Book Summaries 2024

In Unreasonable Hospitality, hospitality guru Will Guidara details how he transformed Eleven Madison Park from a so-so brasserie in the middle of Manhattan into the World’s Best Restaurant in 2017. Guidara contends that the secret to the restaurant’s success was his commitment to providing “unreasonable hospitality”—a level of dedication to providing guests with a fantastic experience that stretched the limits of what seemed sensible. Guidara believes that anyone with a service-based business should also commit to providing unreasonable hospitality—both to their employees and their customers.

In this guide, we’ll trace Guidara’s career and share the lessons he learned from each stage—from his journey to becoming the general manager of Eleven Madison Park to transforming it into a three-star, a four-star, and then the world’s best restaurant. We’ll also include advice from experts in other industries about how to manage a world-class team and deliver exceptional service to your customers.

Bonnie Hammer’s legendary career spans five decades in a turbulent, male-driven industry. Today, Bonnie is a powerful leader at the very top of her field, and women at all levels constantly ask her: What is your secret to success?

Her power—and her staying power—comes from rejecting common myths about how women are “supposed” to act in the workplace. She knows that the traditional wisdom women are told about work—pithy phrases like “don’t mix work with play,” “talk is cheap,” “follow your dreams,” “know your worth,” “trust your gut,” and “you can have it all”—hold women back.

Having risen from an entry-level production assistant whose chief charge was a dog, to a transformative, top executive at NBCUniversal, Bonnie challenges conventional workplace wisdom and shares the uncommon sense women need to succeed.

Bonnie has mentored countless women in every industry, and she leads NBCUniversal’s masterclass for female executives. She’s known for telling the uncensored and uncompromising truth—even when it isn’t easy to hear.

Now, she gives you, the reader, her private masterclass—replacing the lies women have been fed about work with her unique time-tested wisdom. You will leave with powerful new truths and easily digestible, practical advice to apply in your own life.

Written with humor and heart, and full of insights and research that illuminate her points, 15 Lies Women Are Told at Work is a portable mentor for working women. It doesn’t just explain one woman’s rise to the top in a tough industry; it shows how any woman can rise as high as she wants in her own work world.

“A masterclass in success from the mailroom to the boardroom from one of the most powerful women in corporate America, discover the un-common-sense women need to succeed—and the lies to ignore along the way.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued presciently 35 years ago that television was reshaping our culture and trivializing public life—news, politics, religion, education, and business—by turning it into entertainment. He warned that we would become so inundated with irrelevant information that we’d lose sight of what was important—even worse, we wouldn’t care as long as we felt entertained. With the proliferation of digital media today and worries about excessive "screen time," his analysis still resonates.

What can our relationships with other animals teach us? That’s the question naturalist Sy Montgomery addresses in her memoir, How to Be a Good Creature. She explores the lessons about life and love she learned from various animals who touched her life, from a tiny pinktoe tarantula in French Guiana to a beloved 750-pound pet pig named Christopher.

In our guide, we’ll examine how the wisdom and companionship of animals helped Montgomery find her calling as a traveler and nature writer, appreciate animals and people in new ways, and cultivate love and community. These animals taught her how to be more curious, compassionate, friendly, loving, and much more—in other words, they taught her how to be a good creature. We’ll also discuss some of the science and history behind our relationships with other animals, along with ways you can apply the lessons Montgomery learned to your life.

Adolf Eichmann—the Nazi official who arranged the transportation of Jews to their systematic deaths in concentration camps—is often considered a sadistic mastermind. But according to German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem reveals otherwise. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt argues that Eichmann was an unremarkable evildoer whose atrocities reveal the banality of evil—evil driven not by sadism, but by mundane motives and aims.

In this guide, we’ll begin by discussing the historical context of Eichmann’s case, highlighting his specific role in the Holocaust. Next, we’ll focus on Eichmann himself, examining his unremarkable upbringing, his alleged "expertise" regarding the Jewish people, and his mundane motivations for committing atrocities throughout the Holocaust. Finally, we’ll assess the trial against Eichmann and explore Arendt’s reasons for thinking that, although Eichmann was clearly guilty, the trial lacked legitimacy. Throughout this guide, we’ll add further historical context for the trial and the Holocaust itself.

Many people think that to accomplish something truly great, you must be one of a few "gifted" geniuses born with extraordinary talent. However, psychologist Adam Grant argues in Hidden Potential that the world’s top performers weren’t extraordinary geniuses from birth; rather, they built their skills over time using the right techniques. By employing these techniques, you too can become the type of person who achieves wildly ambitious goals.

In this guide, you’ll learn why you have to practice in a way that’s both fun and uncomfortable to maximize your personal growth. Additionally, you’ll discover three ways to tap into your potential by connecting with the right people. In our commentary, we’ll supplement Grant’s advice for how to reach your full potential with ideas from books on personal growth like Peak and The Motivation Myth. We’ll also expand on Grant’s information about the potential of organizations with tips from management books like Rework and No Rules Rules.

What’s it like to grow up in a society where women and girls have few rights, and a terrorist group is trying to take away the only freedoms they do have? What can one person do to combat violent extremism that is destroying everything she loves?

In I Am Malala, Nobel Peace Prize winner and girls’ education activist Malala Yousafzai answers these questions by recounting her life story—from her origins in poverty to her campaign for girls’ education in Pakistan to her eventual shooting at the hands of the Taliban. Part memoir, part history of the Taliban’s rise to power and attacks on women’s and girls’ rights, I Am Malala is above all a chronicle of bravery in the face of great risk.

Our guide provides historical, political, and religious context for the events in Malala's life. We also examine the research and data behind issues such as gender according to Islam, the origins of terrorist organizations, the link between misogyny and violent extremism, and girls’ education worldwide.

In Who, business executives Geoff Smart and Randy Street say that many companies struggle to succeed because they lack an effective hiring process. Thus, these companies hire unfit candidates who fail to complete their responsibilities and harm the companies. Smart and Street seek to solve this problem by sharing their own hiring process, which is designed to more accurately identify the candidate who can best fill a specific role. To develop this process, they drew on their experiences as business executives, as well as the hiring experiences of over 300 successful CEOs they interviewed for the book.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the four steps of Street and Smart’s hiring process, from determining what you’re looking for in an employee to persuading the best candidate to commit to the job. In our commentary, we’ll compare the authors’ advice to that of other experts, such as Brian Tracy and Gallup Press.

Good strategy is the effective application of your organization’s strengths against your rivals’ weaknesses. Unfortunately, many people misunderstand what makes good strategy and end up publishing vague statements of lofty but directionless goals instead of actionable, focused plans that will propel their organization to success.

Richard Rumelt is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on strategy, having guided organizations ranging from small, entrepreneurial start-ups to large, multinational conglomerates, as well as several governments and the U.S. Department of Defense. In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, he lays out the essential components of good strategy and the faulty thinking behind bad strategy. He also describes specific and measurable techniques for designing a focused strategy that gives your organization the best chance of success.

Published in 1969, Business Adventures is a collection of essays about the unpredictability of corporations and Wall Street—and the people behind them. Longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks explores how businesses and economies can rise and fall based on people’s behavior, which is often driven by emotions, habits of thinking, and human tendencies. Brooks’s essays are so insightful and engaging that Microsoft’s Bill Gates has called Business Adventures the “best business book ever.”

In this guide, you’ll find out how human nature led to corporate scandals, stock market setbacks, and major events that shaped the financial world as we know it. As the book was published half a century ago, we also include updates and commentary about the lasting impact of these case studies and connect them to contemporary events and issues.