Business & Economics

In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success.

In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve.

As technology has continually evolved in the last several decades, marketing has had to change with it, evolving through four significant stages that build on the strategies and tools of the previous era. What happens next in the fifth stage, or Fifth Paradigm, will not be an evolution, but a revolution. Almost everything about how marketing is done today, including the very notion of a brand itself, will require a complete re-imagination.

As Chief Marketing Officer of Mastercard—one of the world’s most recognizable and decorated brands—Raja Rajamannar shares the forward-thinking ways all businesses must rethink their entire marketing landscape to remain relevant and be successful.

Readers will:

• Understand the evolution of marketing and how to be at the forefront of future change.
• Get clarity on the right marketing strategies and tactics to pursue amidst an ever-evolving industry.
• Achieve breakthroughs in innovative thinking in order to compete in modern business.
• Gain perspective from top marketers across industries.

Quantum Marketing is for all business people who seek to understand how rapidly marketing is evolving, what some of the smartest people in the discipline are doing to get ready for this dramatic shift, and what the new world will look like for companies, consumers, and society at large as the race to develop revolutionary marketing strategies reaches a whole new level.

Why do some businesses thrive while many more struggle? In this age of disruption, a key reason is the failure of many leaders to realign all the moving parts of their enterprise, including its business strategy and how it is organised, to best support its enduring purpose. Thousands of enterprises globally are operating below their potential simply because they are not well aligned or fail to realign to reflect the new realities of their changing business environment. This book aims to change that.

This book is about strategic realignment, a leadership process to overcome disruption and secure high performance on a sustainable basis. Given that change is a constant and disruption to the business environment ever more likely, strategic realignment must become a core competency in order that all enterprises and leaders can succeed in the future. Most executives recognise this but lack a robust system of thought to execute strategic realignment effectively and realise its full benefits. But once mastered, strategic realignment offers a means of turning disruption into an advantage.

In Re:Align, Jonathan Trevor provides a blueprint to help leaders ask good questions, have better conversations and make the best possible choices to realign their enterprise to be fit for purpose. Drawing upon active research at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School (with contributions from the joint works of Dr Jonathan Trevor and Dr Barry Varcoe), the book also provides practical case studies and evidence-based insights. Re:Align offers both a thoughtful and compelling message as well as an effective toolkit to help leaders everywhere to overcome disruption and improve enterprise performance.

From trade to technology to military might, competition between the United States and China dominates the foreign policy landscape. But this battle for global influence is also playing out in a strange and unexpected arena: the movies.

The film industry, Wall Street Journal reporter Erich Schwartzel explains, is the latest battleground in the tense and complex rivalry between these two world powers. In recent decades, as China has grown into a giant of the international economy, it has become a crucial source of revenue for the American film industry. Hollywood studios are now bending over backward to make movies that will appeal to China’s citizens—and gain approval from severe Communist Party censors. At the same time, and with America’s unwitting help, China has built its own film industry into an essential arm of its plan to export its national agenda to the rest of the world. The competition between these two movie businesses is a Cold War for this century, a clash that determines whether democratic or authoritarian values will be broadcast most powerfully around the world.

Red Carpet is packed with memorable characters who have—knowingly or otherwise—played key roles in this tangled industry web: not only A-list stars like Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie, and Richard Gere but also eccentric Chinese billionaires, zany expatriate filmmakers, and starlets who disappear from public life without explanation or trace. Schwartzel combines original reporting, political history, and show-biz intrigue in an exhilarating tour of global entertainment, from propaganda film sets in Beijing to the boardrooms of Hollywood studios to the living rooms in Kenya where families decide whether to watch an American or Chinese movie. Alarming, occasionally absurd, and wildly entertaining, Red Carpet will not only alter the way we watch movies but also offer essential new perspective on the power struggle of this century.