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Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society. Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation that will shape the twenty-first century. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen alike.

Matt Ridley argues that we need to see innovation as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, involving trial and error, not a matter of lonely genius. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modeled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.

Ridley derives these and other lessons from the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or failed. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertilizer, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright, and even life itself.

For fifty years, economists have been developing elegant theories or how markets facilitate innovation, create wealth, and allocate society’s resources efficiently. But what about when they fail, when they lead us to stock market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, and credit crunches?

In this updated and expanded edition of How Markets Fail, John Cassidy describes the rising influence of “utopian economies”―the thinking that is blind to how real people act and that denies the many ways an unregulated free market can bring on disaster. Combining on-the-ground reporting and clear explanations of economic theories Cassidy warns that in today’s economic crisis, following old orthodoxies isn’t just misguided―it’s downright dangerous.

You play it cool, letting your team take half days on Friday and overlooking the occasional latecomer to the office. You stand up for your people and make sure they know you’re there for them, but they still hate working for you. What gives? Well, you’re clearly screwing something up, and it’s time you find out what it is.

It’s frustrating. You’ve put in the work and finally made it to the management team, and you haven’t stopped there. You show up first and leave last. You’re there every time one of your employees needs something. To any outsider looking in, you’re killing this management thing.

But still, your employees want nothing to do with you. They scoff when you tell them what to do and suddenly get quiet when you walk into the room. You know you have to get your team behind you if you’re going to stay on the management team. Chances are it’s not about what you’re doing right–it’s about what you’re doing wrong.

How Not to Manage is filled with interviews and stories of people who were being held back by the things they didn’t realize were working against them. The workplace is a minefield filled with politics and unspoken rules. This book is here to teach you:

-How you’re screwing it up and what to do about it
-How other people screwed it up before figuring it out
-What you should stop doing immediately
-What you should be doing more of

Now, stop panicking and letting frustration hold you back. This book is the tool you need to get your team on your side and rock the manager title!