New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

How do you value something? It seems simple enough. Since the beginning of commerce thousands of years ago, people have been asserting the value of enterprises. Yet, the math and specific logic of that exercise is only about a century old.

For thirty of those years, Tim Koller and his colleagues at McKinsey, the consultancy, have been in the forefront of how to think about value and how to measure it. The first edition of Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies (Wiley) came out in 1990; this is the seventh iteration, so Koller has been through numerous ups and downs.

His calm and cool reasoning should be required reading for all business managers and investors. 

Daniel Peris is Senior Vice President at Federated Investors in Pittsburgh. Trained as a historian of modern Russia, he is the author most recently of Getting Back to Business: Why Modern Portfolio Theory Fails Investors. You can follow him on Twitter @HistoryInvestor or at http://www.strategicdividendinvestor.com

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Listeners who have tuned in to my most recent episodes here on Systems and Cybernetics will be familiar with what seems be a current running theme. So, as I grapple with what it takes to bring systems thinking to life, I couldn't help but be intrigued when I came across Systems Inspired Leadership: How to Tap Collective Wisdom to Navigate Change, Enhance Agility, and Foster Collaboration (CRR Global, 2021). The book's authors Marita Fridjhon and Frank Uit de Weerd start by acknowledging that today’s twenty-first-century leaders face tremendous pressure in an increasingly complex and fast-changing world, where traditional leadership models have become outdated and ineffective.

Systems Inspired Leadership (SIL) is a powerful alternative for modern leaders. Instead of a top-down, leader-knows-all style that results in stress, pressure, and anxiety, SIL offers a fresh, proven approach for achieving optimal results for organizations. With meaningful collaboration at its core, SIL taps the collective wisdom of the system rather than telling people what to do, and builds shared leadership at all levels of the organization.

I recently had a chance to talk to Marita Fidjhorn, co-author of Systems Inspired Leadership, as well as co-owner and CEO of CRR Global and mentor to an ever-growing community of practitioners in the field of relationship systems work. We spent of most of our time going deep on what it takes to “create from the wisdom of the system rather than react”; this is much of what it means to practice systems inspired leadership. Marita is an expert in and is passionate about relationship systems—and asserts strongly that the kind of leadership needed to address today's "wicked problems' requires a deep Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI), including the vital acknowledgement that "relationship systems are in a constant state of emergence" (one of the 5 RSI principles described in depth in the book).

This episode could have been much longer—Marita and I barely scratched the surface. I encourage any listener interested in the intersection of systems and leadership to have a listen, then read the book for a deeper dive into areas we didn't have time to get to. Here's a little something from the book as an invitation:

“Part of the challenge of being a systems inspired Leader is to hold awareness of the nature and flow of systemic evolution. What wants to be left alone or to be put to rest? What is viable and wants to grow. These are the moments to remember that leadership is a role that belongs to the system".

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Today I talked to Eric Posner about his book How Antitrust Failed Workers (Oxford UP, 2021).

When anti-trust cases are brought forward, typically they involve monopolies exercising undue power in regards to products or services. Rarely do labor issues get the same treatment. Reasons vary from the previous power of unions, to the expense and risk of going to trial, to whether the potential for unfair, uncompetitive practices get scrutinized at all. Posner points in this episode to why the laws may need strengthening. Issues include stagnant wages, and the use and abuse of non-poaching, non-complete and arbitration clauses in the contracts that workers sign. Add in the practice of gig workers and rising inequality issues related to household wealth, and you can’t find a more timely topic than this one.

Eric Posner is a professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He’s currently on leave and working for the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Justice Department. (Note that his views do not necessarily reflect those of the Justice Department.) Two previous books by Posner were each separately chosen as a book of the year in 2018, one by The Economist and the other by The Financial Times.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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There is a complexity paradox that we all need to understand. We humans have a natural inclination towards connection, engagement, and creativity – all necessary skills to thrive in complexity. The problem is that the stress caused by uncertainty and ambiguity makes it difficult to tap into this inclination when we need it the most. Unleash Your Complexity Genius: Growing Your Inner Capacity to Lead (Stanford UP, 2022) offers a set of practices that help you not only understand complexity but actually hack into your own nervous system to bring your natural capacities back online. By paying close attention to your body, redefining your emotional experiences, and connecting more deeply to others, you can transform the anxiety, exhaustion, and overwhelm that complexity creates. Better still, as you unleash your natural complexity genius, you create the conditions for those around you to flourish in an uncertain world.

Jennifer Garvey Berger is the Founder and CEO of Cultivating Leadership where, with her co-author Carolyn Coughlin, she has helped thousands of leaders around the world thrive in complexity.

John Emrich has worked for decades years in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment space called Kick the Dogma.

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What’s important about de novo protein design from an entrepreneurship perspective?

Everything.

As the founder of AI Proteins, Chris Bahl leads a company focused on building proteins completely from scratch. The research and subject matter itself are nothing new to Chris, but the entrepreneurial side of his work certainly is.

From October 2017 to October 2021, Chris served as the head of protein design for the Institute of Protein Innovation, a Boston-based research institution. One month later, however, he and his team opted to leave the research world and launch a new biotech company, AI Proteins.

While the primary purpose of academic research in protein design is to learn more about the nature of proteins as they relate to disease, Chris believes the main mission of biotechnology is to cure it—and he definitely wanted to be on the “curing” side.

AI Proteins is expanding the possibilities of protein therapeutics by rationally designing entirely new proteins, or as they’re officially called, de novo proteins. Using AI-based design and a high-throughput drug-discovery platform, the company creates synthetic proteins from scratch and seeks to optimize a specific protein’s activity for a variety of therapeutic applications.

The objective is to enable the development of proteins that are inexpensive, durable, highly specific, and can be optimized for oral delivery. Such a lofty goal is what entrepreneurship in its truest sense is really about.

It’s also a fascinating story to hear in the founder’s own words.

About our guest:

Chris Stahl is the founder and Chief Scientific Officer of AI Proteins, an Andover, Massachusetts-based company focused on ways to harness the power of synthetically designed proteins to cure diseases.

The former head of protein design at the Institute for Protein Innovation, Chris is also a lecturer at both the Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as a TED Fellow. His areas of expertise include computational protein design, structural biology, biochemistry, and in particular, he is credited for inventing the de novo design of synthetic miniproteins. He holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

About NBN:

The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate, inform and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal stories of carefully selected guests—all in an informal atmosphere of unscripted conversations and open, personal accounts.

Find links to past episodes here.

About our Hosts:

Kimon Fountoukidis:

Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR.

He founded both companies in the mid-90s with zero capital, and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors.

Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. He is passionate about sharing his success with others and working entrepreneurs of all kinds to help them achieve their goals. Listen to his story here. On Twitter. On LinkedIn.

Richard Lucas:

Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who has founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network.

Richard has been a TEDx event organiser for years, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels. He was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991, where continues to invest in promising companies and helps other entrepreneurs realise their dreams.

Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk. On Twitter. On LinkedIn.

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Should you train your kid to become a pro athlete? Why do Koreans dominate women’s golf? Why should ticket scalpers get more respect? Why are pro sports plagued by doping scandals and ruinous strikes? Learn the answers to these questions and more in my conversation with author Paul Oyer and sports economist Daniel Rascher about Paul’s new book An Economist Goes to the Game: How to Throw Away $580 Million and Other Surprising Insights from the Economics of Sports (Yale UP, 2022).

Author Paul Oyer is the Mary and Rankine Van Anda Entrepreneurial Professor, professor of economics, and senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. His academic research studies the economics of organizations and human resource practices, including the use of stock options plans, non-cash benefits, and the development of the gig economy. His previous books include Roadside MBA, which extracts business lessons from the experiences of small businesses across the US, and Everything I Ever Needed to Know about Economics I Learned from Online Dating which recommends that students stop taking economics classes and spend more time on Tinder (at least I think that’s what it’s about, based on the title—I haven’t read that one yet).

To supplement my ignorance, I’m joined on this podcast by my colleague Daniel Rascher. Dan is Professor and Director of Academic Programs for the Sport Management program at the University of San Francisco, where he teaches sports economics and business research methods. As President of SportsEconomics, his clients have included organizations involved in the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, MLS, PGA, NCAA, AHL, sports media, minor league baseball, Formula One racing, CART, Premier League Football, local sports commissions, and various government agencies. He has authored articles for academic and professional journals, book chapters, and a text book in the sport management and economics fields.

Host Peter Lorentzen is Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His research examines the political economy of governance in China.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, the exposure of Big Tobacco’s aggressive lobbying and internal efforts to obscure science showcasing the harmful effects of smoking changed U.S. public opinion of the industry and of product safety protocols, both of which had largely obscured these harms from public view for decades. Public awareness grew, triggering regulation on disclosure related to political influencing strategies, marketing tactics, and transparency regarding the devastating toll of tobacco products on many communities, including and especially children. As similar approaches to assessing the public health impacts of Big Oil and Big Pharma, among other industries, have gained traction in recent decades, Dr. Mélissa Mialon’s new book, Big Food & Co (Thierry Souccar Editions, 2021), adds the amalgamation of multinationals and transnational supply chains that make up Big Food, to that list.

Rising health inequities across race, class, and geography are subtle, yet central themes throughout Dr. Mialon’s meticulous accounting of a complex puzzle in which the marketing and distribution strategies of soft drink companies and ultra-processed food manufacturers are quietly but steadily ushering in a new globalized era of related public health crises – measured by increasing rates of of diabetes, cancers, and heart disease, etc– a crisis that has long been felt in the United States.

Whether branding t-shirts and games at summer camps in France for underprivileged children or blanketing entire streets in Mauritius with the unmistakable bright red and white flag of Coca-Cola, Dr. Mialon describes a taxonomy of commercial determinants of health common to nearly every example – whether multinational food companies’ policy advocacy in Colombia, public-private partnerships in Brazil, or culturally responsive branding for holidays in Southern Africa.

Between academic research and investigative journalism, the survey of trends in Big Food’s operation, marketing, and regulatory capture, offered throughout the book are additionally grounds for laying out a policy roadmap with public health indicators at the center of a wide range of potential reforms including campaign finance and heightened disclosure protocols for public-private partnerships to mitigating conflicts of interest in scientific studies related to food, agriculture, and health, among many others.

Dr. Mélissa Mialon is Associate Professor at Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland. She is a food engineer with a PhD in nutrition and co-coordinates the « Governance, Ethics and Conflicts of Interest in Public Health » (GECI-PH) network, based out of the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. Her research focuses on commercial determinants of health, and particularly on the practices used by corporations to influence public health policy, research and practice.

Anna Levy researches and teaches on emergency, crisis, and development practice & politics at Fordham & New York Universities. She is the founder and principal of Jafsadi.works, a research collective focused on advancing structural and participatory accountability in non-profit, movement, multilateral, city, and policy strategies. You can follow her @politicoyuntura.

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As global governments and regulators set an agenda for net zero carbon emissions, the focus on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria among investors, from pension scheme members to institutions, is on the rise.

The ESG Investing Handbook: Insights and Developments in Environmental, Social and Governance Investment (Harriman House, 2022) is an indispensable guide to the history, developments and latest thinking into the future of ESG investing from some of the most influential names in the business.

Featuring interviews with:

Expert Editor, Becky O’Connor covers the big questions and key themes, such as the effectiveness of divestment versus engagement strategies for promoting positive change as well as difficult topics, such as greenwash.

John Emrich has worked for decades in corporate finance, business valuation and fund management. He has a podcast about the investment advisory industry called Kick the Dogma.

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Today I talked to John List about his book The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale (Currency, 2022).

Want to go on an exuberant, incisive ride through why so many initiatives flounder and how, conversely, you can increase the odds of success? Then listening to John List will be for you. List takes us through his favorite, highly relevant behavior economic principles: loss aversion, confirmation bias and framing among them. Then this episode digs into why 50 to 90% of initiatives fail to scale. List emphasizes the role that false positives and unscalable ingredients play. As to the secrets of building out an idea, knowing when to quit stands out for reasons worth listening in for. Finally, the importance of scaling a company’s culture explains why the gladiatorial culture at Uber wasn’t sustainable at scale.

John List is a professor of economics at both the University of Chicago and the Australian National University. After being the chief economist at Uber and Lyft, he now holds that role at Walmart. He’s also previously been on the Council of Economic Advisers for The White House.

Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of ten books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His newest book is Emotionomics 2.0: The Emotional Dynamics Underlying Key Business Goals. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com.

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In Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets (Harper Business, 2022), Brett Scott tells an urgent and revelatory story about how the fusion of Big Finance and Big Tech requires “cloudmoney”—digital money underpinned by the banking sector—to replace physical cash. He dives beneath the surface of the global financial system to uncover a long-established lobbying infrastructure: an alliance of partners waging a covert war on cash. He explains the technical, political, and cultural differences between our various forms of money and shows how the cash system has been under attack for decades, as banking and tech companies promote a cashless society under the banner of progress.

Cloudmoney takes us to the front lines of a war for our wallets that is also about our freedom, from marketing strategies against cash to the weaponization of COVID-19 to push fintech platforms, and from there to the rise of the cryptocurrency rebels and fringe groups pushing back. It asks the most pressing questions: 

Brett Scott is an economic anthropologist, financial activist, and former broker. In 2013 he published The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money, and since then has spoken at hundreds of events across the globe and has appeared across international media, including BBC World News and Sky News. He has written extensively on financial reform, digital finance, alternative currency, blockchain technology, and the cashless society for publications like the Guardian, New Scientist, Huffington Post, Wired, and CNN.com, and also publishes the Altered States of Monetary Consciousness newsletter. He has worked on financial reform campaigns and alternative currency systems with a wide range of groups and is a Senior Fellow of the Finance Innovation Lab (UK). He currently resides in Berlin.

Utsav Saksena is a Research Fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Finance, Government of India. He can be reached at [email protected]. Note: opinions expressed in this podcast are purely personal and do not reflect the official position of NIPFP or the Ministry of Finance, Government of India.

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