Business / Economics

Hi there, it's Michael, the author. You might know my previous book, The Coaching Habit. It was an unexpected bestseller: more than 700,000 copies sold so far, 1,000+ 5-star reviews on Amazon (my favourite: "I have plodded through many books that wish they could be this book"), a Wall Street Journal bestseller, and used by people and organizations around the world.

So I've been sweating on the follow-up. The pressure! The anticipation! But here it is, and I think you're going to like it. If The Coaching Habit says, "here are the seven essential questions to be more coach-like," The Advice Trap is about getting to grips with how to actually change your behaviour so you stay curious a little bit longer.

It sounds like it should be easy, but it's not. You have to tame your Advice Monster, that part of you that jumps in to offer up ideas, opinions, suggestions and advice. And it's taming your Advice Monster that's at the heart of this book. But there are also some specific coaching strategies, particularly on how to focus on what matters most. There are tools to make your conversations, coaching and otherwise, irresistible. There are even resources beyond the book itself, including a one-year, free leadership program from a 52-person faculty of cool, diverse, and provocative thinkers.

In 2019, I was named the #1 Thought Leader in Coaching, and was short-listed for the coaching award by Thinkers50, the "Oscars of Management." My work's been featured in journals such as HBR, Fast Company, Forbes, and Inc., and my company, Box of Crayons, has trained more than 100,000 people just like you in the tools and mindset required for this essential leadership behaviour: being more coach-like. You'll get all of that wisdom and experience when you read The Advice Trap. I'm pretty sure you'll find it a great investment of your money and time. (And, by the way, thank you in advance for buying it. I'm thrilled to know the book is going out into the world.)

Africa's Informal Workers is a vigorous examination of the informalization and casualization of work, which is changing livelihoods in Africa and beyond.

Gathering cases from nine countries and cities across sub-Saharan Africa, and from a range of sectors, this volume goes beyond the usual focus on household 'coping strategies' and individual agency, addressing the growing number of collective organizations through which informal workers make themselves visible and articulate their demands and interests. The emerging picture is that of a highly diverse landscape of organized actors, providing grounds for tension but also opportunities for alliance. The collection examines attempts at organizing across the formal-informal work spheres, and explores the novel trend of transnational organizing by informal workers.

Part of the ground-breaking Africa Now series, Africa's Informal Workers is a timely exploration of deep, ongoing economic, political and social transformations.

The New York Times bestseller

Blinder's book deserves its likely place near the top of reading lists about the crisis. It is the best comprehensive history of the episode... A riveting tale. - Financial Times

One of our wisest and most clear-eyed economic thinkers offers a masterful narrative of the crisis and its lessons.

Many fine books on the financial crisis were first drafts of history--books written to fill the need for immediate understanding. Alan S. Blinder, esteemed Princeton professor, Wall Street Journal columnist, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, held off, taking the time to understand the crisis and to think his way through to a truly comprehensive and coherent narrative of how the worst economic crisis in postwar American history happened, what the government did to fight it, and what we can do from here--mired as we still are in its wreckage.

With bracing clarity, Blinder shows us how the U.S. financial system, which had grown far too complex for its own good--and too unregulated for the public good--experienced a perfect storm beginning in 2007. Things started unraveling when the much-chronicled housing bubble burst, but the ensuing implosion of what Blinder calls the "bond bubble" was larger and more devastating. Some people think of the financial industry as a sideshow with little relevance to the real economy--where the jobs, factories, and shops are. But finance is more like the circulatory system of the economic body: if the blood stops flowing, the body goes into cardiac arrest. When America's financial structure crumbled, the damage proved to be not only deep, but wide. It took the crisis for the world to discover, to its horror, just how truly interconnected--and fragile--the global financial system is. Some observers argue that large global forces were the major culprits of the crisis. Blinder disagrees, arguing that the problem started in the U.S. and was pushed abroad, as complex, opaque, and overrated investment products were exported to a hungry world, which was nearly poisoned by them.

The second part of the story explains how American and international government intervention kept us from a total meltdown. Many of the U.S. government's actions, particularly the Fed's, were previously unimaginable. And to an amazing--and certainly misunderstood--extent, they worked. The worst did not happen. Blinder offers clear-eyed answers to the questions still before us, even if some of the choices ahead are as divisive as they are unavoidable. After the Music Stopped is an essential history that we cannot afford to forget, because one thing history teaches is that it will happen again.

A brilliant new reading of the economic crisis--and a plan for dealing with the challenge of its aftermath--by one of our most trenchant and informed experts.
When the nation's economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street. But Robert B. Reich suggests a different reason for the meltdown, and for a perilous road ahead. He argues that the real problem is structural: it lies in the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top, and in a middle class that has had to go deeply into debt to maintain a decent standard of living.
Persuasively and straightforwardly, Reich reveals how precarious our situation still is. The last time in American history when wealth was so highly concentrated at the top--indeed, when the top 1 percent of the population was paid 23 percent of the nation's income--was in 1928, just before the Great Depression. Such a disparity leads to ever greater booms followed by ever deeper busts.
Reich's thoughtful and detailed account of where we are headed over the next decades reveals the essential truth about our economy that is driving our politics and shaping our future. With keen insight, he shows us how the middle class lacks enough purchasing power to buy what the economy can produce and has adopted coping mechanisms that have a negative impact on their quality of life; how the rich use their increasing wealth to speculate; and how an angrier politics emerges as more Americans conclude that the game is rigged for the benefit of a few. Unless this trend is reversed, the Great Recession will only be repeated.
Reich's assessment of what must be done to reverse course and ensure that prosperity is widely shared represents the path to a necessary and long-overdue transformation. "Aftershock" is a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for both restoring America's economy and rebuilding our society.

"Against the Gods," a narrative that reads like a novel, chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from the oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today. This is a richly-woven tale of Greek philosophers and Arab mathematicians, of merchants and scientists, gamblers and philosophers, world-renowned intellects and obscure but inspired amateurs who helped discover the modern methods of putting the future at the service of the present, replacing helplessness before the fates with choice and decision.

In this book, Eric Hobsbawm chronicles the events and trends that led to the triumph of private enterprise and its exponents in the years between 1848 and 1875. Along with Hobsbawm's other volumes, this book constitutes and intellectual key to the origins of the world in which we now live.
Although it pulses with great events--failed revolutions, catastrophic wars, and a global depression--The Age of Capital is most outstanding for its analyis of the trends that created the new order. With the sweep and sophistication that have made him one of our greatest historians, Hobsbawm indentifies this epoch's winners and losers, its institutions, ideologies, science, and religion.

The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called surveillance capitalism, and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.

Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new behavioral futures markets, where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new means of behavioral modification.

The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a Big Other operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled hive of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.

With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

A leading economic historian traces the evolution of American capitalism from the colonial era to the present--and argues that we've reached a turning point that will define the era ahead.

"A monumental achievement, sure to become a classic."--Zachary D. Carter, author of The Price of Peace

In this ambitious single-volume history of the United States, economic historian Jonathan Levy reveals how capitalism in America has evolved through four distinct ages and how the country's economic evolution is inseparable from the nature of American life itself. The Age of Commerce spans the colonial era through the outbreak of the Civil War, and the Age of Capital traces the lasting impact of the industrial revolution. The volatility of the Age of Capital ultimately led to the Great Depression, which sparked the Age of Control, during which the government took on a more active role in the economy, and finally, in the Age of Chaos, deregulation and the growth of the finance industry created a booming economy for some but also striking inequalities and a lack of oversight that led directly to the crash of 2008.

In Ages of American Capitalism, Levy proves that capitalism in the United States has never been just one thing. Instead, it has morphed through the country's history--and it's likely changing again right now.
"A stunning accomplishment . . . an indispensable guide to understanding American history--and what's happening in today's economy."--Christian Science Monitor

"The best one-volume history of American capitalism."--Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton