New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

Ilene Fischer is the founder and CEO of Sophia Network, where she guides executive leaders through the turbulence of disruptive change, mergers, reorganizations, and breakthrough innovations – applying her signature Innovation Ecosystems methodology to turn strategic vision into reality. Earlier in her career, she was a partner at Charlie Kiefer’s Innovation Associates and managing director at the Tom Peters Company, and has been an advocate for women’s causes in an array of fields.

“Innovation theatre” in which changes are promised without ever happening is Ilene’s bete noire. Give me a corporate culture steeped in fear, and you can be sure that vital experimentation won’t be valued. In this interview, she makes a strong case for constant iteration that cuts across departmental silos in order to keep pace with the nine disruptive factors she sees as happening simultaneously in the business world today. Is AI big? Yes. But so is what quantum computing makes possible. One of the biggest points she makes in this conversation is that companies are starved for multidisciplinary talent, and the talent they do manage is attract will leave promptly if not given a license to apply that talent and achieve results. Change starts with deep listening (no judging) and grows exponentially into a virtuous circle if done with respect; fail that test, and a vicious cycle will emerge instead.

Ilene's book Innovation Ecosystems: A Dynamic Blueprint for Organizational Success and Engagement is published by John Murray Press, a division of Hachette. The book will be released on October 20 and is available for preorder now.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

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In Corporate Power and the Politics of Change (Cambridge UP, 2025) Matteo Gatti examines how corporations have taken on roles traditionally reserved for governments – advocating on social issues, setting internal norms, and stepping in where public institutions fall short. This phenomenon, called corporate governing, takes two forms: socioeconomic advocacy, when companies take public stances, and government substitution, when they deliver services or protections the state does not provide. Drawing on legal doctrine and insights from the social sciences, Gatti shows how this shift reflects broader pressures within firms and deep dysfunction outside them. The rise of corporate governing has also triggered political, legal, and cultural backlash that challenges its legitimacy and reach. This book offers a framework for understanding how corporate power reshapes policymaking and what that means for business and democracy.

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Tissa Richards is a leadership expert, keynote speaker, and the award-winning author of No Permission Needed and Rethinking Resilience: Fueling Your Competitive Advantage. Her mission is to help bold, high-capacity leaders become unshakable. A repeat tech founder and CEO who has raised millions in funding, Tissa advises a wide array of companies on innovation and performance.

In an era when trust is eroding, holding back and failing to communicate is a greater failing than ever. Rather than act like a turtle withdrawing into your shell, be bold: that’s the message here. The better route is to be in learning more, applying lessons learned from “failures” so that you can seize on the opportunities ahead. Most of all, remember that resiliency is a team sport; the lone hero won’t cut it in a world where exponential growth happens through the chemistry of a community that provides synergy. Case in point: Tissa mentions her interview with a former Executive at Campbell’s, whose Prickly Pear Council proved to be so successful in airing and resolving conflicts that eventually it no longer needed to exist.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

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A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of

Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly

Paul Osterman identifies three distinct categories of disposable

Not all disposable workers object to their arrangements. But most

Paul Osterman is Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management

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A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse.

Whether

A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return.

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I chatted with brand planner Mark Rukman about his quest to translate historical ways of thinking into advertising. Mark likes to joke that, as a historically obsessed, private-sector strategist, he thinks of himself as a nineteenth-century gentleman scholar working in the "Department of Analogies." We discuss Mark's journey from a childhood in the USSR to the lifeblood of capitalism: the advertising industry. Along the way, we explore the nonlinearity of life choices, historical rhythms and events, and even a few unresolved differential equations. Throughout our conversation, we return to history as a surprisingly powerful source of order and clarity in a chaotic world—and as an underused source of insight for brand strategy. Last but not least, we talk about Mark's witty new show, "Old Takes," in which he tackles the hottest cultural trends and historicizes them, showing that if we look back far enough, we've often seen them before.

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Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner are enterprise strategists at Amazon Web Services, based in London. Phil was previously a corporate VP and international CIO at McDonalds. Jana was formerly at DHL and studied uncertainty dynamics in academia. They are authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Octopus’s are nimble and amazing, as anybody who has watched the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher will verify. In contrast, the Tin Man model we know from The Wizard of Oz needs constant oil and is too rusty and rigid to function well on its own for long. This episode’s guests lean into the Octopus model, which is about earning trust and evading, in this case, the enemy within ourselves when it comes to not admitting mistakes and quickly learning from them. The value of a strong feedback loop, creating an technology infrastructure that is “thin” and allows for freedom, and not chasing metrics that prevent you from learning from anecdotal evidence of where change is necessary: those are among the topics that lively conversation pursues. A final key point the authors make is that at a time when investment in executive learning has tripled while other personnel developments remain flat is a mistake; now more than ever, human capabilities need to be built upon in an era of rapid innovation.

Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com.

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In his latest book, Pink Tsunami: The Hello Kitty Kawaii Wave that has Swept the World (Headpress 2026), Alan Brender delves into Hello Kitty the marketing wonder and cultural phenomenon, who has been around for 50 years. There are theme parks, restaurants, cafes and hotels dedicated to her. There are millions worldwide who buy Hello Kitty products, superfans who don’t know when to stop and amass thousands of items bearing Kitty’s countenance, and star fans, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears to name two, who do not think twice about purchasing a $50,000 Hello Kitty necklace. In Pink Tsunami you will hear about the fans, and Kitty’s designers and marketers and how they contributed to her popularity. But all is not glittery for this Queen of Kawaii. She has a dark side that even involves murder. Dive inside this book and all will be revealed.

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British

Traditional

Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book

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In this interview I met with Dr. Juxuan Zhang (Osaka University) to discuss her research on the history of the Chinese apparel industry since 1979. Her paper with Prof Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) investigates the structural transformation of the Chinese apparel industry from 1980 to 2020. Following an approach of industry studies and classic business history, it focuses on the 10 largest apparel companies in the four decades since the 1980s. Drawn from a broad range of published sources and official data, it analyses the ownership transition and entrepreneurial strategies of these companies under the changing institutional context. The findings show how different types of firms were able to use regulations and policies to dominate the industry. The study contributes to literature by exhibiting the dynamics of the industry development from the perspective of companies and entrepreneurs.

Read the full research for free here

Presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D.

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