Photo Gallery: Gallery: The Best Business Books of 2012

Dec. 4, 2012

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don't

By Nate Silver
Penguin Press, $27.95
Business

Book: REP. readers deal with financial predictions every day. This book takes the reader on a tour of success and failure and offers advice on how we might all improve our forecasting skills. Forecasting in weather, politics, and baseball is one thing, and Silver makes a good case for how prediction can be made generally accurate. There is nothing mysterious about predicting the future even if it’s sometimes beyond current human ability.

Author: A well-regarded forecaster, Nate Silver is the founder of the New York Times political blog FiveThirtyEight.com.

Takeaway: The signal is the truth. The noise is what distracts us from the truth.
Steve Jobs

By Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster, $35
Biography

Book: Steve Jobs, the iconic founder of Apple, was not afraid to reveal his contradictions. He was a counterculture rebel who became a billionaire. He disdained shows of wealth, yet coveted his Gulfstream jet. He had little desire for material objects, yet designed objects that are desired by everyone else.

Author: A dying Jobs personally selected Isaacson, the biographer of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, to chronicle his life.

Takeaway: Great successes were preceded by great failures. It was tempting to underestimate Jobs, but that was a big mistake for those who did. The book documents how Jobs curated the ideas for the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and the Apple stores that are now the most productive retail spaces in the world.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

By Charles Duhigg
Random House, $28
Personal Growth

Book: Businesses that can figure out when consumers’ habits are up for grabs have a powerful competitive advantage. Target is almost scarily good at this: One father complained that Target was addressing coupons for baby products to his teenage daughter. Target apologized, but the father called back. Turns out that his teenage daughter was pregnant. Through predictive analytics, Target figured out that the purchasing decisions the pregnant girl made revealed that she was most likely in her second trimester.

Author: Charles Duhigg is an investigative reporter for the New York Times.

Takeaway: Habits are not as fixed as you might think. They can be ignored, changed, or replaced.
Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Daniel Kahneman
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30
Leadership

Book: Kahneman reveals a handful of cognitive biases—unconscious errors of reasoning that distort human judgment. The book posits two systems of decision-making. System 1 is our fast, automatic, intuitive, and largely unconscious mode. It is System 1 that allows us to effortlessly complete the phrase “bread and ______. ” System 2 is the slow, purposeful, and consciously effortful mode of reasoning about the world. It is System 2 that swings into action when we fill out a tax return. These systems, together, all explain quirks in human reasoning.

Author: The 2002 winner of the Nobel Prize in economic science, Kahneman discusses how to make choices in business and personal life and when intuition can and cannot be trusted.

Takeaway: Readers who think that people are generally rational economic players will be challenged. Many people suffer from the planning fallacy: overestimating benefits and underestimating costs.
How Will You Measure Your Life?

By Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon
Harper Business/ HarperCollins, $25.99
Inspiration

Book: Why did so many of Harvard professor Clay Christensen’s classmates turn out so unhappy or even end up jail in the case of Enron CEO Jeff Skilling? From Christensen’s answers to this question flow a number of prescriptions for happiness and advice to keep high achievers from being disrupted by their own success. The book is moving, as only a great teacher can be.

Author: Clayton Christensen is the Kim B. Clark Professor at Harvard Business School. The Innovator’s Dilemma is the best known of his seven books.

Takeaway: In an industry in which temptations to cut corners are always present, Christensen says, “It is easier to keep your standards 100 percent of the time than it is 98 percent of the time.”
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

By Michael J. Sandel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27.00
Finance

Book: There are some things money can’t buy, the MasterCard ad says. But that list is getting shorter. We are paying people to wait in lines for us. Paying our kids to get better grades. Allowing corporations to pay for the right to pollute the air. This book asks, “What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don’t honor and that money can’t buy?” Chapter two on incentives is especially useful for advisors.

Author: Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980.

Takeaway: Markets have a moral impact on the goods that are traded in them as well as on the people doing the trading.
Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All

By Bernard T. Ferrari  
Portfolio, $25.95  
Management

Book: For months, regulators told MF Global’s Jon Corzine that its capital reserves were out of balance with its risks in buying sovereign debt in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. Corzine didn’t listen, and look at his situation now. This book demonstrates that effective listening is difficult, and it offers useful tips and practices to improve our ability to do it better.

Author: Bernard Ferrari is a long-time McKinsey & Co. strategist.

Takeaway: Many problems a company confronts can be traced back to poor decision-making because someone along the chain of command wasn’t listening.
Black Fridays

By Michael Sears
Putnam Adult, $25.95
Fiction

Book: This is a novel about Jason Stafford, a Wall Street trader who takes some ethical shortcuts that lead to a two-year prison stint. You’d think an ex-con would be blackballed from the industry, but he lands a temporary gig probing the shadowy transactions of a recently deceased trader whose ethics are possibly more challenged than Stafford’s. It takes a crook to catch one, or so the high-profile investment firm believes. The neophyte sleuth uncovers a conspiracy of hidden trades and profit-skimming far larger than expected.

Author: Michael Sears knows Wall Street well, having been managing director in the bond trading and underwriting divisions of Paine Webber, and later, Jefferies & Co. He based the story on a conspiracy uncovered by the FBI, code-named Operation Wooden Nickel. This is his first novel.
Managing for People Who Hate Managing: Be a Success by Being Yourself

By Devora Zack
Berrett-Koehler, $17.95
Management

Book: Are you an accidental manager? This book lowers the stakes. It turns out that as a new leader your sole areas of responsibility are your thoughts, your words, and your actions, precisely what your areas of responsibility always were. Now you just have a bigger audience. You can’t control the actions of others. If you lead by example, your influence can make a difference. It starts by being clear about your own leadership style and the style of those you manage. For instance, if you’re giving performance feedback to a thinker, stick with facts and get to the point.

Author: Devora Zack runs a leadership development firm. Her previous book was Networking for People Who Hate Networking.

Takeaway: Less than half of new managers believe they understand how to manage. More than half say they dislike managing. If you’ve been tasked with managing others and don’t have a clue, this sharp, funny, and short book will allow you to sigh with relief and lead in your own relaxed way. Introverts can make excellent leaders.
A Year Up: How a Pioneering Program Teaches Young Adults Real Skills for Real Jobs With Real Success

By Gerald Chertavian
Viking, $26.95
Memoir

Book: There is life after Wall Street. Gerald Chertavian left a lucrative career to do something about the ever-widening opportunity divide in the United States. A Year Up, the organization he founded, combines education, mentoring to struggling kids, and social support, including health coverage. The program works with corporations to develop curricula that meet the companies’ emerging needs. It’s not all Kumbaya; Chertavian recounts the difficulties students face in rising above difficult and often heart-breaking circumstances to keep moving forward.

Takeaway: The program served more than 1,500 students in 2012 in eight cities. Eighty-five percent of graduates get jobs that earn more than $15 an hour within four months of graduation. 

John Kador’s next book (with Brian Cohen) is What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know: An Insider Reveals How to Get Funding for Your Billion Dollar Idea. (McGraw-Hill, Spring 2013).

Who says the publishing industry is dying? Over 3,000 business books, a record number, were published in 2012. It’s impossible for any reader to keep up with the announcements, much less read even a fraction of the worthiest titles. Here, then, is REP.’s list of the 10 best business books of 2012. Our recommendations include titles in leadership, management, finance, memoir, biography, and even fiction. Learn and enjoy!

Gallery: The Best Business Books of 2012

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don't

Steve Jobs

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Thinking, Fast and Slow

How Will You Measure Your Life?

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All

Black Fridays

Managing for People Who Hate Managing: Be a Success by Being Yourself

A Year Up: How a Pioneering Program Teaches Young Adults Real Skills for Real Jobs With Real Success

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Gallery: The Best Business Books of 2012

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don't

Steve Jobs

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business

Thinking, Fast and Slow

How Will You Measure Your Life?

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Power Listening: Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All

Black Fridays

Managing for People Who Hate Managing: Be a Success by Being Yourself

A Year Up: How a Pioneering Program Teaches Young Adults Real Skills for Real Jobs With Real Success

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