Here are the Amazon’s “Editors’ Picks” of the best business and investing books of 2009.
1. The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street
by Justin Fox. Time magazine’s editor-at-large leads readers on a chronological journey of modern economic theory, featuring the cast of scholars who constructed the 20th- and 21st-century financial landscape, from Irving Fisher to such post-WWII figures as Milton Friedman, Harry Markowitz, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, Jack Treynor and William Sharpe. He offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at academia’s finest, complete with amusing anecdotes about the players and their theories, and illustrates how our economic behaviors and markets have been shaped by a gradually refined theory holding that the stock market prices are both random and perfectly rational.
2. Fool’s Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe
by Gillian Tet. Drawing on exclusive access to J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and a tightly bonded team of bankers known on Wall Street as the “Morgan Mafia,” as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of other key players, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Tett brings to life in gripping detail how the Morgan team’s bold ideas for a whole new kind of financial alchemy helped to ignite a revolution in banking, and how that revolution escalated wildly out of control.
3. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
by Matthew B. Crawford. Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls manual competence, the ability to work with one’s hands. According to the author, our alienation from how our possessions are made and how they work takes many forms: the decline of shop class, the design of goods whose workings cannot be accessed by users (such as recent Mercedes models built without oil dipsticks) and the general disdain with which we regard the trades in our emerging information economy.
4. How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way
by Tom Smith. Workplace accountability experts and authors of The Oz Principle: Getting Results through Individual and Organizational Accountability
tackle the next crucial step everyone can take, whether as a manager, supervisor, CEO, or individual performer: creating greater accountability in all the people on whom you depend.
5. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher. The author of The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions (P.S.)
and Working on God (Modern Library Paperbacks)
couples personal ruminations and interviews with experts to explore the role of attention in defining consciousness, identity and the human experience: “who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love-is the sum of what you focus on.”
6. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic
by David Wessel. A look at Ben Bernanke’s response to the financial meltdown.
7. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
by Chris Brogan. Two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brand’s influence, reputation, and profits.
8. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller. Akerlof and Shiller reassert the necessity of an active government role in economic policymaking by recovering the idea of animal spirits, a term John Maynard Keynes used to describe the gloom and despondence that led to the Great Depression and the changing psychology that accompanied recovery. Like Keynes, Akerlof and Shiller know that managing these animal spirits requires the steady hand of government–simply allowing markets to work won’t do it. In rebuilding the case for a more robust, behaviorally informed Keynesianism, they detail the most pervasive effects of animal spirits in contemporary economic life–such as confidence, fear, bad faith, corruption, a concern for fairness, and the stories we tell ourselves about our economic fortunes–and show how Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and the rational expectations revolution failed to account for the.
9. SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good
by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. The Harvard Business School professor offers insights on corporate competitiveness in this timely and captivating assessment of what it takes to succeed in the face of rapid technological, cultural and economic change.
10. Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
by Hugh MacLeod. The author of the blog Gaping Voidm , which draws 1.5 million visitors a month, and the ebook, How to Be Creative, which has been downloaded more than a million times, expands his thoughts about unleashing creativity in a world that often thwarts it.
