Summer reading 2024

Many of us dread having to convey our ideas to others, often feeling ill-equipped, anxious, and awkward. Through an easy-to-follow six-step method along with clear examples, you can develop the life-changing ability to excel in spontaneous communication situations–from public speaking to interviewing and giving feedback to making small talk. Based on the author – Stanford University lecturer – Matt Abraham’s hit podcast of the same name, this book gives you hints and tips to prepare for the unexpected.

• Title: Think Faster, Talk Faster.
• Author: Abrahams, M.
• Library Link (e-book)
• ISBN: 9781035024957
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Macmillan Business

The Leap to Leader is your trusted playbook for making the biggest jump of your career. You'll learn from more than a hundred successful leaders who share their powerful insights and compelling stories of how to make the leap, along with practical strategies and tactics for building a loyal following, moving up quickly to broaden your impact, and making the subtle but crucial mindset shifts that are required to lead others effectively. The leap to leader doesn't have to be a leap of faith. If you're ready to make the jump, start here.

• Title: The Leap to Leader: How Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership
• Author: Bryant, A.
• Library Link (e-book)
• ISBN: 9781647824891
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

The renowned social scientist, professor Dan Ariely, delivers his most urgent and compelling book—an eye-opening exploration of the human side of the misinformation crisis—examining what drives otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs. Misbelief is an eye-opening and comprehensive analysis of the psychological drivers that cause otherwise rational people to adopt deeply irrational beliefs. Utilising the latest research, Ariely reveals the key elements—emotional, cognitive, personality, and social—that drive people down the funnel of false information and mistrust, showing how under the right circumstances, anyone can become a misbeliever.

• Title: Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things
• Author: Ariely, D.
• Library Link (hardcopy)
• ISBN: 9780063280427
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Collins

Data indicates that most strategic efforts to change a company’s culture fail. So how do companies succeed in this endeavor?

A top strategy professor and two highly successful CEOs found that, in companies that had successfully changed their culture, leaders had taken dramatic actions that embodied the new cultural values. These actions inspired stories that became company legends, repeated in every department and handed on to new employees. 

Through compiling and analyzing 150 stories from business leaders who have achieved change, they identified 6 attributes that every successful culture change story has in common. With extensive and inspiring examples of stories containing these attributes, the authors illustrate how readers can harness the power of stories within their company in order to change or create a winning culture to align with any strategy.

• Title: The Cultural Change: How to Build Authentic Stories That Transform Your Organization
• Author:  Barney, J., Amorim, M., Julio, C.
• Library Link (e-book)
• ISBN: 9781523004928
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Berret-Koehler Publishers

Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

• Title: Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things
• Author: Grant, A.
• Library Link (hardcopy)
• ISBN: 9780593656976
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Viking Books USA

After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely. Outlining the three archetypes of failure - simple, complex, and intelligent - Amy showcases how to minimize unproductive failure while maximizing what we gain from flubs of all stripes. She illustrates how we and our organizations can embrace our human fallibility, learn exactly when failure is our friend, and prevent most of it when it is not. This is the key to pursuing smart risks and preventing avoidable harm.

• Title: Right Kind of Wrong
• Author: Edmondson, A.
• Library Link (e-book)
• ISBN: 9781847943767
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Cornerstone Press

Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech’s most powerful players. From “the queen of all media” (Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal), this is the inside story we’ve all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.

Despite the damage she chronicles, Swisher remains optimistic about tech’s potential to help solve problems and not just create them. She calls upon the industry to make better, more thoughtful choices, even as a new set of powerful AI tools are poised to change the world yet again. At its heart, this book is a love story to, for, and about tech from someone who knows it better than anyone.

• Title: Burn Book 
• Author: Swisher, K.
• Library Link
• ISBN: 9780349442136
• Year: 2024
• Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Our lives are minefields of misinformation. It ripples through our social media feeds, our daily headlines, and the pronouncements of politicians, executives, and authors. Stories, statistics, and studies are everywhere, allowing people to find evidence to support whatever position they want. Many of these sources are flawed, yet by playing on our emotions and preying on our biases, they can gain widespread acceptance, warp our views, and distort our decisions.

In this eye-opening book, renowned economist Alex Edmans teaches us how to separate fact from fiction. Using colourful examples—from a wellness guru’s tragic but fabricated backstory to the blunders that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster to the diet that ensnared millions yet hastened its founder’s death—Edmans highlights the biases that cause us to mistake statements for facts, facts for data, data for evidence, and evidence for proof..

• Title: May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases - and What We Can Do About It
• Author: Edmans, J.
• Library Link (hardcopy)
• ISBN: 9780241630167
• Year: 2024
• Publisher: Penguin Business

The global battle among the three dominant digital powers―the United States, China, and the European Union―is intensifying. All three regimes are racing to regulate tech companies, with each advancing a competing vision for the digital economy while attempting to expand its sphere of influence in the digital world. Which digital empire will prevail in the contest for global influence remains an open question, yet their contrasting strategies are increasingly clear.

• Title: Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
• Author: Bradford, A.
• Library Link (e-book)
• ISBN: 9780197649268
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Companies face increasingly turbulent times. Economic and political uncertainty, sustainability developments, and competitors with new business models are just some issues that stretch companies' resilience and adaptability. Strategy in Turbulent Times presents a way of analyzing and fighting turbulent environments. 

Using four animal metaphors, the Camel, Salmon, Chameleon and Octopus, it shows you how to develop new strategies and how to implement them. It is up to you to discover which animal represents the appropriate turbulence strategy for your organization.

• Title: Strategy in Uncertain Times. How to Design a Strategy that is Robust and Future-proof
• Author: Verweire, K.
• Library Link (hardcopy)
• ISBN: 9781647821081
• Year: 2023
• Publisher: LannooCampus

Companies have more data at their fingertips than ever before. Yet, studies show that many executives and organisations 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.

• Title: Decision-driven Analytics: Leveraging Human Intelligence to Unlock the Power of Data
• Author: De Langhe, B.; Puntoni, S.
• Library Link (hardcopy)
• ISBN: 9781613631720
• Year: 2024
• Publisher: Wharton Digital Press

Going down the entrepreneurial route is not something to be taken lightly. Typically, it starts from a passion. As well as the entrepreneurs themselves, this also applies to Hans Crijns, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Vlerick Business School for over 30 years. Over his career, he has personally got to know as many as 1,000 individual entrepreneurs – some fleetingly, others as friends, but all with their own unique story. In his new book Liefdesbrieven aan ondernemers (‘Love Letters to Entrepreneurs’), he shares 51 of these stories with us. You can take the book's title quite literally, as it serves as an engaging and compelling tribute to entrepreneurship in all its facets. This book is available in Dutch only.

• Title: Liefdesbrieven aan ondernemers.
• Author: Crijns, H.
• Library Link (hardcopy)
• ISBN: 9789401499354
• Year: 2024
• Publisher: LannooCampus