GCMC Summer 2012 Reading List

Each summer, the GCMC creates an engaging summer reading list of novels, blogs or articles published within the last year. Let us know how you would rate these works and send in your review to be posted in one of our upcoming issues!

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

In Private Empire, Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobil’s annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than almost any other corporation. Yet despite its outsized influence, it is a black box… read more

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

From the bestselling author of Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis' investigation of bubbles beyond our shores is so brilliantly, sadly hilarious that it leads the American reader to a comfortable complacency: oh, those foolish foreigners. But when he turns a merciless eye on California and Washington, DC, we see that the narrative is a trap baited with humor, and we understand the reckoning that awaits the greatest and greediest of debtor nations… read more   

The Baseline Scenario (economics blog) by James Kwak and Simon Johnson

Required reading for anyone interested in the current sorry state of our economy.  Johnson, a professor at M.I.T Sloan School of Management was the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.  Kwak, once a consultant for McKinsey, holds a Ph.D. in history form U.C. Berkeley and J.D. from Yale Law School which he pursued after founding a successful software company.  They are co-authors of 13 Bankers:  The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown… read more

Grow by Jim Stengel

Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500… read more

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation… read more

The Art of the Sale by Philip Delves Broughton

When Philip Delves Broughton went to Harvard Business School, an experience he wrote about in his New York Times bestseller Ahead of the Curve, he was baffled to find that sales was not on the curriculum. Why not, he wondered? Sales plays a part in everything we do—not just in clinching a deal but in convincing people of an argument, getting a job, attracting a mate, or getting a child to eat his broccoli. Well, he thought; he’d just have to assemble his own master class in the art of selling. And so he did, setting out on a remarkable pilgrimage to find the world’s great wizards of sales… read more  

Collaborate or Perish! by William Bratton and Zachary Tumin

In Collaborate or Perish!, former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner William Bratton and Harvard Kennedy School’s Zachary Tumin lay out a field-tested playbook for collaborating across the boundaries of our networked world. Today, when everyone is connected, collaboration is the game changer. Agencies and firms, citizens and groups who can collaborate, Bratton and Tumin argue, will thrive in the networked world; those who can’t are doomed to perish… read more

Freedom’s Forge by Arthur Herman

In Freedom’s Forge, bestselling author Arthur Herman takes us back to that time, revealing how two extraordinary American businessmen—automobile magnate William Knudsen and shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser—helped corral, cajole, and inspire business leaders across the country to mobilize the “arsenal of democracy” that propelled the Allies to victory in World War II… read more