New Books: Business & Fashion Merchandising

Strong behavioral competencies are essential for any manager today. Emphasizing a self-directed learning approach, this book is designed to transform passive learners into active learners by helping develop behavioral skills based on individual needs. By providing the reader with the tools for self-directed learning, Deb Cohen provides an unending mechanism to learn, improve, and grow, helping develop the proficiencies needed to be successful in doing their job or advancing in their career. With features such as practical examples, worksheets, tables, and figures, the book is packed full of self-directed learning activities.

For the first time in history, ordinary people around the world have the ability to create, distribute, and consume content instantly, from anywhere, using connected devices. In a transformed world where customers shape their own experience, what is the key to breaking through and motivating them to buy? It is context--the close linkage between an individual's immediate desires and the experiences a brand creates to fulfill them. Drawing on new research and new insights into current consumer psychology, Sweezey defines the five key elements of context.

This is the first anthology of fashion criticism, a growing field that has been too long overlooked. Fashion Criticism aims to redress the balance, claiming a place for writing on fashion alongside other more well-established areas of criticism on popular culture. Exploring the history of fashion criticism, this essential work takes us from the so-called 'women's section' of 19th century newspapers to the work of Bill Cunningham in The New York Times, and from early Vogue features to the multi-media platform work of SHOWstudio.

Every company wants to grow, and the most proven way is through innovation. The conventional wisdom is that only disruptive, nimble startups can innovate; once a business gets bigger and more complex corporate arteriosclerosis sets in. Gary Pisano's remarkable research conducted over three decades, and his extraordinary on-the ground experience with big companies and fast-growing ones that have moved beyond the start-up stage, provides new thinking about how the scale of bigger companies can be leveraged for advantage in innovation.

More than ever before, people in their twenties and thirties need help getting their financial lives in order. And who could blame them? These so-called millennials have come of age in the wake of the worst economic crisis in memory, and are now trying to get by in its aftermath. They owe record levels of student loan debt, face sky-high rents, and struggle to live on a budget in an uncertain economy. It's time for them to get a financial life. In this completely revised and updated edition, Kobliner shares brand-new insights and concrete, actionable advice geared to help a new generation of readers form healthy financial habits that will last a lifetime.

Scott addresses the systemic exclusion of women from the world financial order. She argues on the strength of hard data and on-the-ground experience that removing those barriers to women's success is a win for everyone, regardless of gender. Myriad economic injustices have constrained women throughout the world, and Scott takes us from the streets of Accra, where sex trafficking is widespread, to American business schools, where women are routinely patronized, to show that the pervasiveness of the Double X Economy is glaringly obvious. Readers are urged to join the global movement for women's economic empowerment.

Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors-which lives on in full force to this day. So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections.

Listening is critical in today's organizations. As recent examples in the #MeToo era and numerous organizational failures and scandals illustrate, the consequences of poor listening in organizations can be significant, and in some cases, catastrophic. Listening is commonly described in terms of ethics, overlooking its strategic value. The book guides leaders and decision-makers to question the listening habits, practices, and infrastructure within their organizations. The author lays out an argument for the benefits and challenges of strategic listening. In order to improve organizational listening, we need to design organizations to listen.

Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who -- in the troubled years after King's assassination -- believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined--but few people know much about Koch Industries. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He's a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies have made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there's another side to this story.