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?

It’s one thing to have a great idea—but it’s an entirely different thing to actually bring that idea to life. Consultant Adrienne Bellehumeur’s purposeful practices are your key to capturing our collective brains’ bounty—and to pull the most power from even the simplest of actions.

In The 24-Hour Rule and Other Secrets for Smarter Organizations, Bellehumeur draws on the fields of productivity, knowledge management, and design thinking to form what will soon become your and your team’s greatest work superpower. At the heart of Bellehumeur’s six-steps of Dynamic Documentation is the “24-Hour Rule,” a reminder that actionable items—like to-dos, deadlines, feedback, and observations—need to be written down and shared with others. Without embracing documentation—and other memorable secrets like “The Skill Stack Solution” and “The Groundhog Trap,”—our greatest plans and hoped-for solutions will easily slide into oblivion.

Contrary to conventional wisdom about what makes a good negotiator – namely, being aggressive and unemotional – in Bring Yourself, Taheripour offers a radically different perspective. In her own life, and in her nearly 20 years of experience teaching negotiation, she’s found that the best negotiators are empathetic, curious, and present. The essence of bargaining isn’t the transaction, but the conversation and human connection. It is when we bring our whole, authentic selves to the table that we can advocate for ourselves fearlessly and find creative solutions that benefit everyone.

Taheripour has seen the power of this mindset shift firsthand. In her consulting, her classes at Wharton, and in her work teaching negotiation for the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program, her students and clients experience personal breakthroughs as they face the fears and false narratives that held them back. Bring Yourself explains how our pressure points, personal experience, and even our cultural expectations can become roadblocks to finding common ground, and it offers essential strategies to move beyond them and open our minds. Taheripour argues that regardless of our own perceived ability to negotiate, we must have the courage to engage because bargaining plays a crucial role in every aspect of our lives. We negotiate boundaries with our parents and partners, bedtimes with our kids, and even with ourselves every time we make a pros and cons list to weigh a major decision. Negotiation is how we problem solve and how we find our voice.

With eye-opening and empowering stories throughout, Bring Yourself helps readers gain the confidence they need to achieve their goals in work and in life. Timely and provocative, this paradigm-shifting book can transform our world and the way we work together.

Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York’s skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.

These are wonderful stories. But most of the time big visions turn into nightmares. Remember Boston’s “Big Dig”? Almost every sizeable city in the world has such a fiasco in its backyard. In fact, no less than 92% of megaprojects come in over budget or over schedule, or both. The cost of California’s high-speed rail project soared from $33 billion to $100 billon—and won’t even go where promised. More modest endeavors, whether launching a small business, organizing a conference, or just finishing a work project on time, also commonly fail. Why?

Understanding what distinguishes the triumphs from the failures has been the life’s work of Oxford professor Bent Flyvbjerg, dubbed “the world’s leading megaproject expert.” In How Big Things Get Done, he identifies the errors in judgment and decision-making that lead projects, both big and small, to fail, and the research-based principles that will make you succeed with yours