Business & Economics

Congratulations, new leader! You’ve joined the ranks during an exceptionally complicated time.

Our current workplace climate is fraught with political divisions, economic disparities, and ever-shifting social dynamics. Leaders are managing remote teams across larger geographic distances and facing new roadblocks to onboarding, giving performance feedback, and nurturing healthy relationships.

Leadership Two Words at a Time speaks directly to the plight of the new leader and is divided into three parts: Leading Yourself, Leading People, and Leading Work. Rather than overintellectualize the practice, Bill Treasurer breaks up the concept into essential and understandable learning nuggets—summed up by two-word headers—that provide the practical guidance and support that leaders often don’t get. The result is time-tested wisdom that new leaders can grasp immediately and implement easily—and, with a little practice, master completely. Consider it a personal leadership playbook.

This book gives you the basic building blocks to gain both competence and confidence, take on greater responsibility, and learn what it takes to be and stay a leader.

With increased pressure from digital natives, now is the time for established companies to address outdated and antiquated practices in order to respond quickly to the ever-increasing speed of market changes.

The pace of change in business today is such that it is becoming easier to go from a legendarily high-performing company to liquidation in a short period of time. Getting to Nimble shares the stories of organizations that were able to successfully transform their people practices, processes, technology, ecosystems and strategy for the digital era. The book also covers once dominant companies like Circuit City and Kodak that neglected to change and were impaired or died as a result.

Highlighting a framework to follow along with best practices that others can emulate, Getting to Nimble includes case studies from major organizations such as Capital One, FedEx, CarMax, The Washington Post, Domino’s Pizza, Walmart and the country of Estonia.

Innovations rarely come from “experts.” Elon Musk was not an “electric car person” before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension, the world.

In The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby has parlayed unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time—the key figures at Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Benchmark, and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as Chinese partnerships such as Qiming and Capital Today—into a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis that unfurls the history of tech incubation, in the Valley and ultimately worldwide. We learn the unvarnished truth, often for the first time, about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in Valley history, from the comedy of errors at the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber.

VCs’ relentless search for grand slams brews an obsession with the ideal of the lone entrepreneur-genius, and companies seen as potential “unicorns” are given intoxicating amounts of power, with sometimes disastrous results. On a more systemic level, the need to make outsized bets on unproven talent reinforces bias, with women and minorities still represented at woefully low levels. This does not just have social justice implications: as Mallaby relates, China’s homegrown VC sector, having learned at the Valley’s feet, is exploding and now has more women VC luminaries than America has ever had. Still, Silicon Valley VC remains the top incubator of business innovation anywhere—it is not where ideas come from so much as where they go to become the products and companies that create the future. By taking us so deeply into the VCs’ game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.