New Books: Business & Fashion Merchandising

Everyone knows YouTube. Across the world, people watch over a billion hours of video on the website every day. And yet virtually no one knows how YouTube works. This book explains how YouTube's technology and business evolved, how it works, and how it helped Google grow to unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who created YouTube and the Google engineers and chiefs who took it over. It's the story of an industry run amok, and of how corporate greed resulted in the unraveling of truth, the spread of violence, and the corruption of the Internet, all for the sake of profit.

For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity--cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits--as a means to regain solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they've had devastating effects on social and economic welfare. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: what if solvency was never really the goal? The Capital Order traces the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital--and indeed capitalism--in times of social upheaval from below.

Americans have long been skeptical of corporations, and that skepticism has only grown more intense in recent years. Meanwhile, corporations continue to amass wealth and power at a dizzying rate, recklessly pursuing profit while leaving society to sort out the costs. For Profit argues that the story of the corporation didn't have to come to this. Throughout history, corporations have been purpose-built to benefit the societies that surrounded them. Corporations enabled everything from the construction of ancient Rome's roads and aqueducts to the artistic flourishing of the Renaissance to the rise of the middle class in the twentieth century.

Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything--from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market--runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. As Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity.

For its first 200 years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. However, outcomes have changed dramatically in the past 50 years. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has grown. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system. In this bracing yet constructive book, Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: we have treated the economy as a machine for which the pursuit of ever-greater efficiency is considered an inherently good thing. But it has become too much of a good thing.

A sweeping, lively, and highly approachable history of American business from the nation's founding to the 21st century. Major themes include the nation's business beginnings in land and real estate, the pivotal place of financial institutions from the nation's earliest days, America's emergence as an industrial powerhouse, the dominance of its railways, automobiles, and other transportation companies, and the role of government.

This concise volume evaluates the cause and significance of recent corporate failures and financial scandals, and how they reflect on the fitness for purpose of the external auditors, financial reports, financial watchdogs, boards, directors and senior management. Revealing the shortcomings in audit quality, independence, choice and the growing expectation gap, Financial Failures and Scandals questions if the profession, its regulators or government watchdogs, are adequately prepared for the challenges of inevitable future financial failures.

Economists are the guardians of the world's economies and financial systems. The applications of economic theory can alleviate poverty, reduce disease, and promote sustainability. However, economic interventions, including those that are deemed successful, also cause harm. The Tragic Science says what economists have too long ignored: that economists do great harm even as they aspire to do good. DeMartino's argument is that economic harm is complicated, and economists aren't equipped by their professional training to understand the causes and implications of the harm its practice induces.

As a Cambridge philosopher and economist, John Maynard Keynes spent his days moving between government service and academia. When he was called up to the Treasury on the eve of World War I, he relished an opportunity to save the empire. With the disastrous Versailles Treaty, with its harsh demands for German reparations, Keynes saw how the strain on its citizens might encourage would-be authoritarians. In a career that spanned two world wars and a global depression, Keynes argued against ideas he saw as outdated or dangerous. His influential ideas made it to America and FDR's New Deal in the Great Depression.

To thrive in a world driven by data and powered by algorithms, we must develop a digital mindset. This book introduces three approaches - Collaboration, Computation, and Change - that you need for a digital mindset and the perspectives and actions within each approach that will enable you to develop the digital skills you need. With a digital mindset, you can ask the right questions, make smart decisions, and appreciate new possibilities for a digital future. Leaders who adopt these approaches will be able to develop their organization's talent to prepare their company for successful and continued digital transformation.