kiechel’s book was a great reminder that one of the best ways to cope with a challenging business environment is to do just that—to think, as a team, in a disciplined way about sustainable, defensible solutions to those challenges.

Mr. Frisch is managing partner of the Boston-based Strategic Offsites Group and author of Who’s in the Room?: How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them.

Charlotte Beers:

All the lonely months I was writing my new book, Jack Welch’s Winning was my catalyst. It is a miracle of clarity and succinct wisdom on complex subjects such as choosing winners and how to compete. But it was also a goad for me, because in reading Jack’s book, you’d think women had almost no role to play in the big, bad world of business. I’m on a mission to bring their presence and potential to the forefront. I want Jack’s next book to feature amazing women leaders at work.

Ms. Beers is former CEO of Ogilvy & Mather and under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, and author of I’d Rather Be In Charge: A Legendary Business Leader’s Roadmap for Achieving Joy, Power, and Pride at Work.

George Anders:

On Wall Street—where everything can be bought and sold in a heartbeat—some firms have tried to build up world-class investment-research departments by raiding the competition. Top analysts are hired for millions of dollars. They set up shop in a new firm. Then something weird happens: Yesterday’s stars turn into tomorrow’s disappointments. The analysts work just as hard—but not nearly as effectively.

Boris Groysberg’s book explains why. Chasing Stars: The Myth of Talent and the Portability of Performance is the sort of business book that every brilliant professor dreams of writing and so few pull off. It draws big, transferable lessons from Groysberg’s sample set. There’s lots to learn about team-building, corporate cultures, employee churn, and loyalty. There are witty asides about how to stay organized, how to run a meeting, and why the anonymous assistants are far more powerful than we realize. Best of all, Groysberg turns his deep knowledge of a strange, specialized sub-industry into a wide-ranging parable about high-stakes hiring that is instructive for us all.

Mr. Anders is one of the founding writers at Bloomberg View and author of, most recently, The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else.

Adam Lashinsky:

As I was finishing my book on Apple, I happened across Isaiah Wilner’s masterful 2006 book The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine, a biography of Time Inc. co-founder Britton Hadden. The comparisons between the Time founders, Hadden and Henry Luce, and Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are striking. Like Wozniak, Hadden was the creative genius of Time, responsible for all its early innovations, while Luce was the business visionary. For example, Hadden dreamed up Timestyle, the magazine’s witty and quirky manner of writing, while Luce focused on selling ads. Luce also was far better known because Hadden died at age 31; Wozniak, though he outlived Jobs, also exited Apple fairly quickly. The gripping drama of how Hadden and Luce founded Time is an important story of entrepreneurialism from another era. In rescuing Hadden from the shadows of twentieth century journalism history, Wilner has shed considerable light on the creation myth of a still-important company—and my employer today.

Mr. Lashinsky is senior editor-at-large for Fortune and author of Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired—and Secretive—Company Really Works.

Peggy Holman:

How we humans organize ourselves to get work done is transitioning from hierarchies to networks. So I picked up Albert-László Barabási’s 2002 book Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life to learn about networks. I now know that two fundamental dynamics are at play in a network: links connecting and hubs coalescing. The book has me thinking about implications for leadership: What is the role of a leader in a hub? What does link leadership look like?

Ms. Holman is a Bellevue, Wash.-based consultant, author of Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval Into Opportunity, and co-author of The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today’s Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems.

Deepak Malhotra:

Richard Beeman’s Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution takes us back to the travails and triumphs of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Set against the backdrop of one of the most consequential moments in American history are tales of creative deal-making, complex human relations, and the masterful management of conflict and process—but also of mismanagement, miscommunication, and miscalculation. Woven throughout the book is the recurring theme that individuals and their actions are of consequence; what we want to achieve and how we attempt to achieve it matter. It is an insightful read for anyone interested in the fields of management, strategy, leadership, or negotiation.

Professor Malhotra teaches at Harvard Business School and is co-author of Negotiation Genius and author of I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else’s Maze.

James G. Rickards:

The best business book I read in the past year is Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, a classic insider account of politics and policy in the White House during the first two years of the Obama administration, similar in style to the many inside accounts offered by Bob Woodward. When one considers that the failing economy was the dominant policy issue during this period and that decisions made in the White House affected every business, large and small, in terms of taxes, health care, regulation, finance, and the foreign-exchange value of the dollar, it soon becomes clear that this is a business book par excellence.

Suskind has been criticized for a few factual errors, but his powerful narrative skill and insight overcome these missteps. The reader is left with an indelible impression of President Obama as a man with little knowledge of economics or business who relied on the “best and the brightest” only to be undermined in his goals by infighting, flawed beliefs in the power of so-called “stimulus,” and cronyism with Wall Street. Confidence Men is a tour de force and a stinging indictment of the president’s failures in policy and personnel.

Mr. Rickards is a lawyer, economist, and investment banker, and author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis.

Harvey Mackay:

Joe Sweeney built his career by “combining his love of business and his passion for sports.” The title of Networking Is a Contact Sport doesn’t refer to hard hits or banging bodies—it’s about staying in contact with folks whose paths cross yours throughout a career. From the beginning, he encourages readers to take this approach to networking: “When you truly give to others without any expectations or strings attached, you will receive much more than you ever could have expected.” He shares insights on networking personality styles, identifying traits on both sides of a networking relationship, and then describes how to choose the best approach to connect productively with many kinds of people.

Mr. Mackay is chairman of MackayMitchell Envelope Corp. and author of, most recently, The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World.

Aaron Shapiro:

This year, I revisited The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker, the classic manual for productivity first published in 1967. It is brimming with timeless advice such as, “Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.” But I found the most inspiration by putting a time stamp on his words. Executives, he says, need to be able to carve out “fairly large chunks” of time to get work done, while “innovation and change make inordinate time demands,” and executives are under constant pressure to waste time. But he had no idea of the scope of this conflict. This was written before always-on, dinging, vibrating, and flashing communication tools rested in every executive’s pocket and on the conference tables of every meeting, and before goliath businesses and industries were being challenged by fast-moving startups and technology companies. It provoked me to deeply consider what makes an executive effective in the digital world—and to check my email less frequently.

Mr. Shapiro is CEO of Huge Inc. and author of Users, Not Customers: Who Really Determines the Success of Your Business.

Jim Stengel:

I just loved reading Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon. It is the anti-business book business book—personal, reflective, insightful, and incredibly useful in my day-to-day activities in consulting and teaching. Moon shows how the behavior of business and marketing people in highly competitive situations actually drives brands to be more similar versus more differentiated. If leaders take Moon’s advice to heart, they at least will have a shot at charting a new course, a new strategy toward customer-inspired differentiation. I think about her concepts nearly every day.

Mr. Stengel is a Cincinnati-based brand consultant, former global marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, and author of Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies.

Amy Lyman:

I recently read Frank Koller’s Spark: How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a Twenty-First-Century Corporation, an absorbing account of Lincoln Electric, a Cleveland-based manufacturer of electric arc-welding equipment, that focuses on its guaranteed-employment program. Lincoln’s record of significant profit-sharing is testimony to a number of practices that have fueled the company’s long-term success. Besides the guaranteed-employment program, a key practice in use is an advisory council composed of workers, elected by their peers, who meet with Lincoln’s president to discuss issues of concern to everyone in the company. Clear, open, honest and direct communication influences all of the employee-management interactions that happen at Lincoln.

Koller’s well-written book is definitely worth reading. This story of enduring values guiding company operations is inspiring. Lincoln has achieved tremendous success as an organization, in terms of both its market share and its reputation as a respectful group of people.

Ms. Lyman is co-founder of the Great Place to Work Institute and author of The Trustworthy Leader: Leveraging the Power of Trust to Transform Your Organization.

Robert F. Hurley:

I highly recommend that people read Condoleezza Rice’s No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington—but don’t stop there. When you have finished, pick up Thomas Ricks’ Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, and then dive into Doug Feith’s book War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. In reading these three books, you will get a fascinating window into strategic decision-making at the highest levels, conflict and distrust among key actors, and the challenge of formulating and implementing strategy in complex and risk environments. These issues of making difficult decisions in ambiguous and risk environments are critical for leaders today. So is forming a top team that can develop trust in one another so that complexity and risk can be dealt with together. Rice’s very candid and accurate conclusion is that the National Security team in the White House during the Iraq war “could have done better” at this.

Professor Hurley teaches at Fordham University, is president of a behavioral-science consultancy, and is author of The Decision to Trust: How Leaders Create High-Trust Organizations.

Stephen Leeb:

On many levels, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, written in 1959 and unpublished until 1986, has influenced me more than any other book that I have read not only this year but in my entire adult life. Set during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, Grossman’s novel, which many critics compare to War and Peace, is terrifying testimony to how precious our basic freedoms are. On a personal and specific level, it tells me, as someone who cherishes our American way of life, that when it comes to economic and resource security, we must not be complacent; we must not compromise.

Mr. Leeb is chairman and CEO of Leeb Capital Management and author of, most recently, Red Alert: How China’s Growing Prosperity Threatens the American Way of Life.

Ryan Blair:

In The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell talks about needing a maven, a salesman, and a connector, and truth be told, I’m not much of a connector. I have an introverted nature and like to contemplate more than I like to communicate. Knowing this, I found connectors to complete my skill set. I also used Gladwell’s book to structure my own and used his theories to create brand epidemics with my company. If not for The Tipping Point, I wouldn’t have understood how epidemics could be caused by brands, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to create or prevent an epidemic. It was my war plan for two, back-to -back tipping points. 

Mr. Blair is CEO of ViSalus Sciences and author of Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain: How I Went From Gang Member to Multimillionaire Entrepreneur.

Robert Frank:

Michael Lewis’s Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World proves that a gifted storyteller can make even the euro crisis a gripping tale. Loaded with memorable characters and quotes, Boomerang reminded me of P.J. O’Rourke’s rollicking Holidays in Hell, with more finance and less drinking. Lewis introduces us to a gun-wielding hedge-fund manager, a cod fisherman-turned-currency-trader, a bearded Greek monk/real-estate titan and an Irish banking regulator who appeared more like “the crazy uncle” who “had been sprung from the family cellar” than a wizened financial sage.

Like Lewis’s The Big Short, Boomerang proves that “acts of madness” by individuals and cultures contributed as much to the financial crisis as faulty systems and institutions.  One of my favorite lines is: “Leverage buys you a glimpse of prosperity you haven’t really earned.” It’s true of people and countries alike.

Mr. Frank is a senior writer at The Wall Street Journal, for which he writes The Wealth Report, and author of The High-Beta Rich: How the Manic Wealthy Will Take Us to the Next Boom, Bubble, and Bust.