Business

Dan Wang opens Breakneck with a provocation that stays with you long after you close the book: America is run by lawyers, and China is run by engineers. It sounds like a bumper sticker, but Wang spends 288 tightly argued pages demonstrating that this distinction explains more about the diverging trajectories of the two superpowers…

Humility Is the New Smart by Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig is a compelling business book that argues the human qualities most threatened by artificial intelligence—curiosity, openness, and deep listening—are precisely the ones organizations need to cultivate. About the Book Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig begin from a premise that is both counterintuitive and…

Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams’s Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results is an ambitious synthesis — twenty-five years of research, practice, and refinement distilled into a comprehensive model of leadership development that manages to be both academically rigorous and practically applicable. This is a serious book for…

Summary Brené Brown’s The Power of Vulnerability: Teachings on Authenticity, Connection, and Courage, released by Sounds True in its expanded audio and print edition, distills the research and ideas that made Brown one of the most influential voices in American organizational and personal development culture. By 2018, Brown had already delivered what became the most-watched…

Summary Nir Eyal built his reputation writing about persuasive technology. His first book, Hooked, gave product designers a framework for building habit-forming products. Indistractable is the corrective: a methodical guide to understanding why those products, and dozens of other forces, capture our attention against our wishes, and what we can do about it. The book…

The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier is a compact and transformative guide to becoming a better leader by learning to ask better questions — a book that challenges the assumption that good managers give answers, and argues convincingly that the seven right questions can change how you work, how you lead, and how you…

Stephen Shapiro’s 2020 Meridian Award-winning business book argues that the reason organizations fail to solve their hardest problems is not a shortage of intelligence or resources but a failure of question design. With 25 concrete reframing lenses organized into five clusters, Invisible Solutions gives innovation leaders, consultants, and practitioners a workshop-ready toolkit for finding solutions that were hiding in plain sight.

Ike Onyema Obi opens his memoir at the end of the story: sitting in his modern Accra townhome, listening to his young son’s laughter echo from the bath, aware that running water and electric light are things he once had to earn. That quiet opening does more work than most entrepreneurship books manage in their…

Most books about writing a book are, in a quiet way, dishonest. They describe the finished experience of a finished person: how it felt when the words finally came, how the structure eventually emerged, how the struggle was eventually worth it. They document a process in retrospect, which means they document the clean version, the…

The opening line of AI or Die lands before the first chapter even begins: in February 2024, Klarna launched an AI customer service system that handled 2.3 million conversations in thirty days, replacing the equivalent of 700 full-time employees, cutting resolution times by 67 percent, and saving the company $39 million in a single year….