Business Librarian
Financial Times' Best Business Books of the Year / Dec. 2023
For December 2023, here are 12 books from the longlist for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year for 2023 that you can borrow from JMU Libraries. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson won the £30,000 prize for Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can Teach Us to Thrive (Hill, 2023).
Right Kind of Wrong
We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we're often torn between two "failure cultures": one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well.
Material world : a substantial story of our past and future
For every ton of fossil fuels, we extract six tons of other materials-from sand to stone to wood to metal. Even as we pare back our consumption of fossil fuels we continue to redouble our consumption of everything else. Why? Because these ingredients are the basis for everything. They power our phones and electric cars, build our homes and offices, enable the printing of our books, and supply our packaging.
How Big Things Get Done
Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York's skyline in 21 months. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. No less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life's work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg.
Cobalt Red
The searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma
We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. As co-founder of the pioneering AI company DeepMind, part of Google, Mustafa Suleyman has been at the center of this revolution. The coming decade, he argues, will be defined by this wave of powerful, fast-proliferating new technologies.
Power and Progress: Our thousand-year struggle over technology and prosperity
A thousand years of history and contemporary evidence make one thing clear: progress depends on the choices we make about technology. New ways of organizing production and communication can either serve the narrow interests of an elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity. With their bold reinterpretation of economics and history, the authors fundamentally change how we see the world, providing the vision needed to redirect innovation so it again benefits most people.
Beijing Rules
An acclaimed journalist on contemporary China lays bare the country's two-decade quest for global dominance and how the Chinese Communist Party coopted what Western leaders have long considered their most powerful tool in the fight for liberal democracy--capitalism--to expand its illiberal influence worldwide.
Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, high rollers, and the epic race to build the world's most exclusive skyscrapers
A fly-on-the-wall account of the ferocious ambition, greed, and financial one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the world- the new Manhattan megatowers known as Billionaires' Row-from a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal
Tokens : The future of money in the age of the platform
Exploring the history of extra-monetary economies, Rachel O'Dwyer shows that private and grassroots tokens have always haunted the real economy. But as the large tech platforms issue new money-like instruments, tokens are suddenly everywhere. This development is challenging the balance of power between online empires and the state.
Your Face Belongs to Us
The story of a small AI company that gave facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses, threatening to end privacy as we know it.
Unscripted: The epic battle for a media empire and the Redstone family legacy
The shocking inside story of the struggle for power and control at Paramount Global, the multibillion-dollar entertainment empire controlled by the Redstone family, and the dysfunction, misconduct, and deceit that threatened the future of the company, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who first broke the news.
Elon Musk
For two years, Walter Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?