Business & Economics

If you want to be taken seriously, you hire McKinsey & Company. Founded in 1926, McKinsey can lay claim to the following partial list of accomplishments: its consultants have ushered in waves of structural, financial, and technological change to the nation’s best organizations; they remapped the power structure within the White House; they even revo­lutionized business schools. In The New York Times bestseller The Firm, star financial journalist Duff McDonald shows just how, in becoming an indispensable part of decision making at the highest levels, McKinsey has done nothing less than set the course of American capitalism.

But he also answers the question that’s on the mind of anyone who has ever heard the word McKinsey: Are they worth it? After all, just as McKinsey can be shown to have helped invent most of the tools of modern management, the company was also involved with a number of striking failures. Its consultants were on the scene when General Motors drove itself into the ground, and they were K-Mart’s advisers when the retailer tumbled into disarray. They played a critical role in building the bomb known as Enron.

McDonald is one of the few journalists to have not only parsed the record but also penetrated the culture of McKinsey itself. His access puts him in a unique position to demonstrate when it is worth hiring these gurus—and when they’re full of smoke.

Overcome the Never-Enough Mentality to Walk in True Abundance

Prosperity. It’s one of the most dividing words in the Church. Some pastors use it to tell their congregations that God will make them all rich, rich, rich! Others spurn the word and insist that true Christlikeness is found in forsaking all worldly riches and possessions. The truth is, neither of these extremes is fully right or fully wrong.

In his latest book, Kris Vallotton mines the Scriptures in an eye-opening study of what the Bible really says about money, poverty, riches and wealth.

In it you’ll find keys to
· overcome the never-enough mentality to experience true abundance
· break free from a poverty mindset that reaps lack in your life
· demystify biblical teaching on money so you can discover peace in your finances
· learn the difference between riches and wealth

Kingdom prosperity begins from the inside out. When you learn to cultivate a mindset of abundance, no matter your circumstances, you will begin to experience the wealth of heaven in every area of your life.

For decades, statisticians, social scientists, psychologists, and economists (among them Nobel Prize winners) have spent massive amounts of precious time thinking about whether streaks actually exist. After all, a substantial number of decisions that we make in our everyday lives are quietly rooted in this one question: If something happened before, will it happen again? Is there such a thing as being in the zone? Can someone have a “hot hand”? Or is it simply a case of seeing patterns in randomness? Or, if streaks are possible, where can they be found?

In The Hot Hand, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Cohen offers an unfailingly entertaining and provocative investigation into these questions. He begins with how a $35,000 fine and a wild night in New York revived a debate about the existence of streaks that was several generations in the making. We learn how the ability to recognize and then bet against streaks turned a business school dropout named David Booth into a billionaire, and how the subconscious nature of streak-related bias can make the difference between life and death for asylum seekers. We see how previously unrecognized streaks hidden amidst archival data helped solve one of the most haunting mysteries of the twentieth century, the disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg.

Cohen also exposes how streak-related incentives can be manipulated, from the five-syllable word that helped break arcade profit records to an arc of black paint that allowed Stephen Curry to transform from future junior high coach into the greatest three-point shooter in NBA history. Crucially, Cohen also explores why false recognition of nonexistent streaks can have cataclysmic results, particularly if you are a sugar beet farmer or the sort of gambler who likes to switch to black on the ninth spin of the roulette wheel.

Part business manual, part memoir, The Idea Is the Easy Part counters widespread myths of failure and success with lessons learned from Dovey’s decades of hands-on business experience.

Today’s renowned businessmen and entrepreneurs, like Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, and more can earn celebrity and billionaire status. Our books, movies, and TV shows seem to say that with a big idea and a jazzy elevator pitch, anyone can quickly earn funding for their own startups and achieve massive financial success. In these stories, a brilliant innovation—and the funding you’ll easily acquire—are all you need for success.

The reality, however, is vastly different. Getting funding is incredibly hard, and success depends on many factors, strategies, and decisions.

Between serving as the president of the company that developed the groundbreaking EpiPen, bringing entrepreneurship to a Fortune 500 company as president, working in venture capitalism for several decades, and being involved in the development of nearly 300 startups, Brian Dovey is well acquainted with entrepreneurship—its reality as well as its mythology. In The Idea Is the Easy Part, Dovey debunks common myths about businesses and lays out an enthusiastic but realistic guidebook for aspiring entrepreneurs guiding them with the right growth mindset to make better decisions at every stage of the entrepreneurial process.

The Idea Is the Easy Part is a reliable guide to navigating entrepreneurial waters, replacing today’s misleading notions with objective and actionable advice.