Best business books of 2022

Disclaimer We'd like to advise that the following program may contain real news, occasional philosophy, and ideas that may offend some listeners.

Kai So it's that time of year again, the holidays are upon us.

Sandra Yes, we're starting to panic about buying Christmas presents, and, as always on our list, buying people books.

Kai Yeah, best business books.

Sandra So every year, the two of us sit down and look at all the lists that people put out, whether this is Bill Gates and Barack Obama or whether it's the Financial Times...

Kai Guardian, CEO Magazine, there's various...

Sandra New York Times, everyone puts out...

Kai Amazon, Amazon, they do books, I hear.

Sandra So we've done it again, this year, had a look at all the lists, lots of new books. And as always, we're distilling these lists for your entertainment and holiday shopping peace of mind.

Intro From The University of Sydney Business School, this is Sydney Business Insights, an initiative that explores the future of business. And you're listening to The Future This Week, where Sandra Peter and Kai Riemer sit down every week to rethink trends in technology and business.

Sandra So when we started doing these book lists a few years ago, and we were looking at all the, you know, the Economist, and McKinsey and Financial Times lists, and the New York Times list, we realised they all fall in neatly into these categories, things like 'self-help' with the subcategory of 'corporate self-help'...

Kai Yeah. So those books that give this all-important advice to all of us in business, to workers and managers, to leaders, those hard and fast rules by which we should live our lives to be more successful, have more purpose, be happier, to organise better.

Sandra Then there's always a category of books on 'unicorns'. And over the years, we've seen this 'unicorn' category come back, again and again.

Kai Yeah, this is your, you know, Facebooks and Amazons. This is the kind of book where you read about one very successful, unique company and you wonder, 'how does this generalise to the rest of us?'

Sandra Then there's the toxic stuff, misbehaviour, illegal stuff, fraud, and then there's Schadenfreude. These are books about misadventure, and really laying it all out.

Kai Yeah, revelling in failure, basically, last year, our main entry here was Adam Neumann, and the failure of WeWork, and that says it all about this category.

Sandra

Then there's always 'Silicon Valley Kool Aid', something that will revolutionise everything.

Kai The exponential disruption that will really blow your minds.

Sandra There's entries in that category again. And then there are the categories in which there's always very few books, things like 'tech broccoli', or in this case, 'socio-tech broccoli'.

Kai Yeah, or you know, kale, for that matter. These are books about tech that make an actual useful, healthy point.

Sandra And for that matter, here's where the climate books come in. For a couple of years there, we were actually seeing no climate books on the best books of the year.

Kai And that has changed, fortunately, a little bit. So we have a few books in that category that are well worth reading.

Sandra And then there's the pandemic books for the last couple of years, that new category, everything different because pandemic.

Kai Stuff we learn from the pandemic, for the post-pandemic times.

Sandra So let's start with self-help.

Kai Which is again, as every year, a big category.

Sandra The biggest category.

Kai As always.

Sandra But there is a bit of a difference this year, because usually in this self-help category, there's a lot of books where...

Kai We have those books again. Typically there are a lot of books that talk about, you know, how leaders should listen, how empathy is important in business, and other truisms.

Sandra Yes, I think last year we had, you know, small is preferred to large, and action is preferred to inertia, and...

Kai Red tape is really bad.

Sandra Red tape is really bad, yes. Treat your workers well.

Kai And to be fair, we have a few of those again, and they always come with interesting titles. Alliteration, such as 'See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success.'

Sandra Or 'Influence is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen.'

Kai So, both of those counters from the CEO Today list.

Sandra But this year, there's a couple of books that we should mention that are breakthroughs in this category.

Kai They're almost self-help broccoli, if you want.

Sandra One of them’s been on the New York Times Best 100 Books of the Year, on the Amazon Best Books and also the Amazon Editor's Choices. They've also named the Best Science Book of the Year, so far, and you know, it is November, so...

Kai It's a book by Johann Hari, and it's called 'Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again.'

Sandra Probably a book that most, most of us can, um...

Kai Relate to?

Sandra Probably a book that most of us can...

Kai You lost focus there? Did you check your email, just then?

Sandra Well, it's around the - I looked at my phone - it's around the science and the consequences of us losing our attention span. This idea that we're always being interrupted by our devices.

Kai They call it the 'death scroll' for a reason.

Sandra

This idea that we spend most of our working day and our spare time in this constant state of distraction, multitasking, being unable to focus, moving from one app to the other, or from one screen to the other, always being distracted by something, whether that's your phone or social media or something on TV, and really struggling to prioritise or figure out what's important, and also struggling to live in the moment.

Kai So this is a book that I will probably read, and can we suggest that we get this as a paper version, not as an eBook to read on your device.

Sandra So something to share maybe with family or even teams at work or colleagues and something that can make maybe a positive impact on our lives. As might the other notable entry on the self-help list, 'The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward' by Daniel Pink.

Kai And Daniel Pink, is a regular on the New York Times bestseller list and many other lists. And this was an entry on a couple of lists - both the Financial Times and CEO Today, feature this one.

Sandra Daniel Pink's book tackles regret and tries to recast this idea of regret that we normally think of as a negative emotion, as you know, wallowing in our past mistakes.

Kai Or this idea of 'no regret' mindsets.

Sandra He's trying to recast regret as a positive emotion and one that allows us to look at the past and use it to help make more informed decisions or live a more fulfilled life. And it draws on things like neuroscience and biology and social psychology to try to debunk, as you said, the 'no regrets' mindset and make regret a positive thing.

Kai So moving on to the subcategory of corporate self-help. This is not for us as individuals, but for organisations, for leaders, for managers of companies, helpful books from which we can learn about particular ways of running your business.

Sandra A book that's been on quite a few lists, like the Financial Times lists the CEO Today list, by Daniel gross and Tyler Cowen, 'Talent'.

Kai Again, one-word titles are still a thing this year.

Sandra They're still a thing in the corporate self-help book, the one-word titles, but 'Talent' will help you if you want to get better at identifying people who might be underrated, brilliant sets of skills that might give your organisation an edge, this idea of maybe finding undiscovered talent that you can draw on.

Kai And what works for 'Talent' also works for customers, the one-word title book 'Converted', with the subtitle, 'The Data Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts', a book by Neil Hoyne, who is Google's Chief Measurement Strategist, and introduces the reader to ways in which companies can find their most valuable customers, to then develop relationships with them, to grow your business from the customer side.

Sandra And maybe one left field mentioned in this category, which is 'Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect', which is a book by Will Guidara, the book's on the Wall Street Journal list. But it's not your normal business book, but a book about restaurants in particular, about 11 Madison Park's rise to fame. This is still one of the best restaurants in the world, but it charts its rise from being you know, 50th in the top 50, to making it to the top of that list, to being the best restaurant in the world.

Kai And he also tells a lot of stories about how perfection is at the heart of, you know, making your way to the top of your business category. So the idea that we can take away something from the hospitality industry and learn about excellence, to transfer this into management more broadly.

Sandra And that brings us to what is basically a subcategory of the corporate self-help, which are the pandemic books that we've had every year and again, this year, they're all concentrated around the office and rethinking work. Two mentions on this list. One would be 'Redesigning Work'. So if you're thinking about transforming organisations and making hybrid work work for you. This is Professor Lynda Gratton's book from the London Business School. On the Financial Times list, on the MIT Sloan Management Review list. She has a hard look at how you create and how do you manage hybrid and flexible work post-pandemic. And the book draws on real world examples, looks at companies from HSBC to Fujitsu to various places to think about bringing practical steps towards rethinking how we work in our organisation.

Kai And what I like about the book is that she takes unashamedly a bottom-up approach, she says that changes like these have to take people along. You can push through post pandemic work changes towards hybrid top-down. But she also gives some really interesting advice. I like her distinction between sound and silence. This rhythm of work where you have to, you know, do loud work in a group, you have to socialise, you have to do all these things. And then silence where you need to disconnect and focus on certain tasks, and that as a structuring mechanism for how you organise this. I think it's quite practical.

Sandra And it's also kind of a good futures book, because the role of the manager or the role of the leader in it is cast as someone who needs to make sense of future conditions for their organisation and for employees and needs to paint a picture in which people can see themselves working in that space or working in that organisation or fitting into that future.

Kai There's a few more books in this category. Yes, one by Julia Hobsbawm, which is called 'The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future', very much in that same category, trying to make sense of what the role of the office is in this brave new hybrid work world, going forward.

Sandra Okay, let's tackle the biggest category this year, before we get to the good stuff...

Kai We have the toxic stuff.

Sandra We have the toxic stuff. And by far, this has been the biggest category of books we've seen in 2022, and on top of all the lists, whether that's the Financial Times, or the New York Times Notable Books or the Amazon Top Business Books, The Washington Post ones...

Kai So with the economy turning sour, and recessions looming, it seems like either there are more books being published of this ilk, or the lists have just gone a bit darker, so to match the mood, there's a lot of books that feature investigative journalism, on all kinds of wrongdoing.

Sandra So in this category books like 'Butler to the World' by Oliver Bullough, books like 'Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick.'

Kai The subtitle almost says it all.

Sandra Pretty much, David McSwain looks at how various people and health care companies and traders and contractors and so on, exploited the COVID-19 pandemic to basically make money for themselves at the expense of people suffering.

Kai There is 'Flying Blind' by Peter Robertson. This is the fall of Boeing. It takes the 737-MAX crisis that we featured on the podcast before, but really goes all the way back to when Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas as a company, and the ethos that McDonnell brought into the company took over, and shareholder value took precedent over safety and the rigorous development of the technology that goes into the planes, which then is charted to have led to this catastrophe. So really unpacking the dark side of how capitalism turns an engineering company into a shareholder value darling.

Sandra In the exact same vein from The Washington Post's list, 'The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change'. This is looking at how oil companies were studying climate science back in the 1970s. And how executives both invested in that research but were briefed and advised on how to respond to that. And instead, the fossil fuel industry took a different direction and did not engage with fighting climate change, but rather fighting the science on climate change.

Kai So really, what unites all these books is the tension between, you know, capitalism and individual financial greed, and the public good, be that in public health with the pandemic, be that in safety in air travel, climate response, or the next book 'Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It', a book that is on the FT Economics Books list, which really talks about the tension between insurance companies wanting to make money by only insuring people who really don't need insurance, and then in the process, destroying the insurance system as a public good for everyone, where many people now find themselves excluded because they have uninsurable risks.

Sandra But on this list, we have to mention the New York Times investigative journalists' book. This is Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, who wrote a lengthy exposé on McKinsey, of all companies. The book is titled 'When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm'. And the book tries to unpack how global consulting firms go about advising corporations and governments, and what the impact is when trying to balance short term incentives and corporate profits and longer-term considerations around employees or climate.

Kai So this book has a different take on the tension between capitalism and public good by unpacking one of the mechanisms that really often leads companies to prioritise short term profits over the public good, or the welfare of employees or other stakeholders. So that's probably one that I'll put on my reading list for the holidays.

Sandra Our next category, somewhat linked to toxic stuff, as always Schadenfreude.

Kai Stories about corporate failure. And the first entry, aptly named 'Power Failure' by William D. Cohen, a book about General Electric, the rise and fall of one of the big industrial giants in the world.

Sandra And also 'The Bond King: How One Man Made a Market, Built an Empire, and Then Lost It All', by Mary Childs, who is also host of the podcast Planet Money - a story of how Bill Gross turned the bond market to his advantage, made it a game of high risk, high reward, then kind of lost it all.

Kai So again, the rise and fall Schadenfreude stories about companies or people who fail.

Sandra Speaking of companies or people who might fail...

Kai Silicon Valley?

Sandra Silicon Valley Kool Aid, as always, the exponential disruption, the revolution that will revolutionise everything, and first mentioned on this list, of course, the Metaverse.

Kai The Metaverse.

Sandra It has to be the Metaverse on the Amazon Business Books, on the CEO Today Business Books, 'The Metaverse and How it Will Revolutionise Everything.'

Kai Like completely everything, the next internet. It's going to go big, and it will of course be the breakthrough.

Sandra In case you haven't heard about the Metaverse, yet.

Kai A virtual reality.

Sandra It is here.

Kai It's a thing.

Sandra It's a thing, it will reshape society, it will reshape everything

Kai I would put my goggles on. And then there's two books about startups pretty much which you know, very fitting to Silicon Valley gives us the Kool Aid about how to run, how to start your startup.

Sandra 'Hangry: A Startup Journey' by Mike Evans on the Wall Street Journal list, this is looking at the delivery service GrubHub. And also on this list, 'How to...'

Kai And Megan you need to beep this.

Sandra 'How to F*** Up Your Startup:'...

Kai 'The Science Behind Why 90% of Companies Fail, and How You Can Avoid It'. Again, the subtitle says it all.

Sandra This is how to become a 29-year-old multimillionaire, and then two years later lose it all.

Kai Well, we should have put that in the Schadenfreude category...

Sandra No, ‘cause he gets to rebuild his fortune after founding more successful companies.

Kai Excellent.

Sandra And speaking of Silicon Valley, there's always, always a category on these lists of Top Business Books. That is, the unicorn books. These are the big company...

Kai Success stories.

Sandra Yeah, where you're left trying to figure out how that exactly applies to...

Kai They're good reads generally but you know the 'so what?' is somewhat left hanging.

Sandra But this year, there has been an interesting change because for the first time they seem to be not clustered in Silicon Valley, because the first entry on this list is 'Influence Empire' by Lulu Chen. And this is a fascinating story about Tencent.

Kai Tencent, the Chinese tech giant, which has given the world the mega platform WeChat.

Sandra Among many other things, because Tencent is also the world's largest company in terms of video games.

Kai They own a large share in Epic Games, for example, the Fortnite developer.

Sandra Yeah, but also like Blizzard and Ubisoft and many other companies. I think Tencent has about 800 big companies that it's an investor in, and of course WeChat which is the communications platform for not only China but much of Asia.

Kai And many Asian experts in Western countries really. So, probably the most interesting entry in this category, but we should mention 'Inside Vanguard: Leadership Secrets From the Company that Continues to Rewrite the Rules of the Investing Business', by Charles Ellis, and Vanguard, being one of the big funds management companies.

Sandra That is $8 trillion worth of assets on behalf of something like 30 million investors.

Kai And 'Like, Comment, Subscribe'...

Sandra Not only to our podcast, but also as a book entry on the unicorns list. 'Like, Comment, Subscribe: How YouTube Conquered the World.' So there is a Silicon Valley entrant here.

Kai Ah, I was getting worried. But really, we should move on to the broccoli.

Sandra To the broccoli. Yes, the socio-tech broccoli, in this case. There's always a tech broccoli book, a book that might not look as exciting to begin with but provides some real insight into how we understand the tech world. And in this case, going beyond the tech world, understanding things like the datafication of human interactions, what corporations do with data, the first entrant would be 'Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires'. This is Douglas Rushkoff's new book on the Amazon Best Business Books. But it looks at everything from, you know, missions to Mars to island bunkers in New Zealand, the Metaverse, looking at what the rich and powerful choose to invest in.

Kai And also, 'Slouching Towards Utopia' by Bradford DeLonge on the Financial Times list.

Sandra And on the Financial Times Economics list, this is one I think I'm gonna try and read over the holidays. DeLonge looks at explosion of technology and material wealth and how our lives have transformed from the 1870s onwards, where, you know, there are all these predictions about us being freed from poverty and the need to work long hours. But paradoxically, this has led to more inequality in the world, to things like global warming, to people being unhappy with the status quo, and he tries to unpack why that is. So this could be a really interesting read.

Kai Which brings us to the category that in the past was often neglected, but has now fortunately, grown quite a bit, which is books around climate response, climate change, books that have a decidedly business angle around this topic. The first entry to mention is 'Nomad Century' by Gaia Vince, from the Financial Times list, a book that takes a decidedly optimistic view of climate migration and gives a whole lot of examples where countries have found ways to deal with migration in positive ways using the entrepreneurial spirit of climate migrants.

Sandra And that entrepreneurial spirit was actually captured in quite a few books this year. So toxic books have been big, but entrepreneurial books have also been big and speaking on entrepreneurs, maybe an honourable mention here to '25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs', which was on the Financial Times list. This is a book by Andrew Leon Hanna, that looks at entrepreneurs coming from refugee communities and looks at a number of different people.

Kai It actually complements 'Nomad Century' in quite interesting ways.

Sandra Yeah, it shows how this entrepreneurial spirit can thrive in this most challenging of environments.

Kai And so the world will need to find those ways to mitigate the fallout from the looming climate crisis. Which brings us to an important honourable mention, a book that is coming out of our own School here, 'Organising Responses to Climate Change: The Politics of Mitigation, Adaptation and Suffering', by our very own Professor Chris Wright, and his co-authors Daniel Nyberg and Vanessa Bowden. And we will put in the show notes our episode from two weeks ago, where I had the pleasure of interviewing Chris. And the book is really an attempt to find different narratives and show how we need a systemic change in the ways in which we think about the economy, if we want to not only deal with the fallout from climate change, but also slow down its impacts.

Sandra And the list of climate books would not be complete without mentioning one of the really big books on climate change from this year. This is also on the McKinsey Best Books list, 'How to Avoid a Climate Disaster' by Bill Gates, 'The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need'. So how to avoid a climate disaster, addressing what is probably the most fundamental question of our time.

Kai And this book really looks at what technology, innovation, new ideas, entrepreneurship have to offer in finding solutions and breakthroughs to this looming problem, and I want to pick this as my most important read for the holidays.

Sandra I'd second that because it's really a good read in that it makes thinking about climate and the future accessible in a way that's easily understood by a wide audience. It's a riveting read, and a really important read.

Kai And I realise that brings us almost to the end of the podcast.

Sandra ‘Cause you've made your pick. I can't pick the same one.

Kai No, but you need to give us your pick as your read for the holidays.

Sandra Look, I'll probably pick a book that's not quite a business book, but it will be a business book. This is Walter Isaacson's biography. We've had his book on Steve Jobs previously...

Kai Which is still a good read...

Sandra Which is still a fantastic read. But this time around he profiles Jennifer Doudna, and...

Kai And we're big fans.

Sandra And we're really big fans. The book is called 'Code Breaker'. And it's fantastic in looking at and thinking about the gene editing revolution. Jennifer Doudna, of course, with Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered genetic scissors...

Kai CRISPR.

Sandra CRISPR, a way that allows scientists to chop up small bits of DNA with incredible precision.

Kai Gene editing new forms of medicine.

Sandra For which they won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. And CRISPR has the potential and has already revolutionised the way scientists think about changing human genomes and altering human genomes in beneficial ways. Repairing mutations, fighting terrible diseases, finding vaccines...

Kai And not only that, it can fundamentally transform fields such as agriculture.

Sandra Improving not only health but improving nutrition.

Kai So in a way, one of those breakthrough technologies that Bill Gates is talking about when he calls for technology as a solution to mitigate the climate disaster.

Sandra Which is why my pick will be 'The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race' - a biography of Jennifer Doudna, but a much broader scope than that in what the book manages to achieve. So I think also an important read.

Kai Okay, happy reading. That is all we have time for today.

Sandra Happy shopping for the holidays. You've got a lot of options now.

Kai Thanks for listening.

Sandra Thanks for listening.

Outro You've been listening to The Future, This Week from The University of Sydney Business School. Sandra Peter is the Director of Sydney Business Insights, and Kai Riemer is Professor of Information Technology and Organisation. Connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and WeChat, and follow, like, or leave us a rating wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any weird or wonderful topics for us to discuss, send them to sbi@sydney.edu.au.