New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks, production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In Hollywood Shutdown: Production, Distribution, and Exhibition in the Time of COVID (U Texas Press, 2021), Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Hollywood. Hollywood Shutdown examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected film and television production, influenced trends in distribution, reshaped theatrical exhibition, and altered labor practices. From January movie theater closures in China to the bumpy September release of Mulan on the Disney+ streaming platform, Fortmueller probes various choices made by studios, networks, unions and guilds, distributors, and exhibitors during the evolving crisis. In seeking to explain what happened in the first nine months of 2020, this book also considers how the pandemic will transform Hollywood practices in the twenty-first century.Joel Tscherne is an Adjunct History Professor at Southern New Hampshire University. His Twitter handle is @JoelTscherne. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is former US Army general, Stanley McChrystal. A retired four-star general with 34 years of service, Stanley was the commander of all US and coalition forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. Previously, he served as commander of JSOC or the Joint Special Operations Command, overseeing the US military’s most elite units including Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. According to journalist Sean Naylor, in his Book, Relentless Strike, McChrystal was, “the general whose vision and intensity transformed JSOC into a global man-hunting machine.” His tenure included the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing infamous terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.Today Stanley is founder and CEO of the McChrystal Group, a strategic consulting firm. He is also a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. His new book is, Risk. A User’s Guide, published by Portolio in October of 2021.Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Since 2011, Kevin Rabinovich has been working in youth civic engagement, community organizing, and design thinking. He is the founding organizer of TEDxYouth@Columbia, South Carolina’s TEDxYouth event. In this episode you hear Richard interviewing Kevin, and learn how his decision to found a TEDx Youth turned a young teenager into a formidable leader. It’s a deep dive into the world of TEDx organisers, and gives an insight into how volunteering can create opportunities.Relevant links Personal Website  Dangerously Persistent TEDxYouth@Columbia TED’s TEDxYouth description TEDFest How TEDxKazimierz chooses its speakers TEDFest Pre-event This podcast was recorded in 2017 for Project Kazimierz. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee.About Richard Lucas Twitter LinkedinRichard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to David Avrin about his new book Why Customers Leave (And How to Win Them Back) (Career Press, 2019).There are three central themes to this book: immediacy (customers want instant gratification), individuality (offer flexible, customized assistance) and humanity (show interest and concern for those you are assisting). Of them, as David Avrin notes in this pleasing, semi-rant of an interview, immediacy should be the easiest for companies to act on. Unfortunately, automation is paradoxically making immediacy often harder to achieve. Other ironies worth noting from Avrin’s perspective include: companies trying to head off negative off-line reviews with surveys that don’t bring about change; and front-line employees who can figure out quicker than their managers what could and should be improved on. If upgrades don’t happen, what’s the solution? Run an exercise where employees are encouraged to formulate plans on how a competitor could undercut the company they currently work for by making the changes they detect would be beneficial. That move—or threat--would get management’s attention if nothing else will!David Avrin is a highly popular speaker and consultant on the topics of the customer experience as well as on marketing. He’s a former CEO group leader and speaker for Vistage International. This is his third book, following It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You and Visibility Marketing.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this installment of our Recall this Buck series (check out our earlier conversations with Thomas Piketty, Peter Brown and Christine Desan), John and Elizabeth talk with Daniel Souleles, anthropologist at the Copenhagen Business School and author of Songs of Profit, Songs of Loss: Private Equity, Wealth, and Inequality (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press 2019). Dan's work explores the world of private equity "guys" (who are indeed mostly guys) and the ways they are "suspended in webs of significance [they themselves have] spun" as Clifford Geertz puts it.Further, he explores the ways we are all suspended in these webs through the immense buying and managing power of private equity firms. Private equity investors buy out publicly traded companies, often through enormous debt (which is why these deals used to be called "leveraged buyouts" or LBOs), manage the companies and then sell them. They argue they are creating value by cutting fat in management; typically workers bear the brunt of the debt while executives--and the private equity firm and lawyers and others servicing the deal--receive hefty payments.Dan pulls off a tough feat in his book, helping us see the concerns and motivations of people he's working with as understandable and the people themselves as reasonable and even likeable, while also maintaining his own view of private equity as, generally speaking, a noxious force in society.We end with a discussion of the Occupy movement and how it helped to change public conversations about inequality and the power of finance (another angle on the themes we tackled in our earlier "Brahmin Left" conversations).Mentioned in this episode: Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, Barbarians at the Gates: The Fall of NJR Nabisco Karen Ho Liquidated; ethnography of Wall Street, and of "smartness" Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, (John misremembered the title as Confessions of a Stockjobber) Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991) The transcript for this episode is here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Troy is a serial entrepreneur and community activist in Baltimore, Maryland.This podcast was recorded in 2019 for Project Kazimierz.Dave is CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tools Mailstrom.co and Chuck. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” which was featured in the 2008 MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,” curated by Paola Antonelli. He uses social network data to map cities. He is also organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic in Washington, DC and is passionate about data, disinformation, elections, cities, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children. David Troy Situation Report Dave’s 53,000 strong Twitter feed Dave’s website Dave’s TED talk TEDx Midatlantic Notes from Poland Geeks on a Plane 500 Startups Be More Us Video/Campaign to End Loneliness The Chatty Cafe Scheme Alex Hoskyns – Founder of the Chatty Cafe Scheme TEDSummit 2019 The Pre -TED Summit Social Gathering Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Creating a Culture of Predictable Outcomes: How Leadership, Collaboration, and Decision-Making Drive Architecture and Construction (Routledge, 2020) demonstrates the importance of creating cultures in the design and construction industries grounded in sophisticated-caring leadership, high-performing collaborative teams, and master-level decision-making discipline, informed by values, to finally address massive inefficiencies, waste, and unpredictability.Barbara White Bryson offers specific guidance to industry stakeholders to succeed in achieving project-related predictable outcomes by focusing on culture rather than process. This includes selecting the right team members by hiring and firing bravely, valuing psychological safety, leading with values, practicing respect and transparency, fostering empowerment to make decisions at the right level at the right time, and more.This book is a must-read for design and construction professionals who want to finally understand how to set goals and meet those goals for their clients as well as for their teams.Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Assistant Professor at Alfred State College and has served as the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The key to successful dialogue starts and ends with changing the conversation. Recognizing that it takes two people to engage in meaningful outcomes, Can We Talk?: Seven Principles for Managing Difficult Conversations at Work (Kogan Page, 2021) outlines what each contributor needs to do to achieve the best possible result. Using examples from everyday work situations, this book offers guidance on how to create the right conditions for a meaningful discussion. The author identifies the seven key principles that enable both parties to gain a deeper understanding of what the other person may be thinking and will help establish their point of view more clearly: confidence, clarity, compassion, curiosity, compromise, credibility, courage.Can We Talk? includes examples and advice from those who have been there and thrived, as well as lessons learned from conversation failures and example scripts of productive conversations. Readers will learn how to prepare, start and manage the potentially challenging exchange of words that typically occur at work, and come away with an understanding that for any conversation to take place, both parties must be engaged. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I talked to Christine Kane about her book The Soul Sourced Entrepreneur: An Unconventional Success Plan for the Highly Creative, Secretly Sensitive & Wildly Ambitious (BenBella, 2020).Sick of the frequent images of entrepreneurs as machismo, take-no-prisoner, Rambo-like action figures? Look no farther than this episode, in which Christine Kane admits that bulimia was her first business mentor as she had to learn to deal with her 10-year battle with binging and purging to fit an idealistic body image that wasn’t rooted in reality. One demon conquered gave her the fortitude to, first, enter the music industry on her own terms, and then in turn help thousands of (often female) fans become entrepreneurs on their own terms by offering advice. In a phrase from Kane’s book, Soft is Hard because the “human” or soul part of business is at least as important as focusing on strategy. The soft part IS hard, and yet it allows you to stretch and grow as a person and businessperson alike. If ready for some authentic, honest perspective, Christine Kane is a natural choice.Christine Kane is the founder of Uplevel You, a multimillion-dollar business coaching company, which evolved from her 15-year career as a touring singer-songwriter with her own record label. Both businesses were built without any investors.Dan Hill, PhD, is the author of nine books and leads Sensory Logic, Inc. (https://www.sensorylogic.com). His new book is Blah, Blah, Blah: A Snarky Guide to Office Politics. To check out his related “Dan Hill’s EQ Spotlight” blog, visit https://emotionswizard.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Under Bill Carroll’s leadership, Benedictine University, in Lisle Illinois became the fastest growing university in the U.S. from 2000-12. Carroll describes how Benedictine was able to expand from 1400 to over 10,000 students and become one of the most diverse universities in the US by “adding multiple legs to the table”, with each leg being a new type of student served through a new program. These innovative initiatives include: 5 j.v. campuses in China and 3 in Vietnam, branch US campuses in Mesa, AZ and Springfield, IL, online and senior learning programs, outreach to different ethnic and religious groups, and free educational offerings and partnerships for first responders and displaced workers. He also shares his insights on the future of higher education from his unique perspective leading Hunter Global Education, that is working to foster educational partnerships between US and Asian colleges and universities. David Finegold is the president of Chatham University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices