Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety

Dalton Conley

Pantheon

We found it both charming and silly that in its listing on Amazon, a text message from the author was included. As he sat watching his daughter's soccer game, he typed: "The organization man is gone, replaced by the elsewhere dad, the blackberry mom, and various other figures in our new social landscape. Or so I claim... It's up to u 2 tell me if I've struck out or connected..." Analysis of both markets and technology sends Conley down a path that can be both terrifying and eye-opening. Publishers Weekly writes, "Conley examines how technology has altered how Americans earn and spend money, playing out the behaviors characteristic of late capitalism or simply an evolving economic system that, by attaching a price to virtually everything from child rearing to dating, has helped devalue people, the work they do, and the material goods they desire."

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

Liaquat Ahamed

Penguin Press

Do you think bankers as bad guys is anything new? Remember that little thing called The Great Depression? In an interview on Amazon.com, Ahamed said, "The Great Depression was largely caused by a failure of intellectual will - the men in charge simply did not understand how the economy worked. The risk this time round is that a failure of political will leads us into an economic cataclysm." The Washington Post writes: "Ahamed's book focuses on the four men whose arrogance and obstinacy, he contends, caused the worst depression in modern times: Benjamin Strong Jr., the morphine-using, consumptive governor of the New York Federal Reserve; Montagu Norman, the spiritual seeker at the helm of the Bank of England; Emile Moreau, the xenophobic governor of the Banc de France; and Hjalmer Schacht, the president of Germany's Reichsbank, a Prussian by temperament, if not by birth, whose sensibilities led to a flirtation with the Nazis."

MBA Degree in a Box: All the Prestige for a Fraction of the Price

The editors of Mental Floss magazine

Quirk Books

Don't have the $50,000 for an MBA - how about $15? We have to admit, this is a clever and fun product, even though technically it isn't a book. According to the product description, "Now the world's #1 boxed university is expanding its curriculum to include MBA Degree in a Box, an advanced course in business education, for the low price of $14.95." It is "packed with entertaining trivia about Henry Ford, Donald Trump, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and more." The program includes Business School in 96 Pages (a comprehensive textbook), 10 Heroes of the Boardroom trading cards, a "fiendishly complicated" business-trivia final exam, and 10 CEO case study cards. And we all know how important rankings are when selecting an MBA program, so remember "MBA Degree in a Box is the perfect gift for businesspeople of all ages from the highestranked boxed business school in the world!"

The Story of Success: Five Steps to Mastering Ethics in Business

Leigh Hafrey

Other Press

If you don't already have a variety of learning pieces in place on the subject of ethics, you will. While ethics in business has become something of an industry in and of itself, this book is a pared down, realistic primer on the topic that might help you shape your own programs. Hafrey breaks the topic down into five steps necessary to create ethical practices in business. They are:

  1. Speak up, speak out: define your managerial style
  2. See the big picture: recognize the forces that affect your practice
  3. Break the rules, make the rules, absorb the costs: drive change, and know it
  4. Tell good stories: find stories that bring out the best in your people and yourself
  5. Test for truth: distinguish fact from fantasy in your storytelling.

If you follow these steps, Hafrey suggests, the term "business ethics" can become something more than an oxymoron.