Amazon.com updates its list of bestselling business books hourly. Here is a snapshot of what books were hot this morning — Monday, December 10.
The Lies About Money by Ric Edelman. Exposing the seamy underbelly of the retail mutual fund industry, this helpful primer by seasoned financial advisor Edelman offers step-by-step instructions for how to beat it at its own game. Edelman breaks down the options for ordinary people to regain their savings from crooked hands, in a detailed, interactive guide to portfolio selection.
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres. Yale Law School professor and econometrician Ayres argues in this lively and enjoyable book that the recent creation of huge data sets allows knowledgeable individuals to make previously impossible predictions. He calls the data set analysts super crunchers and discusses the changes they’re making to industries like medical diagnostics, air travel pricing, screenwriting and online dating services. Although Ayres presents both sides of this revolution, explaining how the corporate world tries to manipulate consumer behavior and telling consumers how to fight back, his real mission is to educate readers about the basics of statistics and hypothesis testing, spending most of his time in an edifying and entertaining discussion of the use of regression and randomization trials.
The Future of Management by Gary Hamel and Bill Breen. Though this authoritative examination of today’s static corporate management systems reads like a business school treatise, it isn’t the same-old thing. Hamel, a well-known business thinker and author (Leading the Revolution), advocates that dogma be rooted out and a new future be imagined and invented. To aid managers and leaders on this mission, Hamel offers case studies and measured analysis of management innovators like Google and W.L. Gore (makers of Gore-Tex), then lists lessons that can be drawn from them.
Results That Last: Hardwiring Behaviors That Will Take Your Company to the Top by Quint Studer. Business results that truly last don’t come from products and services or particular employees and leaders, no matter how good they are. Products change and evolve; people come and go. What really leads to sustainable business results over time is quality leadership — not leaders, but leadership. Consistently excellent leadership is the key to long-term success and profitability Studer shows you how to build an organizational culture that develops great leaders today and instills the mechanisms and the mindset that will continue to foster great leadership tomorrow. Studer presents the most effective leadership practices and shows you how to apply them across every group, department, or division, resulting in improved leadership and performance on the individual, group, and organizational levels.
How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else by Michael Gates Gill. he son of New Yorker writer Brendan Gill grew up meeting the likes of Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway. A Yale education led to a job at prestigious J. Walter Thompson Advertising. But at 63, the younger Gill’s sweet life has gone sour. Long fired from JWT, his own business is collapsing and an ill-advised affair has resulted in a new son and a divorce. At this low point, and in need of health insurance for a just diagnosed brain tumor, Gill fills out an application for Starbucks and is assigned to the store on 93rd and Broadway in New York City, staffed primarily by African-Americans. Working as a barista, Gill, who is white, gets an education in race
I read the Starbucks book by the former ad exec who got fired, lost all his moola, and went to work at Starbucks. Good part: he learned that being polite to a worker is not the same thing as really understanding and appreciating the job they do(a lot of what workers do takes a lot of skill; a funny part of the book is how scared to death he was of working the register—I can relate). Bad part: he now loves Starbucks with the same fervor with which he loved and kneeled at the alter of corporate America. Wrong lesson! It was the people he worked with at Strabucks that saved him, not the company. Still an interesting read. Mike Maslanka