Business & Economics

Bring data to life with this essential guide to storytelling with maps. 

From scraping patterns in sand to drawing intricate lines on vellum and paper, to charting every place on the planet, humans have used maps as a powerful storytelling medium. The advent of the digital age has revolutionized the creation, distribution, and consumption of maps. The web created enormous opportunities for storytelling, enabling maps to dance and weave, partnering with other multimedia elements—photos, video, audio, text—to tell countless tales about our world. 

Featuring a foreword by renowned travel writer and cofounder of Lonely Planet Tony Wheeler, Telling Stories with Maps: Lessons from a Lifetime of Creating Place-Based Narratives bridges both the analog and digital realms, showcasing how maps themselves tell stories and enrich narratives by providing context and insight. Richly illustrated with examples from traditional maps to the latest digital visualizations, this book is an essential guide for anyone interested in the powerful storytelling potential of maps. 

Topics covered include: 

• How storytelling is fundamental to our humanity  
• Comparing and contrasting the use of words, images, and maps in storytelling 
• How maps help us tackle the who, what, when, where, why, and how  
• Considerations for the deep connection between maps and memory 
• How cartography and location-based storytelling have changed during the digital age  
• How the author and his collaborators refined storytelling techniques to create printed wall maps and atlas plates 
• The roles that maps play in narrative context 

Readers will learn:  

• 15 approaches to storytelling and place-based topics 
• How exposure to maps and geography can change how we think 
• Storytelling approaches suited for digital media yet honoring the centuries-old conventions of cartography 
• How to develop multimedia stories with the ability to employ motion and interactivity for your audience 
• Practical features and functions of ArcGIS StoryMaps, Esri’s storytelling platform, with insight and inspiration you can apply to your stories. 

Author Allen Carroll brings his experience from both the National Geographic Society and Esri into his writing. Carroll spent more than a decade of his 27-year career at National Geographic Society as chief cartographer. In 2010, Caroll joined Esri and founded its ArcGIS StoryMaps team, which developed web tools that enabled hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations to tell place-based stories combining interactive maps and multimedia content. 

Telling Stories with Maps is a winding journey, from thoughts on how our brains process spatial information to practical tips on creating stories, that will guide and inspire you to create place-based narratives that intrigue readers. 

Companies have more data at their fingertips than ever before. Yet, studies show that many executives and organizations fail to extract real value from it.

Challenging the conventional wisdom of data-driven decision-making, marketing professors and behavioral scientists Bart De Langhe and Stefano Puntoni argue that many analytics efforts flounder because data analyses are disconnected from the decisions to be made. In their important book, they offer a new approach they call decision-driven analytics. Counterintuitively, they argue that the key to making good decisions with data is to start by putting data in the background.

Drawing from their own research and teaching, as well as real-world business cases, De Langhe and Puntoni offer four pillars of decision-driven analytics and guide you around common mistakes that have held back many organizations from using data for impact.

In Decision-Driven Analytics, you will learn how to:

+ Avoid common pitfalls in data-driven decision-making;
+ Close the gap between managers and decision-making on one side, and data scientists and data analytics on the other;
+ Enhance the impact of data analytics on business outcomes;
+ Think without data to make better decisions;
+ Prepare for artificial intelligence’s impact on data analytics; and
+ Evaluate the costs and benefits of decision-driven analytics.


A must-read for anyone who wants to harness the power of data for competitive advantage, Decision-Driven Analytics will equip you with the skills and tools you need to more effectively use data for business outcomes and to make better decisions in today’s complex and data-rich world.

Discover your own path to entrepreneurship and make your mark in the world

In a world where entrepreneurship often seems to be driven by tech prodigies and venture-backed unicorns, many aspiring entrepreneurs find themselves wondering: “What if I don’t fit the stereotype of a Silicon Valley wunderkind? Is there a place for me in this landscape?”

In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, Lori Rosenkopf, Vice Dean of Entrepreneurship at The Wharton School, shatters these limiting perceptions, revealing an array of entrepreneurial paths that are open to anyone with the drive to create value through innovation. Drawing from her thirty-year career and interactions with more than 20,000 students, Rosenkopf offers a compelling roadmap for entrepreneurial success.

From Amy Errett’s disruption of the hair care industry with Madison Reed to Jarrid Tingle’s mission to diversify venture funding through Harlem Capital, the book showcases a rich tapestry of founders who have carved their own unique paths. These inspiring stories reveal that entrepreneurship is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, but a realm of possibilities limited only by one’s imagination and determination.

In Unstoppable Entrepreneurs, discover:
+ 7 distinct entrepreneurial paths, from disruptors to intrapreneurs;
+ The 6 Rs of entrepreneurial success;
+ Insights for navigating the inevitable setbacks and challenges;
+ Strategies for overcoming biases and obstacles in securing funding and support; and
+ Tools for developing an entrepreneurial mindset, regardless of background or industry.

Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur with a groundbreaking idea, a seasoned business owner looking to scale, or an employee seeking to drive innovation within your organization, this essential read will challenge your assumptions, unleash your entrepreneurial potential, and inspire you to make your mark in the world.

"Brilliantly captures the essence of adult development, offering leaders a roadmap to growth amidst complexity. A must-read for anyone committed to evolving their consciousness and leadership practice."

—Robert Kegan, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, co-author of Immunity to Change and An Everyone Culture

An advanced guide to leadership development and intentional evolution—your own or others

The leaders we need to solve our complex, unprecedented problems can only be developed in the workplace, and they require personal transformation, not just some new leadership skills. The second edition of Jennifer Garvey Berger's influential Changing on the Job explains the advanced perspective, maturity, and personal evolution leaders need to make a powerful difference in their organizations and in the world. The book offers practical tools and deep insights based on adult development theory to help leaders turn their greatest challenges into growth and personal transformation. Berger explains the four predictable stages of leadership maturity and wisdom, and how to accelerate growth toward the third and fourth stages. Whether you're a seasoned leader or an emerging coach, Changing on the Job is a roadmap to cultivating courageous, wise, and steady leadership in an uncertain world.

Five years after the pandemic forced a global experiment in remote work, organizations are facing a critical inflection point. For the first time, we have evidence, drawn from experience and research, on what works and what doesn’t.

In their important new book, In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work, Wharton professor Peter Cappelli and workplace strategist Ranya Nehmeh deliver a balanced, research-based approach to navigating the complex landscape of remote and hybrid work. They provide a fresh perspective on why hybrid models often fail and what organizations must do differently to succeed in this new era—with takeaways that may not be welcome to all.

In this timely book, discover:
+ Why remote work succeeded initially but has become increasingly problematic over time
+ What has been lost with the move away from in-office work
+ The hidden benefits of in-person work
+ How work dynamics post-pandemic have further influenced workplace culture and employee attitudes
+ How career advancement opportunities have changed
+ How new hires are faring
+ How the changes have impacted home life

In Praise of the Office also reveals when in-office works best, when fully remote work works best, and what is required to make hybrid work. Plus, it identifies what aspects of hybrid can do the most damage to employers and employees.

Fast-reading and practical, In Praise of the Office offers all of us—employers and employees alike— the tools and insights to make informed decisions about the future of work, whether navigating a return-to-office initiative, refining hybrid models, or fully embracing remote work. Cappelli and Nehmeh provide leaders with the clarity and direction to build stronger, more resilient workplaces.

Envision this scenario: An industrial manufacturer is breaking itself in three, and its board chair asks you, the chief financial officer, to step up to the helm of one of the spin-offs. You will take charge of everything, from plant operations and product marketing to human resources and governance practices. Are you ready to lead?

In The Leader's Checklist, 10th Anniversary Edition: 16 Mission-Critical Principles, world-renowned leadership expert and Wharton professor Michael Useem shows you how to lead through any challenge—and shares how ITT's Denise Ramos did just that when she encountered this situation.

In this illuminating guide, Useem offers a Leader's Checklist that will help you develop your ability to make good and timely decisions in unpredictable and stressful environments—for those moments when leadership really matters.

To illustrate the principles, Useem examines where leaders go right—and wrong. He looks at:How Ramos, the former CEO of ITT, turned around the once-struggling enterprise; How AIG's tone-deaf response to the tumultuous events of the global financial crisis left the company vulnerable to one of the greatest corporate collapses in business history; andHow Virginia Rometty, the former executive chair of IBM, acquired and integrated a cloud-computing company to help turn around IBM's fortunes. Based on Useem's own research experience and an array of leadership investigators, thinkers, and practitioners, The Leader's Checklist offers actionable insights you can put into practice as a leader today.

Shortlisted in the Smart Thinking category at the Business Book Awards in partnership with Pathway Group 2025

Finalist in the Leadership - Think Differently category of the Goody Business Book Awards 2024

The pandemic, climate change, rising populism, geo-political unrest – just a few of the issues causing turbulence in today’s world. We are living and working in times that are complex and fast changing.

The Dao of Complexity is a book about challenging and deepening worldviews. It explores the remarkable resonance between complexity and Daoism, engaging with the processual, contextual and emergent nature both of ourselves and of the world of which we are a part. It connects to ideas from such diverse fields as quantum physics, brain science, political theory and economics.

Jean asks what ‘making sense’ of the world means in these turbulent times and how that can galvanise action for those of us trying to make a difference, trying to ‘make waves’ in a world of increasing connectivity, polarisation and fragility.

Taking its lead from Daoist texts, the design encourages readers to open at any page and use the short, stand-alone, yet networked pieces as reflective starting points.

This book will be of interest to scholars and those striving for social change, as well as managers and policy makers looking for inspiration. The general reader interested in science, philosophy and ancient wisdom will find relatable material to explore how to engage effectively in this complex world.

A holistic, research-backed framework to future-proof your leadership and unlock the full potential of your team

In the wake of the pandemic and on the cusp of the generative AI revolution, the world of work has undergone a seismic shift. Chronic stress, burnout, and employee disengagement have reached crisis levels, and leaders are struggling to keep their teams motivated and inspired amid relentless change and uncertainty. Conventional management approaches are no longer sufficient, demanding a new leadership framework to address the root causes of these challenges.

To meet this moment, Lead Well: 5 Mindsets to Engage, Retain, and Inspire Your Team provides a timely and practical blueprint for a new era of leadership. Drawing on extensive research and workshops with thousands of leaders, Paula Davis, CEO and founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute and author of Beating Burnout at Work, offers a transformative approach to building high-performing teams that can adapt and grow, even in the face of relentless change.

Lead Well offers actionable tools and insights to help you and your team today:
+ Discover the 5 Lead Well mindsets that can transform your team’s well-being at work;
+ Explore research-backed strategies to foster a greater sense of purpose, meaning, and values alignment at work;
+ Gain techniques to improve workload management, work-life integration, and sustainable productivity;
+ Develop skills to build team cohesion and a culture of trust and support;
+ Cultivate practices that boost systemic resilience and help teams adapt to disruption; and
+ Implement Tiny Noticeable Things (TNTs) that can be quickly adopted by teams.

Davis’s first book, Beating Burnout at Work, addressed individuals and teams experiencing significant stress. This new book offers a method for addressing the factors that can lead to counterproductive stress and disengagement.

Whether you’re a seasoned leader or an emerging manager, Lead Well provides a holistic, research-backed framework to future-proof your leadership and unlock the full potential of your team. Navigating today’s turbulent work landscape has never been more critical—or more achievable.

Winner in the Leadership - Mentoring/Coaching category of the Goody Business Book Awards 2024

We live and work in a world of change. Helping individuals and teams prepare for, respond to, and learn from change are critical for thriving. Managers and leaders at all levels play a vital role in developing talent, increasing performance, and supporting transitions and transformations. This book is about effectively coaching others in your role as a manager-coach. A manager-coach is a person who uses coaching-related knowledge, approaches, and skills to coach team members in the organization who report to them or who have sought their coaching.

In 16 chapters, leaders at all levels, human resource professionals, and graduate students will find research-based, practical approaches to developing talent, improving performance, and supporting transformation. Topics include the change coaching process, theoretical foundations of coaching, use of self in managerial coaching, six coaching skills, how to coach across differences, specialty coaching (peer, team, and executive), ethical considerations for coaching, and continuous development for manager-coaches.

Provides models, frameworks and tools that can be used to coach team members.

2019 AXIOM BUSINESS BOOK AWARD WINNER

Featured in Forbes, NPR's Marketplace, and a Google Talk, The Customer Centricity Playbook offers "actionable insights to drive immediate value," according to Neil Hoyne, Head of Customer Analytics and Chief Analytics Evangelist, Google.

How did global gaming company Electronic Arts go from being named "Worst Company in America" to clearing a billion dollars in profit?

They discovered a simple truth—and acted on it: Not all customers are the same, regardless of how they appear on the surface.

In The Customer Centricity Playbook, Wharton School professor Peter Fader and Wharton Interactive's executive director Sarah Toms help you see your customers as individuals rather than a monolith, so you can stop wasting resources by chasing down product sales to each and every consumer.

Fader and Toms offer a 360-degree analysis of all the elements that support customer centricity within an organization. In this book, you will learn how to:
Develop a customer-centric strategy for your organization Understand the right way to think about customer lifetime value (CLV) Finetune investments in customer acquisition, retention, and development tactics based on customer heterogeneity Foster a culture that sustains customer centricity, and also understand the link between CLV and market valuation Understand customer relationship management (CRM) systems, as they are a vital underpinning for all these areas through the valuable insights they provide
Fader's first book, Customer Centricity, quickly became a go-to for readers interested in focusing on the right customers for strategic advantage. In this new book, Fader and Toms offer a true playbook for companies of all sizes that want to create and implement a winning strategy to acquire, develop, and retain customers for the greatest value.

"A must-read."—Aimee Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, Zillow

"The Customer Centricity Playbook offers fundamental insights to point organizations of any size in the right direction."—Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company, Inc., and coauthor, The Ultimate Question 2.0

"Peter Fader and Sarah Toms offer transformative insights that light the path for business leaders."—Susan Johnson, Chief Marketing Officer, SunTrust Banks

A powerful call to action, Customer Centricity upends some of our most fundamental beliefs about customer service, customer relationship management, and customer lifetime value.

Despite what the old adage says, the customer is not always right. Even companies that can seemingly do no wrong—like the coffeehouse giant Starbucks—have only recently started to figure this out.

Starbucks is one of many companies that has successfully executed a pivot that puts the company in a customer-centric mindset, an approach that Wharton professor Peter Fader describes in Customer Centricity. Fader advocates that in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers … and then there is pretty much everybody else.

In a new preface and afterword to Customer Centricity, Fader reflects on how the landscape has changed over nearly a decade since he first proposed that businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. Using examples from Starbucks, Nordstrom, and more, Fader provides insights to help you understand: Why customer centricity is the new model for success in today's data-driven environment. How the ideas of brand equity and customer asset value help us understand what kinds of companies naturally lend themselves to the customer-centric model and which ones don't; Why the traditional models for determining the value of individual customers are flawed; How executives can use customer lifetime value (CLV) and other customer-centric data to make smarter decisions about their companies; How the well-intended idea of customer relationship management (CRM) lost its way—and how your company can properly put CRM to use; How customer centricity will help you realign your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.ALSO AVAILABLE: Once Fader convinces you of the value of customer centricity in this book, The Customer Centricity Playbook, with Sarah Toms, will show you where to get started to bring it to the forefront of your organization.

THE WHARTON EXECUTIVE ESSENTIALS SERIES
The Wharton Executive Essentials series from Wharton School Press brings the ideas of the Wharton School's thought leaders to you wherever you are. Inspired by Wharton's Executive Education program, each book is authored by globally renowned faculty and filled with real-life business examples and actionable advice. Wharton Executive Essentials guides offer a quick-reading, penetrating, and comprehensive summary of the knowledge leaders need to excel in today's competitive business environment and capture tomorrow's opportunities.

Environment, Social, Governance (ESG) has become the noun, verb, and adjective of the modern business era. Faced with societal and regulatory pressure, big business in America, Asia, and Europe has been forced to define and articulate ESG goals to combat climate change and save the planet. The only problem is that ESG has been captured by the PR hype machine as a few prominent business leaders make bold promises to save the planet but are vague about how they propose to achieve this. Eager to showcase their green credentials, companies are making all kinds of promises to reduce their carbon footprint and to play their part in reducing global warming and improving social outcomes. How to separate fact from fiction and exaggerated commitments from realistic goals?

Vasuki Shastry spent several years at the coal face itself – running ESG for a major international bank in the City of London – and argues that corporate cultures are too focused on the profit motive and quarterly business targets. Change can only really come through a paradigm shift for business which aligns business with social purpose. Getting there will require a corporate revolution which will disrupt and dislodge the ancien régime and usher in a new age of sustainable business. The author offers a solution in the form of a Climate Manifesto for Business that will Make Our Planet Great Again!

**Business Book Awards 2025 - Winner, International Business Book of the Year**

**Goody Business Book Awards 2024: Leadership – DEI Winner**

**getAbstract International Book Award 2024 Finalist**

**International Book Awards Finalist: Business**

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is under fire, but attracting and retaining talent is more important than ever. This book introduces an entirely new approach to DEI, showing how and why measuring inclusion is the key for organizations to enjoy higher performance and greater employee satisfaction, without causing any backlash.

Measuring Inclusion offers step-by-step directions, sample data, and real-world case studies to help you make meaningful and sustainable improvements in employee recruitment, engagement, productivity, and retention.

You will learn to quantify, track, and estimate the financial ROI of your organization’s DEI efforts just as you do with every other business activity—and in the process make your organization more successful and increasingly welcoming for everyone.

“A more strategic, data-informed approach to DEI.” – Tiffani Wollbrinck, Global Talent Management and Development, Levi Strauss & Co

“Practical, measurable strategies that tie directly to business performance.” – Kirsty Devine, Head of US HR and Global Projects, The Financial Times

“The analytical framework practitioners have been looking for in the area of DEI.” – Silke Muenster, Former Chief Diversity Officer, Philip Morris International

“A crucial counterpoint to the current backlash against DEI, providing a data-driven justification for why these efforts are essential for business success.” – Jennifer Brown, Keynote Speaker and WSJ best-selling author, How to be an Inclusive Leader

A former professor with degrees in mathematics, aerospace engineering, and neuroscience, Paolo Gaudiano is an entrepreneur, a teacher, a prolific writer, and a sought-after speaker. His work transforms how people think about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and what they do about it, with the ultimate goal of making our society more inclusive and equitable while driving greater economic benefits for everyone.

In this updated and expanded edition of his groundbreaking book, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt reveals how the latest advances in neuroscience—including new insights from artificial intelligence—are transforming our understanding of effective leadership.

Drawing on more than two decades of research at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and business, Platt reveals how leaders can develop critical abilities through understanding the brain’s inner workings. In The Leader’s Brain, Expanded and Updated, Platt offers the latest cutting-edge insights on what neuroscience can teach us about how to be a better leader.

In an all-new chapter on generative artificial intelligence (AI), Platt reveals how visionary leaders can harmonize human limitations with AI's boundless potential. He introduces three essential skills for AI-ready leadership and offers practical strategies for fostering workplace cultures where technology enhances rather than disrupts human connection. In the process, he illuminates the path to a more intuitive, ethical, and productive partnership between human intelligence and its artificial counterpart.

Neuroscience provides answers to many of the most vexing challenges leader’s face, including:
+ Why different managers make vastly different decisions when presented with identical information
+ How companies like Apple build strong emotional connections with customers while others fail
+ What neuroscience teaches us about building high-performing teams
+ How to avoid common decision-making traps that plague even visionary leaders
+ What secrets AI can reveal about the brain
+ Techniques for optimizing communication and inspiring innovation

The Leader’s Brain, Updated and Expanded, provides an essential blueprint for leadership development in a rapidly evolving business landscape where artificial intelligence and human potential must work in harmony. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, it offers evidence-based insights to help you lead more effectively in our technology-driven world.

As a leader in your organization, you will be very familiar with your organization’s key financial statements and monthly management reports. You may have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures.

But how much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that these revenues are generated by actual customers—the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers’ buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base.

A customer-base audit is a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm’s customers using data captured by its transaction systems. It will help you answer questions such as:

-- How healthy is your customer base? How realistic are your growth objectives?
-- How do your customers differ in terms of their behavior and value?
-- How has the quality of your customers changed over time?
-- What changes in customer behavior lie behind period-to-period changes in firm performance?
-- What is important to your high-value customers? Which products help you acquire and retain your best customers?

Fader, Hardie, and Ross present five “lenses” through which an executive can address questions like those above. The answers are often lurking in various parts of the organization, but it is rare to find all the relevant analyses in one place, let alone performed on a regular basis (as an audit should be). Yet without such a basic, systematic understanding of the foundations of the firm’s primary source of cash flow, how can executives make informed decisions?

Fader, a Wharton professor, is the author of Customer Centricity and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook, both of which have helped businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. In this first step of the journey, Fader, Hardie, and Ross assist leaders in gaining a fundamental understanding of their customers’ buying behavior—and thus their company as a whole.

The next crisis might be here now, or it might be around the corner. In The Prepared Leader: Emerge from Any Crisis More Resilient Than Before, two history-making experts in crisis leadership—James, dean of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and Wooten, president of Simmons University—forcefully argue that the time to prepare is always.

In no other time in recent history have leaders in every industry and on every continent grappled with so many changes that have independently and simultaneously undermined their ability to lead. The Prepared Leader encapsulates more than two decades of the authors’ research to convey how it has positioned them to navigate through the distinct challenges of today and tomorrow. Their insights have implications for every leader in every industry and every worker at every level.

In their fast-reading and actionable book, James and Wooten provide tools and frameworks for addressing and learning from crises, and they provide insight into what you need to know to become a Prepared Leader, including:

The five phases of crisis management and the skills you need for each phase. They examine how the National Basketball Association and its commissioner, Adam Silver, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Making the right decisions under pressure and how to avoid common mistakes. They reveal how Burger King CEO Jose Cil began planning for the aftermath of a crisis right in the middle of one.
Building a crisis leadership team and how to lead one that you’ve inherited. They detail how Wonya Lucas, CEO and President of the Crown Media Family Networks, aligned and mobilized an executive team during a time of crisis.

James and Wooten argue that—in addition to people, profit, and the planet—prepared leadership should be the fourth “P” in a company’s bottom line. They bring decades of world-renowned research on crisis leadership, diversity and inclusion, management strategy, and positive leadership to the table to help leaders better prepare themselves to lead through crises—and for whatever lies around the corner.

Rich with insights and firsthand accounts, this is more than UC Berkeley's story. It's a case study about how universities can provide societal benefits while also driving socioeconomic mobility. Follow Berkeley's six-phase evolution from its early backlash against corporate collaborations to its current exuberance for entrepreneurs and startups. Through stories of founders and their ventures, discover how the university overcame institutional resistance, resolved cultural tensions, and harnessed its thriving innovation ecosystem.

Whether you're a university leader, a government official, or someone interested in the future of higher education, Startup Campus offers insights about managing change, nurturing entrepreneurship, and creating lasting value.

Read how one of the world’s great universities rewired itself for the twenty-first century and what other institutions can learn from its journey.

Sales have changed; gone are the days of manipulative and pushy salespeople who rely on charm to get sales. Selling From The Heart is built for the new economy where authentic relationships matter and out-dated techniques just don’t work any longer. 

Larry Levine understands the essential role of relationships when it comes to selling, how those genuine connections can fuel sales funnels and exceed sales goals. In Selling From the Heart, Larry coaches readers to build meaningful relationships in natural ways by discovering their authentic selves and offering that authentic perspective to clients. Sales professionals and entrepreneurs will find new levels of sales and personal fulfillment by Selling From the Heart.

The language of business

In order to understand how your business is performing right now and to evaluate, assess, and devise new strategies to boost future performance, you need information. Financial statements are a critical source of the information you need.

In direct and simple terms, Richard A. Lambert, Miller-Sherrerd Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, demystifies financial statements and concepts and shows you how you can apply this information to make better business decisions for long-term profit. You will learn to use and interpret financial data; find out what we can learn from Pepsi, Krispy Kreme, General Motors, and other companies; learn how to evaluate investment strategies; and apply your financial know-how to develop a coherent business strategy.

What new products or services should you launch next year? How can you improve the productivity of a paint line? What should you name your new venture? How can you decrease patient waiting times? How can you improve the customer experience?

Pretty much any creative problem-solving task can be framed as seeking a new match between solution and need, from operational process improvements to creating strategies to foster organic growth. Innovation tournaments aim to find a match that is not just good, but exceptional.

Leveraging more than two decades of experience organizing innovation tournaments in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, from Buenos Aires to Kuwait City, Shanghai to Moscow, and with many Fortune 500 companies, two renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and the foremost experts on innovation tournaments offer a template that you can use to generate winning ideas that will drive great outcomes—whatever your challenges, whatever your business.

In The Innovation Tournament Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Exceptional Solutions to Any Challenge, Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich offer an engaging, often humorous, and always actionable guide to help you learn:

--How to frame and articulate your specific innovation challenge
--How to decide on the right format, structure, and strategic direction for your own innovation tournament
--How to maximize the quality of the opportunities that will compete
--How to select the very best ideas
--How to develop those ideas into real-world opportunities
--How to use tournaments to foster a culture of innovation

Fast-reading and filled with real-world successes, The Innovation Tournament Handbook is a comprehensive roadmap to finding a new match between a solution and a need that is not merely good, but exceptional.

A leadership planner based on the bestselling A Failure of Nerve.

Nearly 25 years after the bestselling A Failure of Nerve first astonished the business world, Edwin H. Friedman’s groundbreaking wisdom is back – now in a fresh, agile framework designed with today’s leaders in mind. Combining essential excerpts from the beloved original with new and engaging prompts and exercises, A Failure of Nerve in 52 Weeks builds on the success of Friedman’s earlier work to provide readers with an insightful year-long resource for leadership planning and development.

Concentrating on the core tenets of A Failure of Nerve, this workbook will help readers recognize and reign in their own emotional reactivity, overcome a misplaced addiction to data, and develop a sense of self that will never be overrun by the loudest and least mature voices in the room. Each weekly spread is packed with quotes and exercises to stimulate self-reflection and features a week-long planner page designed with ample space to mark appointments, track goals, and map out one’s path to well-differentiated leadership. Whether you are a longtime fan or new to Friedman’s work, this versatile planner will provide the structure, guidance, and wisdom to help you grow into the courageous leader you aspire to be.

Everywhere we turn, brands and organizations are under fire for failing to treat their customers with respect and dignity. And increasingly, consumers want firms to take a lead in helping to shape a better society. Yet, most don’t know where to start or have struggled to get things right.

In Marketplace Dignity, Cait Lamberton, Neela A. Saldanha, and Tom Wein introduce a tangible, practical way to take a stand on the fundamental value of humans, and in so doing, be a force for good in a society that increasingly demands that they do so. Marketplace dignity is the idea that customers seek respect and recognition from the firms they interact with, not just rational or emotional benefits. Marketplace dignity appeals to humans’ sense of justice and goes to the essence of what makes customers human. It is also a powerful driver of their engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction.

In this book, you will discover how to:
+ Apply the principles of marketplace dignity to the whole of the customer journey, from the pre-consumption phase to the post-consumption phase;
+ Design and deliver products, services, and experiences that respect your customers’ dignity and value as human beings;
+ Improve your performance using the Marketplace Dignity Framework, which is underpinned by representation, agency, and equality; and
+ Create a competitive edge and a positive social impact with marketplace dignity.

Drawing on the authors’ rigorous research, as well as the successes and failures of companies around the world, from Fortune 100 companies to nonprofits to independent organizations, Marketplace Dignity will empower you to diagnose, understand, and enhance the way that you engage with your customer base across the entirety of their journey with your organization.

An invitation and guide for leaders “to cast a courageous and imaginative vision, to lead resiliently, and to be present and steady in times of deep anxiety.”

Ed Friedman’s genius was to see the individual in the family in the larger group, bringing the wisdom of his experience as a therapist and rabbi to the field of organizational leadership.

A timeless bestseller, A Failure of Nerve still astonishes in this new edition with its relevance and continues to transform the lives of leaders everywhere—business, church, family, schools—as it has for more than 20 years:

• Offers prescient guide to leadership in the age of “quick fix.”
• Provides ways to recognize and address organizational dysfunction.
• Emphasizes “strength over pathology” in these anxious times.

“The age that is upon us requires differentiated leadership that is willing to rise above the anxiety of the masses. We need leaders who will have the ‘capacity to understand and deal effectively’ with the hive mind that is us. This is, in Friedman's words, ‘the key to the kingdom.’ I am grateful for this accessible new edition.”
―C. Andrew Doyle, Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Texas

Unlock one’s full potential and become the legend in one’s industry with Gene Frederick’s inspiring new book, Be the Legend.

Award-winning realtor and industry expert Gene Frederick shares his personal journey and proven strategies to help professionals rise above the competition and achieve extraordinary success. Through a blend of personal anecdotes and actionable insights, Be the Legend offers a step-by-step road map for mastering sales and leadership.

Whether someone is a real estate agent, a business professional, or an entrepreneur, this inspirational guidebook will provide them with the direction and inspiration needed to stand out, make a lasting impact, and build a meaningful legacy.

Each chapter is designed to inspire action, equipping people with the confidence and strategies necessary for career transformation and professional excellence. With practical guidance and real-world examples, Be the Legend serves as a powerful resource for those striving to reach the highest levels of success in their field.

Discover how Japan’s new leadership model has transformed its top companies and created a new paradigm for business success

In Resolute Japan, Waseda University’s Jusuke J. J. Ikegami and the Wharton School’s Harbir Singh and Michael Useem reveal a new leadership model that has led Japan’s corporations to make a stunning comeback. In the process, they share what they have learned from interviews with more than 100 CEOs and top executives of Japan’s largest and most influential companies, including Hitachi, Honda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, NTT, and Panasonic.

In this book, you will discover:
+ How Japan’s new leadership model has led to superior performance in the stock market and beyond;
+ The core principles and practices that characterize Japan’s new leadership model and how they differ from the old models;
+ How Japan’s new leadership model enables companies to balance multiple and often conflicting objectives, such as shareholder value and social responsibility, short-term results and long-term growth, and agility and stability;
+ How Japan’s new leadership model fosters innovation, resilience, and competitiveness in a rapidly changing global environment;
+ Why, even in an environment of macroeconomic stagnation due to economic policies at the national level, individual companies can achieve sustainable development through this new leadership model; and
+ How Japan’s new leadership model can inspire and inform business leaders in the West and elsewhere who are facing similar challenges and opportunities.

Resolute Japan offers a rare and insightful perspective on the new corporate fabric of Japan, one that is sure to both challenge and enlighten leaders around the world.

• Deciding Whether You Really Want to Be a Freelance Editor
• Setting Up Your Business
• Finding Clients
• Marketing like a Pro
• Building Your Website
• Contracts and Invoices 
• Becoming Financially Savvy 

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023

An urgent study on how punitive immigration policies undermine the health of Latinx immigrants

Of the approximately 20 million noncitizens currently living in the United States, nearly half are “undocumented,” which means they are excluded from many public benefits, including health care coverage. Additionally, many authorized immigrants are barred from certain public benefits, including health benefits, for their first five years in the United States. These exclusions often lead many immigrants, particularly those who are Latinx, to avoid seeking health care out of fear of deportation, detention, and other immigration enforcement consequences. Medical Legal Violence tells the stories of some of these immigrants and how anti-immigrant politics in the United States increasingly undermine health care for Latinx noncitizens in ways that deepen health inequalities while upholding economic exploitation and white supremacy.

Meredith Van Natta provides a first-hand account of how such immigrants made life and death decisions with their doctors and other clinic workers before and after the 2016 election. Drawing from rich ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews in three states during the Trump presidency, Van Natta demonstrates how anti-immigrant laws are changing the way Latinx immigrants and their doctors weigh illness and injury against patients’ personal and family security. The book also evaluates the role of safety-net health care workers who have helped noncitizen patients navigate this unstable political landscape despite perceiving a rise in anti-immigrant surveillance in the health care spaces where they work. As anti-immigrant rhetoric intensifies, Medical Legal Violence sheds light on the real consequences of anti-immigrant laws on the health of Latinx noncitizens, and how these laws create a predictable humanitarian disaster in immigrant communities throughout the country and beyond its borders. Van Natta asks how things might be different if we begin to learn from this history rather than continuously repeat it.

What if every day at work felt like your team’s most productive ‘away day’?

The most successful and innovative teams and organisations are highly collaborative, creative and productive - you will find the principles of great workshops infused throughout their culture.

This is a book about how running great workshops, and taking inspiration from them, can lead to a great team environment. Workshop Culture will show you how to create a happy and engaged team through small actions which lead to big results. It features a practical and accessible toolkit to help improve your team’s performance and productivity.

Workshop Culture gives you:

• Inspiring case studies from forward-thinking and innovative teams that have found success from a workshop culture
• A structured methodology that you can follow to bring more happiness, productivity and engagement to your team
• Practical exercises to help you build new skills and knowledge, and increase impact at work

Alison Coward is a team culture coach, consultant and founder of Bracket, a consultancy that partners with ambitious, forward-thinking companies to build high-performing, collaborative team cultures.

"Few people have more experience guiding organizational change than Greg Shea and Cassie Solomon." —Adam Grant, New York Times-bestselling author, Originals and Give and Take

Featured on CNBC and in Harvard Business Review and Fast Company, Leading Successful Change is now updated for 2020 and beyond to help leaders successfully navigate the ever-increasing pace of change.

When Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter as CEO in 2015, the company was in trouble. But unlike so many other social media platforms that have crumbled under tough conditions, Twitter is still alive—and thriving.

How did Twitter turn itself around in one of the most turbulent and competitive industries? The change management approach of authors Gregory P. Shea and Cassie A. Solomon guided a significant area of the organization's turnaround effort.

In this revised and updated edition of Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share success stories from a host of companies including Twitter, Viacom, and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, offering a tested method for leading successful change, which they have developed over a combined 50 years of helping organizations do just that.

In Leading Successful Change, Shea and Solomon share:
Why most change efforts failThe two key tenets for making successful changeHow to create a scene that will provide a vision of the futureThe 8 Levers of Change, a tried-and-true method for designing the work environment to support the changesHow winning companies—from IKEA to Whirlpool—are successfully implementing change
Change is not optional and it is difficult—but it is also not impossible—with Leading Successful Change.

"A must-use guide for anyone who is faced with leading others to a future that is better than today."
—Annie McKee, author, How to Be Happy at Work.

"Greg Shea and Cassie Solomon have written a novel and valuable resource for leaders of change."
—Michael Useem, Professor of Management, The Wharton School, and author, The Leader's Checklist

"Wonderfully concise."
—Richard J. Green, Board Chairman and CEO, Firstrust Bank

"The handbook for positive disruption for any leader in any industry in the 2020s."
—Stephen K. Klasko, President and CEO, Thomas Jefferson University; Distinguished Fellow for the Future of Health, World Economic Forum

In today’s competitive marketplace, companies can no longer compete on price or product alone. The real game-changer? Customer experience. But creating remarkable experiences that customers want to share doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive.

In Becoming The Experience Maker, Dan Gingiss introduces the proven WISER framework—Witty, Immersive, Shareable, Extraordinary, and Responsive—showing businesses how to transform ordinary customer interactions into powerful word-of-mouth marketing opportunities. Packed with 50+ real-world case studies from a variety of industries, this book provides a practical framework that businesses of any size can use to create customer loyalty and sustainable growth.

Inside this expanded second edition, you’ll discover:

• A step-by-step framework for creating memorable customer experiences
• Practical strategies for both B2B and B2C businesses
• Insights on today’s biggest challenges—including AI, crisis management, and digital experience design
• How to foster a customer-centric culture where every employee plays a role

From Fortune 500 companies to small businesses and nonprofits, Becoming The Experience Maker provides the roadmap to gaining a true competitive edge. Because when your customers are your biggest advocates, business growth becomes sustainable.

“For every business that suspects their only true differentiator is customer experience, this is the indispensable playbook for making it work.” >—Jay Baer, Author of 7 books, including The Time to Win

Ten years ago a groundbreaking cross-generational study revealed that greater freedom and new constraints were leading fewer young people to choose parenthood. In the intervening years, the decision to have a family has not gotten easier.

Stew Friedman, founding director of The Wharton School's Work/Life Integration Project, studied two generations of Wharton college students as they graduated: Gen Xers in 1992 and Millennials in 2012. The cross-generational study produced a stark discovery—the rate of graduates who planned to have children had dropped by nearly half over those 20 years. While some might wonder what this privileged group can tell us about broader trends in the United States, Friedman argues that they were “the canaries in the coal mine. . . . if they could not see a way to make their careers and families work, how could those with fewer opportunities and resources square this circle?”

In a new preface to this 10th anniversary edition of Baby Bust, Friedman observes that the birth rate in the United States has continued to decline in the years since. He offers new insights into why fewer people are choosing to have children, how the pandemic affected these trends, and what can be done about it.

In this book, Friedman addresses:

+ How views about work and family have changed;
+ Why men and women have different reasons for opting out of parenthood;
+ How family has been redefined;
+ What choices we face in our social and educational policy; and
+ How organizations and individuals—especially men—can spur cultural change.

In the debates on work and family, people of all generations are calling for a reasoned, thoughtful, research-driven contribution to the discussion. In Baby Bust, Friedman offers just that: an astute assessment of how far we have come and where we go from here.

Winning through Platforms achieved #1 bestseller status, and is a Best Business Book Awards winner for 2024. It is your new go-to guide for modern competitive advantage.

Digital platforms are no longer for just the tech elite. They’re spreading to every company and industry, powered by the growth of customer sensors, streaming data, and artificial intelligence—lighting the valuable customer Use journey that was formerly dark.

How will you succeed when your markets get platform-crowded? Three senior advisers to the world’s leading technology companies reveal how to win through platforms when every competitor has one.

Winning Through Platforms decodes growth moves from a decade of platform competition, communicates them through a platform playbook. It’s a treasure trove of 24 proven platform strategies—such as customer coalition design, in-use enrichment, AI branding, and much more. These playbook strategies are delivered through engaging stories of over 50 companies, plus proprietary frameworks and workshop-style questions that lead you to act.

This game-changing playbook will teach you how to:

• Revitalize your business through strategic use of platforms
• Design platforms that are compelling to customers and hard for competitors to match
• Accelerate in-market growth through brand-and-demand excellence that spans your customer’s entire platform journey
• Innovate in high-impact benefit areas to differentiate your platform
• Elevate your customer’s personal platform experience
• Transform your enterprise and operations to drive superior performance

Every CEO, innovator, go-to-market leader, and aspiring professional will gain valuable insight through this book. Whether your company is just starting on its first platform journey or is a born platform disruptor, this book will transform your ability to win.

Learn the platform playbook. Find and apply your plays.

This book forms part of the American Marketing Association (AMA) leadership series.

A first-of-its-kind, science-backed toolkit takes a holistic approach to burnout prevention by helping individuals, teams, and leaders build resilience and thrive at work.

Burnout has become one of the most talked about workplace topics, and its impact is far-reaching. The 24/7 pace of work, constant demands, and scant resources can easily put busy professionals on a path to burnout, a cycle that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Burnout affects the health and well-being of the entire organization, yet most attempts to help focus on quick-fix strategies aimed at individuals. Something is missing.

In Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience, Paula Davis, founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute, provides a new framework to help organizations prevent employee burnout.

Davis's research-driven, fast-reading, and actionable book is the first of its kind to explore a new solution to the burnout problem at work: a comprehensive approach focused on building the resilience of teams of all sizes. Davis argues that teams, and their leaders, are uniquely positioned to create the type of cultures that are needed to prevent burnout.

In Beating Burnout at Work, Davis shares stories from her work coaching, teaching, and training leaders and teams of all sizes, and she explores:How she navigated her own burnout as a lawyer, and how that led her to study burnout and launch a business with the aim of helping organizations and their employees become more resilient; How teams and leaders can utilize simple, science-backed strategies to create cultures that promote resilience and well-being and reduce burnout; How the Mayo Clinic, one of the most renowned medical centers in the world, has developed a powerful model to reduce burnout in its organization; How organizations dealing with high-stress challenges, including the US Army, work to increase resilience in a systemic way; andHow the German company trivago is piloting a new approach to work amid COVID-19 in order to increase team connection and resilience.Solving the burnout puzzle requires a systemic approach. In Beating Burnout at Work, Davis offers an actionable method to help leaders create cultures of well-being and resilience in their organizations.

Cities are always changing: streets, infrastructure, public spaces, and buildings are constantly being built, improved, demolished, and replaced. But even when a new project is designed to improve a community, neighborhood residents often find themselves at odds with the real estate developer who proposes it. Savvy developers are willing to work with residents to allay their concerns and gain public support, but at the same time, a real estate development is a business venture financed by private investors who take significant risks. In How Real Estate Developers Think, Peter Hendee Brown explains the interests, motives, and actions of real estate developers, using case studies to show how the basic principles of development remain the same everywhere even as practices vary based on climate, local culture, and geography. An understanding of what developers do and why they do it will help community members, elected officials, and others participate more productively in the development process in their own communities.

Based on interviews with over a hundred people involved in the real estate development business in Chicago, Miami, Portland (Oregon), and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, How Real Estate Developers Think considers developers from three different perspectives. Brown profiles the careers of individual developers to illustrate the character of the entrepreneur, considers the roles played by innovation, design, marketing, and sales in the production of real estate, and examines the risks and rewards that motivate developers as people. Ultimately, How Real Estate Developers Think portrays developers as creative visionaries who are able to imagine future possibilities for our cities and communities and shows that understanding them will lead to better outcomes for neighbors, communities, and cities.

Today's global financial system bears little resemblance to what it was at the end of the twentieth century. Shadow banking—financial activity taking place outside existing regulatory frameworks—has grown so important that it now serves as the backbone of the entire system. The shadow banking system, however, is highly unstable and the main reason why the financial system has remained in crisis mode since the 2008 financial crisis. To maintain stability, central banks like the Fed and the European Central Bank have come to use radical new monetary policy instruments which were inconceivable until very recently. Without intervention on the part of central banks, existing financial systems would completely collapse.

As Joscha Wullweber shows, there has been a radical change in the state-market nexus. With governments refraining from strong and comprehensive fiscal and financial regulatory policies, central banks have become the main stabilizing force and the nodal point of financial circulation. These overburdened institutions are called on to make near-daily interventions to avert crisis. Wullweber calls this historic phase central bank capitalism. His book offers a lucid account of our current state of permanent crisis with its new dilemmas and paradoxes that pose enormous challenges to financial and economic stability.

Dire reports of surging deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon appear often in international headlines, with commentators decrying the destruction of tree-covered habitats as an act of environmental vandalism. Although forest losses are alarming, broader trends are bending in the direction of forest recovery. In this book, Brent Sohngen and Douglas Southgate address the long-term recovery of forests in Latin America. The authors synthesize trends in demography, agricultural development, and technological change, and argue that slower population growth and increasing crop and tree yields—in conjunction with protecting local ownership of natural resources—have encouraged forest transition. This book explores how market forces, ownership arrangements, and the enforcement of property rights have influenced this shift from net deforestation to net afforestation.

Forest transitions have happened before, such as the recovery of tree-covered habitats in Europe and the United States. Signs of a similar transformation in land use are now present in Latin America. Ending deforestation requires a strengthening of forest dwellers' property rights while ensuring that biodiversity conservation is no longer treated as a value-less externality. The resulting forest landscape, actively managed for ecosystem services, will be more resilient, as is needed to overcome climate change.

The Trust Transformation unveils a revolutionary approach to fostering deeper connections and achieving success in one’s personal and professional life.

The Trust Transformation emerged as an evidence-based training program at AdventHealth during the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching the power and principles of interpersonal trust. Initially offered as a four-hour class for employees and delivered as a workshop for leadership teams in the organization, thousands of team members have since completed the course. 

Since its launch, the program has been tested in numerous business and organizational cultures. Now, creators Roy Reid and Dr. Omayra Mansfield offer these principles to all who want to understand how trust works and how to make it work for them. 

Their groundbreaking work explores the four attributes of transformational trust and the guiding principles to achieve it in one’s life. They also share insights and exercises to build, cultivate, repair, and restore trust in both personal and professional relationships.

This science-backed framework supports individuals and organizations seeking to improve their health, well-being, resilience, and performance through the transformational power of trust. 

Every CEO aims to deliver sustainable growth. But as the impacts of climate risk escalate, this challenge will intensify in the years ahead. To succeed, the board must enhance its sustainability fluency and own the climate agenda.

Navigating Sustainable Growth addresses anyone grappling with how leading companies can thrive in an emerging future that prioritizes decarbonization and dematerialization. With over 300 examples of practices by 180 leading global companies, this timely book explores two major themes:

• To deliver sustainable growth, companies cannot rely on strong financials alone. They must also demonstrate a track record of reducing negative impacts and creating value through sustainable offerings — and help suppliers and customers do the same.
• The board owns the critical 5-7-year planning horizon that is key to how successful companies create long-term value. As climate risks amplify, the short-term focus of most executive teams leads to missing new opportunities while facing new perils.

As a bonus, the book offers The Climate Story. This eight-step, data-rich synopsis explains how we arrived at this crossroads, and where it will take us.

This book will help investors, citizens, students, and educators discover proven strategies for sustainable growth; CEOs and corporate secretaries to reframe board agendas; and boards to measure performance and chart a course to transform climate risk into opportunity.

Featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Vox, The Shopping Revolution is "a brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century" (Kirkus Reviews).

The retail industry was already in the midst of unparalleled disruption. Then came COVID-19.

In a fully updated and expanded edition of The Shopping Revolution: How Retailers Succeed in an Era of Endless Disruption Accelerated by COVID-19, Wharton professor Barbara E. Kahn, a foremost retail expert, examines the companies that have been most successful during a tsunami of change in the industry. She offers fresh insights into what we can learn from these companies' ascendance and continued transformation in the face of unprecedented challenges.

Kahn, also the author of Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth, examines:In a brand-new chapter, how companies in China, like Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo have changed the game;How Amazon became the retailer of choice for a large portion of the US population, and how other companies have chosen to work with them or have to compete against them; How Walmart beat out other grocers in the late 1990s to become the leader in food retailing, and how they must pivot to hold their leadership position today; How Warby Parker dared to compete against Luxottica in the lucrative eyewear business, and what that can tell start-ups about how to carve out a niche against a Goliath; How Sephora drew away customers from once-dominant department stores to become the go-to retailers for beauty products.
Kahn argues we are just witnessing the start of the radical changes in retail that have been hastened by the pandemic and will revolutionize shopping in every way. Building on these insights, Kahn offers a framework that any company can use to create a competitive strategy to survive and thrive in today's—and tomorrow's—retail environment.

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture

Television, once a broadcast medium, now also travels through our telephone lines, fiber optic cables, and wireless networks. It is delivered to viewers via apps, screens large and small, and media players of all kinds. In this unfamiliar environment, new global giants of television distribution are emerging—including Netflix, the world’s largest subscription video-on-demand service.

Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization. Netflix Nations considers the ways that subscription video-on-demand services, but most of all Netflix, have irrevocably changed the circulation of media content. It tells the story of how a global video portal interacts with national audiences, markets, and institutions, and what this means for how we understand global media in the internet age.

Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution.

From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

The geography of American retail has changed dramatically since the first luxurious department stores sprang up in nineteenth-century cities. Introducing light, color, and music to dry-goods emporia, these "palaces of consumption" transformed mere trade into occasions for pleasure and spectacle. Through the early twentieth century, department stores remained centers of social activity in local communities. But after World War II, suburban growth and the ubiquity of automobiles shifted the seat of economic prosperity to malls and shopping centers. The subsequent rise of discount big-box stores and electronic shopping accelerated the pace at which local department stores were shuttered or absorbed by national chains. But as the outpouring of nostalgia for lost downtown stores and historic shopping districts would indicate, these vibrant social institutions were intimately connected to American political, cultural, and economic identities.

The first national study of the department store industry, From Main Street to Mall traces the changing economic and political contexts that transformed the American shopping experience in the twentieth century. With careful attention to small-town stores as well as glamorous landmarks such as Marshall Field's in Chicago and Wanamaker's in Philadelphia, historian Vicki Howard offers a comprehensive account of the uneven trajectory that brought about the loss of locally identified department store firms and the rise of national chains like Macy's and J. C. Penney. She draws on a wealth of primary source evidence to demonstrate how the decisions of consumers, government policy makers, and department store industry leaders culminated in today's Wal-Mart world. Richly illustrated with archival photographs of the nation's beloved downtown business centers, From Main Street to Mall shows that department stores were more than just places to shop.

Competition is tougher than ever these days and competing on price or product just doesn’t work as well anymore. So how can companies stand out in a crowded marketplace that is constantly evolving?

The answer is customer experience, and the best part about customer experience is that it’s delivered by human beings which are unique to a company. Named a Top Business Book of 2021 by Forbes, The Experience Maker helps managers and executives focus on customers who are already spending money with their company rather than spending more money on marketing new customers. In The Experience Maker, Dan Gingiss teaches that creating a remarkable experience for customers will ensure they become a company’s best marketers and salespeople. By learning from the successes of other companies and applying the proprietary WISER method (Witty, Immersive, Shareable, Extraordinary, Responsive), managers and executives learn to create remarkable experiences that their customers will want to talk about with friends, family, and social media followers.

Author and consultant Jennifer Garvey Berger has worked with all types of leaders—from top executives at Google to nonprofit directors who are trying to make a dent in social change. She hears a version of the same plea from every client in nearly every sector around the world: "I know that complexity and uncertainty are testing my instincts, but I don't know which to trust. Is there some way to know what to do when I can't know what's next?"

Her newest work is an answer to this plea. Using her background in adult development, complexity theories, and leadership consultancy, Garvey Berger discerns five pernicious and pervasive "mind traps" to frame the book. These are: the desire for simple stories, our sense that we are right, our desire to get along with others in our group, our fixation with control, and our constant quest to protect and defend our egos. In addition to understanding why these natural impulses steer us wrong in a fast-moving world, leaders will get powerful questions and approaches that help them escape these patterns.

Permanent Revolution concisely describes the development and workings of capitalism and its influence on the broader society. In the developed world—Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia—capitalism is ubiquitous, and as such, often taken for granted. Discussion usually focuses on specific aspects of the system that individuals appreciate or dislike, ignoring the larger picture. The notion of millennials denouncing capitalism on Facebook and Twitter—products of capitalist development—is a caricature that is eerily close to reality.

In this book, Wyatt Wells examines the development of economic innovation, the role of financial markets, the business cycle, the ways markets operate, and the position of labor in capitalist economies, as well as the effects of capitalism on law, politics, religion, and even the arts. This discussion is grounded in history, though it does make use of economic theory. As a result, the book sometimes approaches topics from an unconventional direction. For instance, it notes that financial markets not only pool and allocate the resources of savers—the role ascribed to them in conventional economics textbooks—but they also discipline enterprises, punishing those unable to meet prescribed financial standards.

Permanent Revolution ranges broadly, delving into how capitalism reshapes the broader society. The system creates wealth in new and, often, unexpected places, and it constantly moves people physically and socially. The result revolutionizes society. Traditional structures based on deference and long experience gradually collapse because they no longer correspond to social reality. Capitalist societies must devise ways to accommodate perpetual change in politics, religion, and society. Much of the diversity, liberty, and flexibility we associate with modern society are the product of capitalist development.

There is a complexity paradox that we all need to understand. We humans have a natural inclination towards connection, engagement, and creativity – all necessary skills to thrive in complexity. The problem is that the stress caused by uncertainty and ambiguity makes it difficult to tap into this inclination when we need it the most. This book offers a set of practices that help you not only understand complexity but actually hack into your own nervous system to bring your natural capacities back online. By paying close attention to your body, redefining your emotional experiences, and connecting more deeply to others, you can transform the anxiety, exhaustion, and overwhelm that complexity creates. Better still, as you unleash your natural complexity genius, you create the conditions for those around you to flourish in an uncertain world.

The targets of workplace bullies often suffer long after the bullying stops. Resentment, anger, emotional pain, and even physical ailments can prevent them from moving forward with their lives. How can people who have been bullied at work grow from victim to survivor?

Thriving After Workplace Bullying – Journey from Victim to Survivor, tells the stories of the survivors of workplace bullying focusing on their resilience, how they moved past the hurt, and crucially, how they changed from perceiving themselves as a victim to feeling empowered.

This book delves into what workplace bullying is, its costly impact on both the target and organization, and through in-depth studies and interviews, helps us understand how to avoid workplace bullying.

Thriving After Workplace Bullying is essential reading for organizational leaders, Human Resources professionals, and anyone invested in employee welfare.

"As we look ahead to the recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, Making Money Moral could not come at a better time."
—Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, JPMorgan Chase

The math doesn't add up: Global financial markets can no longer ignore the world's most critical problems. The risks are too high and the costs too great.

In Making Money Moral: How a New Wave of Visionaries Is Linking Purpose and Profit, authors Judith Rodin and Saadia Madsbjerg explore a burgeoning movement of bold and ambitious innovators. These trailblazers are unlocking private-sector investments in new ways to solve global problems, from environmental challenges to social issues such as poverty and inequality. They are earning great returns and reimagining capitalism in the process.

Pioneers in the field of sustainable and impact investing, Rodin and Madsbjerg offer first-hand stories of how investors of every type and in every asset class are investing in world-changing solutions—with great success. Meet the visionaries who are leading this movement:The investment managers putting trillions of dollars to work, like TPG, Wellington Management, State Street Global Advisors, Nuveen, Amundi, APG and Natixis;The asset owners driving the transition, like GPIF and PensionDanmark;A new generation of entrepreneurs benefiting from the investments, like DreamBox Learning, an innovative educational technology platform, and Goodlife Pharmacies, which is disrupting the traditional notion of a pharmacy; The corporations that are repurposing their business models to meet demand for sustainable products and services, like Ørsted; andThe nonprofits that are reimagining how to raise money for their work while creating significant value for investors, like The Nature Conservancy.
In their book, Rodin and Madsbjerg offer a deep look at the most powerful tools available today—and how they can be unlocked. They reveal:Who the investors are and what they want;How innovative products and investment strategies can deliver long-term value for investors while improving lives and protecting ecosystems;How leaders can build strategies and prepare their organizations to enter and expand this dynamic market; andHow to measure impact, understand critical regulations, and avoid potential pitfalls.A roadmap to making the financial market a force for good, Making Money Moral is a must-read for those seeking private-sector capital to address a big problem, as well as those seeking both to mitigate risk and to invest in big solutions.

"Judith Rodin and Saadia Madsbjerg identify an important new way of looking at money: from the root of all evil to the fount of all solutions. Their timely, important book on impact investing is full of powerful insights and compelling examples they've seen firsthand. Their work will be sure to accelerate momentum toward a more sustainable world."
—Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School Professor and Author of Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time

800-CEO-READ BESTSELLER

Featured in Fortune, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur, Go Long is "mandatory reading for the CEOs and boards of all public companies," according to David M. Rubenstein, co-founder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group.

The lifespans of companies are growing shorter each day. Why do some companies thrive and grow, while others fail?

Inspired by the CEO Academy, the annual off-the-record gathering of chief executives organized by the authors, reveals how some of the world's most prominent business leaders resisted short-term pressures to successfully manage their organizations for the long term, and in turn, aim to create more jobs, more satisfied customers, and more shareholder wealth.

In Go Long, authors Dennis Carey, Brian Dumaine, Michael Useem, and Rodney Zemmel take you behind the scenes to witness the business decisions that are enabling leading organizations to outsmart and outlast the competition.
Why did CEO Larry Merlo allow CVS to take a $2 billion hit—on purpose? How did former CEO Alan Mulally maneuver Ford's $48 billion turnaround? How did director Maggie Wilderotter and her fellow board members engage top management to embark on an unusual exercise to help Hewlett Packard Enterprise build a long-term strategy? Why did former CEO Paul Polman turn back to Unilever's original mission of leading with a purpose to fuel profits? How did former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg convince his investors and board to allow him to make a $150 billion bet? How did former CEO George Buckley find a way to address investor calls for 3M to spend less on research and development while still finding a way to innovate?
These leaders argue that a short-term mindset might satisfy investors for this quarter or next, but there's a heavy price to be paid. Instead, they argue, long-term thinking is your best short-term strategy.

"Considering the enormous harm that short-term investing has done not only to companies, but to countries as well, this book should be required reading in boardrooms everywhere. A concise, powerful call for responsible, long-term business practices."—Kirkus Reviews

"A must-read. If you're looking to build or lead a company that grows consistently not just from quarter to quarter, but year to year … this book is for you."—Indra Nooyi, Board of Directors, Amazon; former Chairman and CEO, PepsiCo, Inc.

Available for the First Time: The Complete Social Entrepreneur's Playbook

Covers all three phases of the start-up to scale-up process, developed with reader feedback from "one of the more unusual ebook...experiments of the year" (ThinReads)

Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.

MacMillan and Thompson used their own systematic framework to publish The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook. To test the market, they offered the first phase in their start-up method (step 1) as a free ebook. Readers were invited to join The Social Entrepreneur's Advisory Group, and nearly 300 aspiring and active social entrepreneurs shared feedback that helped shape the complete edition of the book, which covers all three steps in the start-up to scale-up process.

Based on this crowd-sourced feedback from readers of the free ebook and drawing on the authors' more than 26 years' combined experience developing and studying social enterprises in the field across Africa and in the United States, this new edition provides guidance for each phase:

Phase One: Pressure Test Your Start-Up Idea. Based on the free ebook, this expanded section now includes advice on setting revenue and social impact goals, how to navigate the sociopolitical landscape, and how to develop a strong concept statement. In addition, MacMillan and Thompson provide advice on how to identify and test a proposed revenue-generating solution and define and segment your target population.
Phase Two: Plan Your Social Enterprise. All new to this edition, this critical phase shows you how to frame and scope the venture, determine what it will take to actually deliver a sustainable enterprise, identify the key assumptions that have been made, and design checkpoints to test those assumptions before making major investments.
Phase Three: Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise. Available for the first time in this edition, you will learn how to effectively launch your enterprise, manage upside potential and downside risk, and strategically scale up.

Filled with accessible frameworks and tools, as well as inspiring stories of social entrepreneurs, The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook is a must-read for any aspiring or active social entrepreneur, as well as philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofits interested in doing more good with fewer resources.

Includes access to downloadable planning documents, including user-friendly spreadsheets

A 2018 DIGITAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST BUSINESS BOOK

Covered in Forbes, Fast Company, and Harvard Business Review, Crack the C-Suite Code is "a true insider's guide," according to Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg.

How can I reach the C-suite? That is the most common question Cassandra Frangos hears from the executives she coaches. Many aspire to reach the C-suite, but the typical paths to the top are hard to find and difficult to follow.

In Crack the C-Suite Code, Frangos reveals the hidden dynamics for reaching the C-suite. She offers expert guidance based on her experience as a consultant at Spencer Stuart and former head of global executive talent at Cisco, a company with 70,000 employees. Her deep research on the topic includes candid interviews with CEOs, hundreds of aspiring C-suite candidates, and the leading experts in the field.

Frangos identifies four core paths you can follow to reach the C-suite: The Tenured Executive, The Free Agent, The Leapfrog Leader, and The Founder. To actively improve your chances for success, she presents:
Insider knowledge from current CEOs and well-known executivesGuiding questions that clarify the risks and rewards associated with each pathAccelerators and derailers that either enhance or detract from your chances to succeedAdvice on how to leverage your experience, leadership brand, and mindset to help you land on the C-suite short listInsight on how the evolving role of the CEO affects your strategy to reach the top

A career playbook for anyone who aspires to the top spot, Crack the C-Suite Code features advice from successful C-level leaders, including Accompany's Amy Chang, Goldman Sachs' Edith Cooper, Nest's Yoky Matsuoka, Cisco's Chuck Robbins, and Corning's Wendell Weeks. These and other top leaders from a broad range of companies, including Microsoft, Google, and General Electric, tell the stories of their success and help aspiring executives crack the C-suite code.

"If you've ever wanted to really figure out how to ascend to the C-suite, this is your Rosetta Stone."—James M. Citrin, Leader, Spencer Stuart CEO Practice, and author, You're In Charge, Now What?

"Frangos has created a roadmap for executives on the fast track."
—Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author, Forget a Mentor, Find a Sponsor and Executive Presence

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: How Digital Businesses Succeed in an Ever-Changing Global Marketplace, 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.

In more than three decades of studying multinational firms, Guillén has found they often misunderstand key aspects of what it takes to succeed globally, from culture and institutions to local competitive dynamics and pursuing markets in a logical sequence. Seeing multibillion-dollar companies like Amazon flounder in certain markets has led Guillén to research what it takes to create a successful global strategy.

In The Platform Paradox, Guillén details: How the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitization and forced companies like Airbnb to pivot and adapt; How platforms like Tinder and Uber have used local advantages to grow rapidly in different countries; How traditional companies have transformed themselves into digital platforms, like Lego undertaking a digital revolution to emerge from bankruptcy and become the "Apple of toys"; and The possibilities and limits to global expansion, as illustrated by companies like Zoom and Skype. In The Platform Paradox, Guillén offers an integrated framework for these platforms to identify and implement a digital platform strategy on a truly global scale.

Winner, 2020 Outstanding Book Award, given by the International Communication Association

Honorable Mention, 2020 Nancy Baym Book Award, given by the Association of Internet Researchers


How the transformation of social media platforms and user-experience have redefined the entertainment industry

In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, have given rise to a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Operating at the intersection of the entertainment and interactivity, communication and content industries, social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate new kinds of content separate from the century-long model of intellectual property control in the traditional entertainment industry.

Social media entertainment has expanded rapidly and the traditional entertainment industry has been forced to cede significant power and influence to content creators, their fans, and subscribers. Digital platforms have created a natural market for embedded advertising, changing the worlds of marketing and communication in their wake. Combined, these factors have produced new, radically shifting demands on the entertainment industry, posing new challenges for screen regimes, media scholars, industry professionals, content creators, and audiences alike.

Stuart Cunningham and David Craig chronicle the rise of social media entertainment and its impact on media consumption and production. A massive, industry-defining study with insight from over 100 industry insiders, Social Media Entertainment explores the latest transformations in the entertainment industry in this time of digital disruption.

During the 1980s and 1990s, European economies went through a period of slowing economic growth and high unemployment, what some economists described as “secular decline.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States enjoyed a robust recovery during those years by reducing taxes, eliminating regulations on business, and tightening monetary policy. 

Now, after two decades of subpar growth, the question is whether or not the American economy has entered into its own era of secular decline.

This Broadside examines this troubling development, recognizing that there are no easy solutions to the problem. Lacking workable solutions, Americans will have to adjust to a future of slow economic growth, with all that implies for inter-generational progress, American strength abroad and political conflict at home. 

Innovation and Scaling for Impact forces us to reassess how social sector organizations create value. Drawing on a decade of research, Christian Seelos and Johanna Mair transcend widely held misconceptions, getting to the core of what a sound impact strategy entails in the nonprofit world. They reveal an overlooked nexus between investments that might not pan out (innovation) and expansion based on existing strengths (scaling). In the process, it becomes clear that managing this tension is a difficult balancing act that fundamentally defines an organization and its impact.

The authors examine innovation pathologies that can derail organizations by thwarting their efforts to juggle these imperatives. Then, through four rich case studies, they detail innovation archetypes that effectively sidestep these pathologies and blend innovation with scaling. Readers will come away with conceptual models to drive progress in the social sector and tools for defining the future of their organizations.

The way you show up in digital spaces communicates your brand—whether you intend it or not. 

With the ease of digital communication at anyone’s fingertips and many professionals transitioning to work-from-home, the way an individual communicates online is more important than ever before. Keynote speaker and communication coach Dr. Ali Atkison’s latest guide for personal success, How’s Your Computer-side Manner? explains how to blend one’s “in-person” self with their digital self, in order to put their best foot forward in an ever-changing digital landscape. 

Digital communication is an absolute necessity for today’s working professionals—especially for those who may never meet their colleagues in person due to the rise in remote-work opportunities. Dr. Ali Atkison believes that it’s time to end the false delineation between who someone is in-person versus who they are online. Too many proceed with mistaken assumptions about what shapes their communication style and their communication choices, and without the clarity of why we do what we do, it is difficult to make more well-informed decisions. 

How’s Your Computer-side Manner? explores the 9 common mistakes today’s professionals often make in their digital communications—and the negative consequences that can result from those mistakes, from being left off of projects and out of meetings, to being placed on performance-improvement plans, to losing respect and a sense of community with colleagues. Dr. Atkison explains how these mistakes can happen and their impact, while providing easy-to-employ strategies for mitigating these mistakes and improving online communication. 

Finance is the study of how individuals, institutions, governments, and businesses acquire, spend, and manage their money and other financial assets to maximize their value or wealth. Fundamentals of Finance introduces the nuances of finance in a comprehensive yet concise manner and is essential reading for professionals building a career in finance or for students taking a course in finance. The book consists of four parts:

• Part I: "Introduction to Finance, Money and Interest Rates, and Time Value of Money" focuses on the role financial markets play in the financial system and financial basics that underlie how markets operate.
• Part II: "Investments and Portfolio Management" discusses the characteristics of stocks and bonds, how securities are valued, the operations of securities markets, formation of optimal portfolios, and derivatives.
• Part III: "Financial Management/Corporate Finance" explores financial planning, asset management, and fund-raising activities that will enhance a firm’s value.
• Part IV: "Management of Financial Institutions" focuses on management of financial institutions in general, and risk management in financial institutions in particular.

The book’s many examples, appendices, graphs and tables provide valuable know-how to a wide audience, making it an excellent resource for professionals as well as students who wish to attain a broad understanding of finance.

Please contact Stefan.Giesen@degruyter.com to request additional instructional material comprising a chapter-wise listing of questions and answers.

Organizations often declare that their biggest asset is their people. As such, business leaders make constant efforts to hire the best talent – and to get the best out of their workers. But a confluence of forces is reshaping all aspects of talent management. A war for talent rages and will be exacerbated in the long-term by demographic aging; the half-life of skills is decreasing as AI powers more parts of business workflows; flexible and hybrid work models are becoming commonplace; and management methods focused on measurement and efficiency are not sufficient for engaging a purpose-seeking generation.

In these turbulent times, CEOs and their entire teams – not just HR – need to rethink how they can create a people advantage, going beyond traditional approaches to organization, performance management, and compensation. This book – a collection of recent essays written by researchers at the BCG Henderson Institute, Boston Consulting Group’s think tank – aims to help leaders to reinvent work by providing a forward-looking perspective on all aspects of talent management.

Across five chapters, the book discusses

• How to attract the talent of the future
• How to shape the workforce in an evolving context
• How to embrace new models of work
• How to build the workplace of the future
• How to establish new models of leadership and culture

By providing a combination of new ideas, real-world examples, and concrete recommendations, Reinventing Work serves as a guide for leaders to effectively navigate the changing nature of work.

Finalist in the Marketing - Branding category of the Goody Business Book Awards 2024

Boeing Max 737’s twin crashes, Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal, worms in Cadbury’s chocolates, cyanide in Tylenol, the #MeToo movement… In the past 24–48 hours, chances are you have read about a brand believed to have transgressed in some part of the world. These and other transgressions – real or perceived – plague company brands and, as in the case of the #MeToo movement, human brands, routinely and globally. And they often come with serious consequences: consumer injury, billions of dollars in recovery and restitution, legal nightmares, bankruptcy, and damage to the brand. Despite their universal prevalence, negative outcomes, and the justified media frenzy around their occurrence, in-depth, thorough, and critical reflections on brand transgressions are scarce. Consequently, barring the lens of some quick-fix solution, managers lack a precise understanding of how to handle such potentially explosive situations.

Managing Brand Transgressions: 8 Principles to Transform Your Brand presents over 25 case studies of brands like Boeing, Cadbury, Dolce & Gabbana, Fox News, Maggi, Starbucks, Stoli Vodka, and Tylenol in countries such as USA, China, India, UK, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Latvia. Through these real-life stories, the book captures a snapshot of approximately 50 years of company responses to crises – some successful, some not – caused by brand transgressions. Most importantly, it provides managers with a roadmap of eight principles that companies must use to turn transgressions into opportunities and transform their brands from inside out. Thoroughly researched, gripping, and provocative, this book can guide a brand not only through its crisis but prevent it from becoming a dinosaur.

Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Innovation provides a concise non-technical introduction to artificial intelligence as the key driver of innovation in the new economy. The book positions AI as a General Purpose Technology, vital for driving advancements across all sectors of business, government, and society.

Written for leaders, innovators, and decision-makers, this book bridges the gap between technical complexity and practical application, demystifying AI's core concepts while illuminating its catalytic impact across industries and organizations. Through a careful examination of innovation dynamics, computational foundations, and core AI principles, readers will gain the essential knowledge needed to both understand and effectively navigate the AI landscape.

This succinct guide makes technical concepts accessible—from algorithms and machine learning to deep learning and generative AI—giving leaders the clarity they need to engage confidently with AI technology.

Discover the scientifically proven path to unlocking your creative potential, no matter your age, profession or background.

From personal breakthroughs to organizational transformation, Creativity in the Age of AI shows you how to leverage cutting-edge AI tools to amplify your natural abilities. This concise, practical guide will help you:

• Gain confidence in your ability to become more creative through understanding the neuroscience behind creative thinking
• Master 12 powerful approaches to enhance creativity, from challenging mental models to interdisciplinary thinking
• Learn to amplify these approaches using cutting-edge AI tools
• Experiment with these methods to address personal, professional, and organizational challenges
• Build a customized, dynamic portfolio of creativity tools tailored to your unique needs
• Overcome common obstacles to implementing creative solutions
• Draw inspiration from remarkable innovators including Nobel Prize winners, artists, musicians, architects and entrepreneurs

This accessible book distills decades of research and practice, including principles from the lead author's popular Wharton MBA creativity course taught for over a decade.

Build a personalized toolkit for unstoppable innovation in today’s challenging times and transform your creative potential into practical solutions enhanced by the power of AI!

Avoid Popping Under Pressure

Pressure management is the key to effective leadership, conflict resolution, and staying composed when life feels like it’s stretching you to the limit. In How to Untie a Balloon, former hostage negotiator and founder of Conflictish® Ryan Dunlap provides practical strategies for managing stress, mastering conflict management, and building emotional resilience.

Dunlap reveals the profound effects of pressure on our decision-making, relationships, and emotional well-being. Through the vivid metaphor of a balloon, he illustrates how unmanaged stress and unresolved conflict can lead to self-sabotage. By introducing the F.I.R.S.T. Steps framework—Feelings, Interests, Relationships, Situation, and Toll—Dunlap delivers a proven system for mastering negotiation, enhancing communication skills, and achieving breakthrough results in both personal and professional arenas.

Experience immediate and lasting benefits, including the ability to remain composed during difficult conversations, strengthen relationship communication, and approach every negotiation with clarity and confidence. Whether you are navigating business deals, couples communication, or leadership challenges, these strategies empower you to transform pressure into opportunity.

Through each step of the F.I.R.S.T. Steps framework, you’ll learn how to:

• Recognize and regulate your emotions to maintain respect, influence, and composure in negotiation and conflict resolution.
• Distinguish between surface frustrations and underlying priorities, sharpening your conversation skills for meaningful dialogue.
• Foster relationship communication and prevent conflicts from escalating, whether in couples communication or organizational settings.
• Approach high-pressure scenarios with assurance, mastering difficult conversations and leadership communication.
• Deconstruct complex conflicts into manageable elements for strategic negotiation and problem-solving.
• Integrate real-world tactics from a seasoned negotiator to build emotional intelligence and resilience in response to human emotions.

With its blend of compelling real-life stories, expert frameworks, and actionable advice, How to Untie a Balloon is the definitive resource for anyone committed to personal growth, effective negotiation, and lasting conflict resolution.

If you have valued works such as The Anatomy of Peace, Getting to Yes, or The Next Conversation, this book will be an indispensable addition to your collection.

"A QUICK BUT THOUGHTFUL LOOK INTO THE PROS AND CONS OF GAMIFICATION…."—Daniel H. Pink, Author, Drive

Why can't life—and business—be fun?

For thousands of years, we've created things called games that tap the tremendous psychic power of fun. In a revised and updated edition of For the Win: The Power of Gamification and Game Thinking in Business, Education, Government, and Social Impact, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue that applying the lessons of gamification could change your business, the way you learn or teach, and even your life.

Werbach and Hunter explain how games can be used as a valuable tool to address serious pursuits like marketing, productivity enhancement, education, innovation, customer engagement, human resources, and sustainability. They reveal how, why, and when gamification works—and what not to do.

Discover the successes—and failures—of organizations that are using gamification:
How a South Korean company called Neofect is using gamification to help people recover from strokes;How a tool called SuperBetter has demonstrated significant results treating depression, concussion symptoms, and the mental health harms of the COVID-19 pandemic through game thinking; How the ride-hailing giant Uber once used gamification to influence their drivers to work longer hours than they otherwise wanted to, causing swift backlash.
The story of gamification isn't fun and games by any means. It's serious. When used carefully and thoughtfully, gamification produces great outcomes for users, in ways that are hard to replicate through other methods. Other times, companies misuse the "guided missile" of gamification to have people work and do things in ways that are against their self-interest.

This revised and updated edition incorporates the most prominent research findings to provide a comprehensive gamification playbook for the real world.

"The Strategic Leader's Roadmap provides an essential playbook for combining business strategy with great leadership."—William P. Lauder, Executive Chairman, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.

In The Strategic Leader's Roadmap, Updated and Revised Edition: 6 Steps for Integrating Leadership and Strategy, Wharton management professors Harbir Singh and Michael Useem offer a six-point checklist for today's leaders to follow. They explain how leading strategically will help managers strengthen their capacity to develop strategy and to lead its execution.

Drawing on one-on-one interviews with CEOs, in-depth research, and their experience teaching today's executives and tomorrow's leaders, Singh and Useem take readers into the offices—and mindsets—of some of today's foremost strategic leaders.

In this fully updated and revised edition, Singh and Useem explore: How Indra Nooyi rose to become CEO of PepsiCo and led its successful strategic redirection; How Jack Ma consistently pivoted and outflanked competition to position Alibaba to become a global behemoth; How John Chambers, executive chairman of Cisco Systems, changed his and other company leaders' leadership to stay ahead of disruption; How Lawrence Culp Jr., the CEO of General Electric, has increased efficiency by up to 900% by undertaking a thorough examination of process and strategy. Fast-reading and actionable, The Strategic Leader's Roadmap will enable leaders at all levels to master the abilities necessary to keep their companies ahead of the competition.

"The Ostrich Paradox boldly addresses a key question of our time: Why are we humans so poor at dealing with disastrous risks, and what can we humans do about it? It is a must-read for everyone who cares about risk."
—Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

We fail to evacuate when advised. We rebuild in flood zones. We don't wear helmets. We fail to purchase insurance. We would rather avoid the risk of "crying wolf" than sound an alarm.

Our ability to foresee and protect against natural catastrophes has never been greater; yet, we consistently fail to heed the warnings and protect ourselves and our communities, with devastating consequences. What explains this contradiction?

In The Ostrich Paradox, Wharton professors Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther draw on years of teaching and research to explain why disaster preparedness efforts consistently fall short. Filled with heartbreaking stories of loss and resilience, the book addresses:


	•How people make decisions when confronted with high-consequence, low-probability events—and how these decisions can go awry
	•The 6 biases that lead individuals, communities, and institutions to make grave errors that cost lives
	•The Behavioral Risk Audit, a systematic approach for improving preparedness by recognizing these biases and designing strategies that anticipate them
	•Why, if we are to be better prepared for disasters, we need to learn to be more like ostriches, not less


Fast-reading and critically important, The Ostrich Paradox is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why we consistently underprepare for disasters, as well as private and public leaders, planners, and policy-makers who want to build more prepared communities.

The practice of charging interest on loans has been controversial since it was first mentioned in early recorded history. Lending is a powerful economic tool, vital to the development of society but it can also lead to disaster if left unregulated. Prohibitions against excessive interest, or usury, have been found in almost all societies since antiquity. Whether loans were made in kind or in cash, creditors often were accused of beggar-thy-neighbor exploitation when their lending terms put borrowers at risk of ruin. While the concept of usury reflects transcendent notions of fairness, its definition has varied over time and place: Roman law distinguished between simple and compound interest, the medieval church banned interest altogether, and even Adam Smith favored a ceiling on interest. But in spite of these limits, the advantages and temptations of lending prompted financial innovations from margin investing and adjustable-rate mortgages to credit cards and microlending.

In Beggar Thy Neighbor, financial historian Charles R. Geisst tracks the changing perceptions of usury and debt from the time of Cicero to the most recent financial crises. This comprehensive economic history looks at humanity's attempts to curb the abuse of debt while reaping the benefits of credit. Beggar Thy Neighbor examines the major debt revolutions of the past, demonstrating that extensive leverage and debt were behind most financial market crashes from the Renaissance to the present day. Geisst argues that usury prohibitions, as part of the natural law tradition in Western and Islamic societies, continue to play a key role in banking regulation despite modern advances in finance. From the Roman Empire to the recent Dodd-Frank financial reforms, usury ceilings still occupy a central place in notions of free markets and economic justice.

Management & Workplace Culture Book of the Year, 2020 Porchlight Business Book Awards

A Publishers Weekly Fall 2020 Big Indie Book

The dark side of the gig economy (Uber, Airbnb, etc.) and how to make it equitable for the users and workers most exploited. 

How do leaders and innovators drive change and improvement?

Governments often depend on a geographic context for making major decisions, sharing information, and expanding its operations. When organizations face the need for change from a drastic event, such as economic downturns or a pandemic, how do they maintain the quality of their day-to-day operations while continuing to find solutions to existing and new problems?

Many governments and professionals turn to geographic information systems (GIS). Using GIS and location intelligence produces more informed, data-driven decisions, which lead to improved outcomes.

Measuring Up: The Business Case for GIS, Volume 3 is a third book in the Measuring Up series demonstrating how government agencies have embraced GIS as a critical infrastructure in their processes. Through a collection of all-new, updated, real-world stories, each chapter covers how GIS helps organizations in saving time, saving money, avoiding cost, increasing accuracy, improving productivity, increasing efficiency, automating workflows, managing resources, and aiding in budgeting. Readers can look to this new collection as a model for working through their organization’s new challenge or to understand the business value of introducing GIS into their organization.

Measuring Up: The Business Case for GIS, Volume 3 explores how organizations can continue to move forward using GIS as not just a tool but necessary to the solution.

Secrecy is endemic within organizations, woven into the fabric of our lives at work. Yet, until now, we've had an all-too-limited understanding of this powerful organizational force. Secrecy is a part of work, and keeping secrets is a form of work. But also, secrecy creates a social order—a hidden architecture within our organizations. Drawing on previously overlooked texts, as well as well-known classics, Jana Costas and Christopher Grey identify three forms of secrecy: formal secrecy, as we see in the case of trade and state secrets based on law and regulation; informal secrecy based on networks and trust; and public or open secrecy, where what is known goes undiscussed. Animated with evocative examples from scholarship, current events, and works of fiction, this framework presents a bold reimagining of organizational life.

Have you ever known colleagues who the minute they stepped into the conference room, on stage, or onto the playing field, elevated the performance of everyone around them? Someone whose impact within the team could be seen in nearly everything that was said and done.

These individuals are catalysts - they spark excellence in the behavior and the performance of the entire team. 

The Catalyst Effect identifies the behaviors and skills needed to lead from wherever you are, regardless of your role or title. It describes powerful leadership and teamwork principles—12 clearly defined competencies, based on field research with professionals in business, sports, the arts, and non-profit organizations—that will elevate the performance of individuals, teams, and your entire organization. 

This essential guide will show you how to learn and practice these catalytic competencies and help your group and organization achieve greater success, improve team dynamics, and help teammates grow in stature while magnifying their value.

Finalist in the Leadership - HR and Employee Development category of the Goody Business Book Awards 2024

Talent management is a linchpin of organisational triumph in our dynamic and swiftly evolving business world. As a key decision-maker, your capacity to craft astute talent decisions holds the potential to transcend your company from mere mediocrity to unparalleled excellence.

However, brace yourself for a revelation: Many of your long-held convictions about talent may be profoundly flawed. What if we shared a secret that could revolutionise your perspective? What if the gateway to unleashing your team’s boundless talents resides within your thoughts and judgments? Imagine the possibilities if you could harness exponential outcomes by elevating the calibre of your decision-making.

In ReThinking Talent Decisions, Sharna Wiblen, PhD, presents an uncomfortable truth: Talent decisions are always subjective. Drawing on examples from business, sports, movies and everyday interactions, Sharna emphasises the importance of understanding complexity and encourages deliberate, intentional, and informed decisions and conversations around talent.

This indispensable guide will give you insight into: 　　

• The Power of Personal Judgment: Learn how your own perspectives shape the today and the future of work.
• The Complexity of Talent Decisions: Recognise the critical need for key decision-makers to collectively define talent in your unique context.
• The Human Element: Understand how harnessing your mind can propel you, your team, and your organisation to new heights.
• Perceptions and Values: Learn how aligning perceptions and values can revolutionise your approach.
• A New Paradigm: Realise that talent management is a judgment-oriented endeavour.
• Navigating the Intersection of Talent and Technology: Delve into the world of technology systems and understand how they bolster and shape talent decisions in today’s digital age. 　　

ReThinking Talent Decisions is your secret weapon for achieving unparalleled success in the ever-competitive corporate arena. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or a rising star, the wisdom within these pages will empower you to master the art and science of talent decisions.　

The De Gruyter Handbook of Organizational Conflict Management offers insightful contributions covering a myriad of conflict management topics ranging from fundamental issues, such as emotional intelligence and cultural differences, to cutting-edge themes such as political conflicts and mindfulness training. Renowned conflict management scholars and leading practitioners have contributed chapters to this handbook based on their research and their practical experience in the field of confl ict management. Many of the authors have influenced the topic of conflict management as it has become both a fi eld of academic study in universities and a necessary leadership skill.

The handbook is organized in four sections. The first section covers interpersonal conflict management and focuses on perceptions, conflict styles, emotional intelligence, psychological safety, and change. The second section includes ethnic and cultural issues in organizational conflict management, such as microaggressions, ethnicity and religion, and political conflicts. The third section offers methods for managing organizational conflicts, including mediation, negotiation, ombudspersons, and conflict coaching. This section also offers guidance on developing an organizational conflict management system and discusses HR’s role in managing conflicts. The fourth section introduces chapters on special topics in conflict management, such as workplace bullying, gender issues, birth order personality, human connections, and forgiveness.

This handbook is an essential reference for scholars and practitioners. It offers organizational leaders insights into the causes and solutions to organizational conflict management. In addition, it is an excellent textbook for undergraduate and graduate courses in organizational conflict management.

Organizations within all industries will use this book to evaluate their storeroom practices towards best practices. The reader can choose a path forward by using the book’s contents to educate the storeroom associates and storeroom users on the relationship of all the storeroom functions and world-class principles for storeroom effectiveness.
 
Unique Features

• Provides a step-by-step, detailed explanation of the 32 storeroom processes and practices, with additional guidance in related activities that lead to a super-efficient and effective storeroom that’s a true core-value driver.
• Helps those who need to establish a maintenance storeroom from ‘scratch,’ as well as reviewing an established storeroom’s processes to determine the necessary steps required to elevate performance and results.

A personal, journalistic ethnography of the modern American working class, based on the travels and interactions of the author through the American heartland.

"Second Class is the most important book you will read all year. A political realignment is coming, and it’s my hope that the end result will work in favor of our all-too-neglected American working class. When that realignment comes, Batya and her book will help lead the way."

—Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind

Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life?

While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working class who are fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning ladies, health care aides, cops, truck drivers, fast food workers, electricians, and more. In their own words, these working-class Americans explain the struggles and triumphs of their increasingly precarious lives—as well as what policies they think would improve them. Second Class combines deep reporting with a look at the data and expert opinions on America’s emergent class divide, in which the most basic elements of a secure and stable life are increasingly out of reach for those without a college education. 

America has broken its contract with its laboring class. So, how do we get back to the American Dream? How do we once again become the land of opportunity, the promised land, where hard work and commitment to family are enough to protect you from poverty? It’s not that hard actually. All it would take, as this book illustrates, is for those in power to once again respect the dignity of work—and the American worker.

Named #1 Best Business Book of 2011, by Patriot-News-PennLive.com

If you have ever flown in an airplane, used electricity from a nuclear power plant, or taken an antibiotic, you have benefited from a brilliant mistake.

Each of these life-changing innovations was the result of many missteps and an occasional brilliant insight that turned a mistake into a surprising portal of discovery. In Brilliant Mistakes, Paul Schoemaker, founder and chairman of Decision Strategies International, shares critical insights on the surprising benefits of making well-chosen mistakes.

Brilliant Mistakes explores why minimizing mistakes may be the greatest mistake of all, situations when mistakes are most beneficial and when they should be avoided, the counter-intuitive idea that we should deliberately permit errors at times, and how to make the most of brilliant mistakes to improve business results.

Brilliant Mistakes is based on solid academic research and insights from Schoemaker's work with more than 100 organizations, as well as his provocative Harvard Business Review article with Robert Gunther, "The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes." Schoemaker provides a practical roadmap for using mistakes to accelerate learning for your organization and yourself.

The branding bible for today's globalized world

Today, brands have become even more important than the products they represent: their stories travel with lightning speed through social media and the Internet and across countries and diverse cultures. A brand must be elastic enough to allow for reasonable category and product-line extensions, flexible enough to change with dynamic market conditions, consistent enough so that consumers who travel physically or virtually won't be confused, and focused enough to provide clear differentiation from the competition. Strong brands are more than globally recognizable; they are critical assets that can make a significant contribution to your company's bottom line.

In Global Brand Power, Kahn brings brand management into the 21st century, addressing how branding contributes to the purchase process and how to position a strong global brand, from identifying the appropriate competitive set, offering a sustainable differential advantage, and targeting the right strategic segment. This essential guide also covers how customer ownership of your brand affects marketing strategy, methods for assessing brand value, how to manage a brand for long-term profitability, effective brand communications and repositioning strategies, and how to manage a brand in a world of total transparency—where one slip-up can go around the world via social media instantaneously.

Filled with stories about how Coca-Cola, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., Marriott, Apple, Starbucks, Campbell Soup Company, Southwest Airlines, and celebrities like Lady Gaga are leveraging their brands, Global Brand Power is the only book you will need to implement an effective brand strategy for your firm.

Bringing hard data to the way we think about entrepreneurial success, this bold call to action draws on the latest scientific evidence to dispel the most pervasive startup myths and light a path to entrepreneurship for those eclipsed by the hype.

When you think of a successful entrepreneur, who comes to mind? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe even Jesse Eisenberg, the man who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network? It may surprise you that most successful founders look very different from Zuckerberg or Gates. In fact, most startup origin stories are very different from the famous "unicorns" that have achieved valuations of over $1 billion, from Facebook to Google to Uber.

In The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors, Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick takes us to the forefront of an empirical revolution in entrepreneurship. New data and better research methods have overturned the conventional wisdom behind what a successful founder looks like, how they succeed, and how the startup ecosystem works.

Among the issues he examines:
Which founders are most likely to succeed?Where do the best startup ideas come from?What's the most foolproof way of securing the funding needed to take a company to the next level?Should your sales pitch really be something out of Hollywood?What's the best way to grow and scale your company and create a thriving culture that won't hinder expansion?
Mollick argues that entrepreneurship is too important, both for society and for the individuals who start companies, to be eclipsed by the shadows of unicorns. He shows we can democratize entrepreneurship—but only by following an evidence-based approach that puts to rest the false narratives that surround it.

For millions of Americans, the COVID shock has brought retirement saving to an abrupt halt—now it’s time to get back on track. 

Even before the pandemic, a large share of households by Americans over age 50 faced the threat that their living standards would decline sharply in retirement. In the wake of COVID-19, these numbers will surely worsen. In Retirement Reboot: Commonsense Financial Strategies for Getting Back on Track, finance writer and regular New York Times retirement contributor Mark Miller offers practical strategies for Americans to improve their retirement prospects.

If you’re nearing retirement age and worry you haven’t saved enough, Retirement Reboot will walk you through the core decisions to make now to improve your retirement outcomes—even if retirement is just a few years away. You’ll learn how to make a plan, think through the timing of retirement, optimize Social Security, navigate Medicare, build savings, and tap home equity. You’ll also explore ongoing strategies, such as careful budgeting, generating income from work even after retirement, planning for long-term care, and leveraging special assistance aimed at low-income workers. If you have low savings, or none at all, Miller’s simple steps can help you make the most of your remaining working years and reboot the retirement you always imagined.

How do companies use location intelligence to achieve competitive advantage and business success?

We live in a digital, global economy, and businesses need to know where to source, operate, and market to grow their customer base. Through location analytics and location intelligence, a business can make better-informed decisions and ultimately add value to their organization, their customers, and society. But how do businesses integrate location analytics into their business development, marketing, and operations?

Spatial Business: Competing and Leading with Location Analytics examines how location is a key factor in intelligent business decisions and achieving success. Through varied, in-depth, real-world examples, readers learn how location analytics solutions can be designed, deployed, and managed from strategic and operational perspectives.

Each chapter of Spatial Business examines how real companies have integrated location into their business intelligence and decision-making. Some key concepts include:

• The fundamentals of spatial business and the technologies and methods by which businesses can understand the location value chain 
• The creation of spatial business architecture to facilitate location analytics in meeting business goals and needs
• The themes of spatial business and implications for practice

Written by experts in spatial business and designed for managers, professionals, and students at all levels, Spatial Business provides a road map for realizing the potential of geospatial data across the entire business value chain.

Also available in Spanish.

No more blank pages, no more sweaty palms! 

Filled with behind-the-scenes stories from a career storyteller at Walt Disney World, Tell Your Story delivers the secret formula to engage an audience. Alice Fairfax provides over 50 tools for not only writing a great story, but getting up and delivering one in person or online.

With wit, warmth, and plenty of stories, Tell Your Story helps anyone seeking to overcome the stress and fears of being a great communicator—from the weekly social post to the annual board presentation, and everything in between!