The best business books of the year

Happy Christmas! What did Santa leave in your stocking this year? If it was only more socks, then here are some suggestions for books you can buy yourself to while away the holidays and spark fresh ideas for the New Year.

Janesville by Amy Goldstein

This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its factory stills – but it’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, she shows the consequences of one of America’s biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it’s so hard in the twenty-first century to re-create a healthy, prosperous working class.

Adaptive Markets by Andrew Lo

Economists still can’t agree on whether investors and markets are rational and efficient, as modern financial theory assumes, or irrational and inefficient, as behavioral economists believe—and as financial bubbles, crashes, and crises suggest. This is one of the biggest debates in economics and the value or futility of investment management and financial regulation hang on the outcome. In the groundbreaking book Adaptive Markets, Andrew Lo cuts through this debate with a new framework, the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, in which rationality and irrationality coexist.

Drawing on psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and other fields, Adaptive Markets shows that the theory of market efficiency isn’t wrong but merely incomplete. When markets are unstable, investors react instinctively, creating inefficiencies for others to exploit. Lo’s new paradigm explains how financial evolution shapes behavior and markets at the speed of thought—a fact revealed by swings between stability and crisis, profit and loss, and innovation and regulation.

A fascinating intellectual journey filled with compelling stories, Adaptive Markets starts with the origins of market efficiency and its failures, turns to the foundations of investor behavior, and concludes with practical implications—including how hedge funds have become the Galápagos Islands of finance, what really happened in the 2008 meltdown, and how we might avoid future crises.

Reset by Ellen Pao

In 2015, Ellen K. Pao sued a powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm, calling out workplace discrimination and retaliation against women and other underrepresented groups. Her suit rocked the tech world—and exposed its toxic culture and its homogeneity. Her message overcame negative PR attacks that took aim at her professional conduct and her personal life, and she won widespread public support—Time hailed her as “the face of change.” Though Pao lost her suit, she revolutionized the conversation at tech offices, in the media, and around the world. In Reset, she tells her full story for the first time.

The daughter of immigrants, Pao was taught that through hard work she could achieve her dreams. She earned multiple Ivy League degrees, worked at top startups, and in 2005 was recruited by Kleiner Perkins, arguably the world’s leading venture capital firm at the time. In many ways, she did everything right, and yet she and other women and people of color were excluded from success—cut out of decisive meetings and email discussions, uninvited to CEO dinners and lavish networking trips, and had their work undercut or appropriated by male executives. It was time for a system reset.

After Kleiner, Pao became CEO of reddit, where she took forceful action to change the status quo for the company and its product. She banned revenge porn and unauthorized nude photos—an action other large media sites later followed—and shut down parts of reddit over online harassment. She and seven other women tech leaders formed Project Include, an award-winning nonprofit for accelerating diversity and inclusion in tech. In her book, Pao shines a light on troubling issues that plague today’s workplace and lays out practical, inspiring, and achievable goals for a better future.

The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel

Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality?

To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.

Ever since humans began to farm, herd livestock, and pass on their assets to future generations, economic inequality has been a defining feature of civilization. Over thousands of years, only violent events have significantly lessened inequality. The “Four Horsemen” of leveling – mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues – have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich.

Scheidel identifies and examines these processes, from the crises of the earliest civilizations to the cataclysmic world wars and communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Today, the violence that reduced inequality in the past seems to have diminished, and that is a good thing. But it casts serious doubt on the prospects for a more equal future.

An essential contribution to the debate about inequality, The Great Leveler provides important new insights about why inequality is so persistent – and why it is unlikely to decline anytime soon.

The One Device by Brian Merchant

Odds are that as you read this, an iPhone is within reach. But before Steve Jobs introduced us to ‘the one device’, as he called it, a mobile phone was merely what you used to make calls on the go.

How did the iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable company ever? Veteran technology journalist Brian Merchant reveals the inside story you won’t hear from Cupertino – based on his exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors and developers who guided every stage of the iPhone’s creation.

This deep dive takes you from inside 1 Infinite Loop to nineteenth-century France to WWII America, from the driest place on earth to a Kenyan pit of toxic e-waste, and even deep inside Shenzhen’s notorious ‘suicide factories’. It’s a first-hand look at how the cutting-edge tech that makes the world work – touch screens, motion trackers and even AI – made its way into our pockets.

The One Device is a road map for design and engineering genius, an anthropology of the modern age and an unprecedented view into one of the most secretive companies in history. This is the untold account, ten years in the making, of the device that changed everything.

The Spider Network by David Enrich

The Spider Network is the almost-unbelievable and darkly entertaining inside account of the Libor scandal – one of history’s biggest, farthest-reaching scams to hit Wall Street since the global financial crisis, written by the only journalist with access to Tom Hayes before he was imprisoned for 14 years.

Revealing never-before-seen details into the inner-workings and private lives of those involved, and with ramifications that reach across the British establishment – from the Labour Party to the Bank of England – The Spider Network is a gripping, thriller-esque story with a host of unusual characters and financial excess that will draw comparisons to bestsellers The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short, but with its roots in Canary Wharf.

A culmination of years of investigative journalism by David Enrich, using emails, text messages and his secret relationship with Tom Hayes – a brilliant but troubled mathematician with Asperger’s syndrome – The Spider Network follows Tom and a group of British bankers as they stumble on a way to manipulate the obscure number responsible for the interest rates of trillions in loans worldwide.

Featuring a mismatched cast – including a prickly French trader ‘Gollum’, a broker nicknamed ‘Abbo’ who likes to publicly strip naked when drinking, a nervous former Kazakh chicken farmer known as ‘Derka Derka’, and a karaoke-loving executive who falsely claimed to be a member of 1990s pop group Ocean Colour Scene – this group generated incredible riches. Then it all unravelled in spectacularly vicious, backstabbing fashion.

With unparalleled access to key characters and evidence, The Spider Network is not only a rollicking account of the scandal, but also a provocative examination of a financial system that was crooked throughout, the consequences of which are still rippling through the world today.

Black Edge by Sheelah Kolhatkar

The rise over the last two decades of a powerful new class of billionaire financiers marks a singular shift in the American economic and political landscape. Their vast reserves of concentrated wealth have allowed a small group of big winners to write their own rules of capitalism and public policy. How did we get here?

Through meticulous reporting and powerful storytelling, New Yorker staff writer Sheelah Kolhatkar shows how Steve Cohen became one of the richest and most influential figures in finance—and what happened when the Justice Department put him in its crosshairs.

Cohen and his fellow pioneers of the hedge fund industry didn’t lay railroads, build factories, or invent new technologies. Rather, they made their billions through speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than wrong—and for this they have gained not only extreme personal wealth but formidable influence throughout society. Hedge funds now manage nearly $3 trillion in assets, and competition between them is so fierce that traders will do whatever they can to get an edge.

Cohen was one of the industry’s greatest success stories. He mastered poker in high school, went off to Wharton, and in 1992 launched SAC Capital, which he built into a $15 billion empire, almost entirely on the basis of his wizardlike stock trading. He cultivated an air of mystery, reclusiveness, and extreme excess, building a 35,000 square foot mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut, and amassing one of the largest private art collections in the world. On Wall Street, Cohen was revered as a genius.

That image was shattered when SAC became the target of a sprawling, seven-year government investigation. Labeled by prosecutors as a “magnet for market cheaters” whose culture encouraged the relentless hunt for “edge”—and even “black edge,” or inside information—SAC was ultimately indicted in connection with a vast insider trading scheme, even as Cohen himself was never charged.

Black Edge offers a revelatory look at the gray zone in which so much of Wall Street functions, and a window into the transformation of the U.S. economy. It’s a riveting, true-life legal thriller that takes readers inside the government’s pursuit of Cohen and his employees, and raises urgent questions about the power and wealth of those who sit at the pinnacle of modern Wall Street.

Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

Economics is broken. It has failed to predict, let alone prevent, financial crises that have shaken the foundations of our societies. Its outdated theories have permitted a world in which extreme poverty persists while the wealth of the super-rich grows year on year. And its blind spots have led to policies that are degrading the living world on a scale that threatens all of our futures.

Can it be fixed? In Doughnut Economics, Oxford academic Kate Raworth identifies seven critical ways in which mainstream economics has led us astray, and sets out a roadmap for bringing humanity into a sweet spot that meets the needs of all within the means of the planet. En route, she deconstructs the character of ‘rational economic man’ and explains what really makes us tick.

She reveals how an obsession with equilibrium has left economists helpless when facing the boom and bust of the real-world economy. She highlights the dangers of ignoring the role of energy and nature’s resources – and the far-reaching implications for economic growth when we take them into account. And in the process, she creates a new, cutting-edge economic model that is fit for the 21st century – one in which a doughnut-shaped compass points the way to human progress.

Ambitious, radical and rigorously argued, Doughnut Economics promises to reframe and redraw the future of economics for a new generation.

Economics for the Common Good by Jean Tirole

When Jean Tirole won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, he suddenly found himself being stopped in the street by complete strangers and asked to comment on issues of the day, no matter how distant from his own areas of research. His transformation from academic economist to public intellectual prompted him to reflect further on the role economists and their discipline play in society. The result is Economics for the Common Good, a passionate manifesto for a world in which economics, far from being a “dismal science,” is a positive force for the common good.

Economists are rewarded for writing technical papers in scholarly journals, not joining in public debates. But Tirole says we urgently need economists to engage with the many challenges facing society, helping to identify our key objectives and the tools needed to meet them.

To show how economics can help us realize the common good, Tirole shares his insights on a broad array of questions affecting our everyday lives and the future of our society, including global warming, unemployment, the post-2008 global financial order, the euro crisis, the digital revolution, innovation, and the proper balance between the free market and regulation.

Grave New World by Stephen D. King

A controversial look at the end of globalization and what it means for prosperity, peace, and the global economic order.

Globalization, long considered the best route to economic prosperity, is not inevitable. An approach built on the principles of free trade and, since the 1980s, open capital markets, is beginning to fracture. With disappointing growth rates across the Western world, nations are no longer willing to sacrifice national interests for global growth; nor are their leaders able—or willing—to sell the idea of pursuing a global agenda of prosperity to their citizens.

Combining historical analysis with current affairs, economist Stephen D. King provides a provocative and engaging account of why globalization is being rejected, what a world ruled by rival states with conflicting aims might look like, and how the pursuit of nationalist agendas could result in a race to the bottom.

King argues that a rejection of globalization and a return to “autarky” will risk economic and political conflict, and he uses lessons from history to gauge how best to avoid the worst possible outcomes.

Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw and Jill Tracie Nichols

Microsoft’s CEO tells the inside story of the company’s continuing transformation, while tracing his own journey from a childhood in India to leading some of the most significant changes of the digital era and offering his vision for the coming wave of intelligent technologies.

Hit Refresh is about individual change, the transformation happening inside Microsoft, and the arrival of the most exciting and disruptive wave of technology humankind has experienced – including artificial intelligence, mixed reality, and quantum computing. It examines how people, organisations, and societies can and must transform, how they must ‘hit refresh’ in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, and continued relevance and renewal. Yet at its core, it’s about humans and how one of our essential qualities – empathy – will become ever more valuable in a world where technological advancement will alter the status quo as never before.

In addition to his thoughts on these stunning scientific leaps, Satya Nadella discusses his fascinating childhood before immigrating to the U.S. and how he learned to lead along the way. He then shares his meditations as sitting CEO – one who is mostly unknown following the brainy Bill Gates and energetic Steve Ballmer. He explains how the company rediscovered its soul – transforming everything from its culture to its business partnerships to the fiercely competitive landscape of the industry itself.

Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin

Google. Amazon. Facebook. The modern world is defined by vast digital monopolies turning ever-larger profits. But it didn’t have to be this way.

In Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin, a fifty year veteran of the entertainment industry, offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life was shaped around the libertarian values of entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Larry Page. Their unprecedented growth came at the heavy cost of tolerating piracy of books, music and film, while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users.

It is the story of a massive reallocation of revenue, in which $50 billion a year has moved from artists, creators and owners of content to the monopoly platforms. With this reallocation of money comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political influence on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma.

And if you think that’s got nothing to do with you, the next step for these companies is to come after your jobs.

Move Fast and Break Things is a call to arms; to say enough is enough and to demand that we do everything we can to fight the power of these tech giants. It’s a book that combines the righteous activism of No Logo, the outrageous antiheroes of The Big Short, and the dystopian sci-fi of Dave Eggers’ The Circle – except this is no novel. This our new reality.

Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman

To understand the twenty-first century, you need to understand that the planet’s three largest forces— Moore’s law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)—are accelerating all at once. These accelerations are transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.

Why is this happening? As Friedman shows, the exponential increase in computing power defined by Moore’s law has a lot to do with it. The year 2007 was a major inflection point: the release of the iPhone, together with advances in silicon chips, software, storage, sensors, and networking, created a new technology platform. Friedman calls this platform “the supernova”—for it is an extraordinary release of energy that is reshaping everything from how we hail a taxi to the fate of nations to our most intimate relationships. It is creating vast new opportunities for individuals and small groups to save the world—or to destroy it.

Thank You for Being Late is a work of contemporary history that serves as a field manual for how to write and think about this era of accelerations. It’s also an argument for “being late”—for pausing to appreciate this amazing historical epoch we’re passing through and to reflect on its possibilities and dangers. To amplify this point, Friedman revisits his Minnesota hometown in his moving concluding chapters; there, he explores how communities can create a “topsoil of trust” to anchor their increasingly diverse and digital populations.

With his trademark vitality, wit, and optimism, Friedman shows that we can overcome the multiple stresses of an age of accelerations—if we slow down, if we dare to be late and use the time to reimagine work, politics, and community.

The Driver in the Driverless Car by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever

This book teaches readers to evaluate the potential impact of any new technology by asking three simple questions. According to Vivek Wadhwa, it is up to everyone to choose how technology moves forward. Will our future be Star Wars or Mad Max? If we simply let change happen, we may give our vote to the dark side, which will steal our privacy and control everything by default. A computer beats the reigning human champion of Go, a game harder than chess. Another is composing classical music. Labs are creating life-forms from synthetic DNA. A doctor designs an artificial trachea, uses a 3D printer to produce it, and implants it and saves a child’s life.

Astonishing technological advances like these are arriving in increasing numbers. Scholar and entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa uses this book to alert us to dozens of them and raise important questions about what they may mean for us.

Breakthroughs such as personalized genomics, self-driving vehicles, drones, and artificial intelligence could make our lives healthier, safer, and easier. But the same technologies raise the specter of a frightening, alienating future: eugenics, a jobless economy, complete loss of privacy, and ever-worsening economic inequality. As Wadhwa puts it, our choices will determine if our future is Star Trek or Mad Max.

Wadhwa offers us three questions to ask about every emerging technology: Does it have the potential to benefit everyone equally? What are its risks and rewards? And does it promote autonomy or dependence? Looking at a broad array of advances in this light, he emphasizes that the future is up to us to create— that even if our hands are not on the wheel, we will decide the driverless car’s destination.

The Wisdom of Finance by Mihir Desai

‘Finance is shrouded in mystery for outsiders, while many insiders are uneasy with the disrepute of their profession. How can finance become more accessible and also recover its nobility?’

Finance is an essential part of modern life – we see it everywhere, from our retirement assets to our investments in housing and education. And yet for most of us it seems as mysterious and alien as the world of astrophysics or medicine – and a good deal less attractive. Shrouded in greed and complexity and populated by the likes of Jordan Belfort and Gordon Gekko aren’t markets in general, and finance in particular, a crass domain that we have to shelter ourselves from in order to live a good life?

Actually, no. In this book Harvard Business School Professor Mihir Desai takes up the cause of restoring humanity to finance. With deft wit, he draws upon a rich knowledge of literature, film, history, and philosophy to explain finance’s inner workings. Through this creative approach, he shows that outsiders can easily access the underlying ideas and insiders can reacquaint themselves with the core values of their profession.

This combination of finance and the humanities creates unusual and illuminating pairings: Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are guides to risk management; Jeff Koons becomes an advocate of leverage; and Mel Brooks’ The Producers teaches us about fiduciary responsibility. In Desai’s vision, the principles of finance also provide answers to critical questions in our lives: bankruptcy teaches us how to react to failure, the lessons of mergers apply to marriages, and the Capital Asset Pricing Model demonstrates the true value of relationships.

Wild Ride by Adam Lashinsky

The inside story of Uber, the multi-billion dollar disruptor that has revolutionised the transportation industry around the world. Uber is one of the most fascinating and controversial businesses in the new economy in which capitalism is pursued without capital. It’s both beloved for its elegant ride-hailing concept and heady growth, and condemned for CEO Travis Kalanick’s ruthless pursuit of success at all cost.

In Wild Ride, Adam Lashinsky, veteran Fortune writer and author of Inside Apple, traces the story of Uber’s meteoric rise: from its murky origins to its plans for expansion into radically different industries. The company has already poached entire departments from top research universities in a push to build the first self-driving car and possibly replace the very drivers it’s worked so hard to recruit.

With access to current and former employees, as well as CEO Travis Kalanick, this book will be the first to unlock Uber’s vault. It’s a story that start-up founders, business executives, tech-savvy readers, and drivers and riders will find riveting.