Business & Economics

The world’s most powerful CEOs never saw it coming. In 2018, after a decade-long bull market, the CEO of American Airlines declared, “I don’t think we’re ever going to lose money again.” The U.S. entered March 2020 riding an eleven-year economic high, with unemployment at record lows, the Dow Jones flirting with 30,000, and the good times certain to continue. By the end of the month, ten million people were out of work, iconic firms were begging for bailouts, and countless small businesses were in freefall. Slick consulting teams and country-club connections were suddenly of little use: CEOs were fumbling in the dark, tossing out long-term strategy and making decisions on the fly that, they hoped, might just save them.

In Crash Landing, Liz Hoffman shows how the pandemic set the economy on fire—but if you look closely, the tinder was already there. After 2008, corporate leaders had embraced cheap debt and growth at all costs. Wages went stagnant. Millions were pushed into the gig economy. Companies crammed workers into offices, and airlines did the same with planes. Wall Street cheered on this relentless march toward efficiency, overlooking its collateral damage.

Based on access to an astonishing array of business titans, Crash Landing is Liz Hoffman’s account of the most remarkable year in modern economic history. She takes readers into the beating heart of the twenty-first-century economy, revealing how the pandemic exposed its pressure points. Bankruptcies decimate retail. Banking and pharma rivals team up. Bleeding cash, airlines like Delta weigh safety against survival. An untested White House fumbles for the 2008 playbook. There’s Goldman Sachs’s David Solomon blindsided by a virus in the middle of a high-stakes reinvention; American Airlines’s Doug Parker, shuttling between K Street and the White House, determined to secure a multi-billion-dollar bailout; and Ford’s Jim Hackett, gambling on the switch from cars to ventilators.

In Crash Landing, Hoffman probes the pandemic’s implications for the future of work, corporate leadership, and capitalism itself, asking: Will this remarkable time give rise to newfound resilience, or become just another costly mistake to be forgotten?

An essential guide to equip the next generation of founders with the mindset and tools they need to take the leap to become globally successful entrepreneurs.

Featuring a foreword by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, this fascinating handbook inspires potential founders and provides essential guidance and advice for people who want to create their own start-up and build a successful company. This book answers the question “how do I get started?” It takes the reader from making the decision to plunge into entrepreneurship, through the process of choosing and developing an idea and team, all the way to raising capital and working with VCs and angel investors.

Alice Bentinck and Matt Clifford are the co-founders of Entrepreneur First (EF). Over the last decade, they have worked with thousands of ambitious individuals across the world, supporting them to become founders. Those individuals have now built companies worth billions of dollars that are taking on some of the world’s biggest challenges, including finding hard-to-spot cancers, tackling climate change and building new financial platforms. In How to Be a Founder, the authors share advice, insights and lessons from their decade of experience working with individuals to become successful founders. The book covers what you need to do today to start your journey as a founder and the steps to take to maximise your chances of building a high-growth, scalable company. You’ll also hear advice from some of the world’s best investors and entrepreneurs who have built some of most iconic technology companies of our time.

Few of us put lives at risk in our daily work as surgeons and pilots do, but we all have a strong interest in avoiding predictable and preventable errors. So why don’t we all embrace the aviation approach to failure rather than the health-care approach? As Matthew Syed shows in this eye-opening book, the answer is rooted in human psychology and organizational culture.

Syed argues that the most important determinant of success in any field is an acknowledgment of failure and a willingness to engage with it. Yet most of us are stuck in a relationship with failure that impedes progress, halts innovation, and damages our careers and personal lives. We rarely acknowledge or learn from failure—even though we often claim the opposite. We think we have 20/20 hindsight, but our vision is usually fuzzy.

Syed draws on a wide range of sources—from anthropology and psychology to history and complexity theory—to explore the subtle but predictable patterns of human error and our defensive responses to error. He also shares fascinating stories of individuals and organizations that have successfully embraced a black box approach to improvement, such as David Beckham, the Mercedes F1 team, and Dropbox.