Showing titles in Business Ethics

In 2001, Adam Neumann arrived in New York after five years as a conscript in the Israeli navy. Just over 15 years later, he had transformed himself into the charismatic CEO of a company worth $47 billion. With his long hair and feel-good mantras, the six-foot-five Neumann looked the part of a messianic Silicon Valley entrepreneur. The vision he offered was mesmerising: a radical reimagining of work space for a new generation. He called it WeWork.

The proud owner of a sprawling £14 million estate in the Cotswolds, boasting a stable of eventing horses, a fleet of supercars and neighbouring the royal family, Neil Woodford was the most celebrated and successful British investor of his generation. But, in 2019, after a stream of poorly judged investments, Woodford's asset management company collapsed, trapping hundreds of thousands of rainy-day savers in his flagship fund and hanging £3.6 billion in the balance.

As head of TED for the past 20 years, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world's most significant thinkers sharing their boldest ideas across every imaginable discipline. Yet there's a single theme that stands out in his mind as the essential connecting thread: generosity. It may seem simple, but generosity has played a key role in building the tools, knowledge, and institutions that have allowed civilisation to flourish. Now, in our unsettled modern world, beset by disruption and division, Anderson believes our collective future depends on reconnecting to this vital human trait.

Consciousness is the main source of organizational greatness. "Conscious business", explains Fred Kofman, means finding your essential values through your work. A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders. It produces sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of its community and the dignity of each member.

Gripping and darkly comic, Breaking Twitter takes listeners inside the battle between one of the most intriguing, polarizing, influential men of our time – Elon Musk – and the company that owns our world’s best hope for a shared global conversation. From employee accounts within Twitter headquarters to the mission-driven team Musk surrounded himself with, this is the full story from all sides.

In examining the history of the 737, a highly regarded plane that Boeing's new management degraded with cost-focused mandates, Flying Blind explores how Boeing skimped on testing in the race to match a competing plane from Airbus, outsourced software work to poorly paid graduates in India and convinced the US Federal Aviation Authority to put the MAX into service without requiring pilots to undergo simulator training.

When André de Ruyter took over as Eskom CEO in January 2020, he quickly realised why it was considered the toughest job in South Africa. Aside from neglected equipment, ageing power stations and an eroded skills base, he discovered that Eskom was crippled by corruption on a staggering scale. De Ruyter takes the listener inside the boardrooms and government meetings where South Africa’s future is shaped, with ministers often pulling in conflicting directions, and candidly reflects on his three years at the power utility.

When Brittany Kaiser joined Cambridge Analytica - the UK-based political consulting firm funded by conservative billionaire and Donald Trump patron Robert Mercer - she was an idealistic young professional working on her fourth degree in human rights law and international relations. A veteran of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, Kaiser’s goal was to utilise data for humanitarian purposes, most notably to prevent genocide and human rights abuses. But her experience inside Cambridge Analytica opened her eyes to the tremendous risks that this unregulated industry poses to democracy.

McKinsey earns billions advising almost every major corporation as well as countless governments, including Britain's, the USA's and China's. It boasts of its ability to maximise efficiency while making the world a better place. Its millionaire partners and network of alumni go on to top jobs in the world's most powerful organisations. And yet, shielded by non-disclosure agreements, its work remains largely secret—until now. In this propulsive investigation, two prize-winning journalists reveal the reality.

This book is for anyone who wants to understand what being more inclusive at work means, especially as it relates to black leaders. Based on candid interviews with thirty successful black leaders, it peels away the multifaceted layers of black British leaders in organizations to offer a new way of thinking about the black British experience.

The 10-Day MBA is an essential business reference, summarising a top business school education in one audio collection. Steven Silbiger devotes a concise chapter to each discipline you will encounter on an MBA course - marketing, ethics, accounting, organisational behaviour, quantitative analysis, finance, operations, economics and strategy. On day 10 the author gives a series of MBA mini courses on research, public speaking, negotiating, international business and more.

At a time when multiple crises are compounding to create epic inequality, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme - from the metaverse to cryptocurrency, space travel and transhumanism - is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms. In The End of Reality¸ Jonathan Taplin shines a light on the enormous cultural power of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreessen.

With unparalleled access, and having interviewed hundreds of people – from Amazon executives to competitors to small businesses who rely on its marketplace to survive – Dana Mattioli exposes how Amazon was driven by a competitive edge to dominate every industry it entered, bulldozed all who stood in its way, reshaped the retail landscape, transformed how Wall Street evaluates companies, and altered the very nature of the global economy.

Drawing on four decades of hands-on management experience, the founder of Richer Sounds argues that ethically run businesses are invariably more efficient, more motivated and more innovative than those that care only about the bottom line. He uncovers the simple tools that the best leaders use to make their businesses fair, revealing how others can follow suit. And he also delves into the big questions that modern capitalism has to answer if it is to survive and to thrive.

The Happy Index is structured into ten lessons that will provide you and the people you work with the tools to re-evaluate the ways you look at your business. Offering insight into the ways in which James has managed the family business, he strongly believes that you will see the benefits from working with an upside-down mindset, not only for success but also your team’s wellbeing and happiness. Really, though, it’s easy. Turn up on time. Trust your team. Do your work.

In his most provocative and practical book yet, one of the foremost thinkers of our time redefines what it means to understand the world, succeed in a profession, contribute to a fair and just society, detect nonsense, and influence others. Citing examples ranging from Hammurabi to Seneca, Antaeus the Giant to Donald Trump, Nassim Nicholas Taleb shows how the willingness to accept one's own risks is an essential attribute of heroes, saints, and flourishing people in all walks of life.

You know him as the founder of Microsoft; the philanthropic, kind-hearted billionaire who has donated endless funds to good causes around the world. But there's another side to Bill Gates. Combining rich storytelling and ground-breaking reporting, The Good Billionaire offers listeners a provocative and timely counter-narrative about one of the world's most widely recognized individuals - a true global celebrity with a truly global audience.

Confronting Our Freedom is about reframing the common practices rising from traditional thinking about management and leadership. Most management theory and practice are about the need for clear constraints to succeed in the world where we work, but this now conventional thinking about managing calls for adaptation when working remotely has become common. This book is an invitation to freedom.

Robert B. Reich makes a powerful case for the expansion of America’s moral imagination. Rooting his argument in common sense and everyday reality, he demonstrates that a common good constitutes the very essence of any society or nation. Societies, he says, undergo virtuous cycles that reinforce the common good as well as vicious cycles that undermine it, one of which America has been experiencing for the past five decades. This process can and must be reversed.

Influence Without Authority is the classic guide to getting what you need from people you don't control. Getting things done requires collaboration, and convincing others to contribute requires political skill; this book introduces the Exchange Model, in which you get what you need by offering something of value in return. The key lies in knowing what the other person values - that's their "currency", and it's your immediate tool for coaxing their cooperation. This model has been proven over decades, as organizations around the world have turned toward collaboration.