Sarah Frier is a journalist and she’s gone deep into what happened after Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. This site has an archive of more than one thousand interviews, or five thousand book recommendations. Obviously, they’re working within a US system but, from the outside, a lot of the policy prescriptions that even candidates that are supposedly left-of-centre come up with look rather pallid. The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven KotlerA gazillion books ponder the social and economic effects of disruptors like AI, virtual reality, 3-D printing, blockchain, robotics, and digital biology. Maybe it’s not quite fair to talk about waves these days, but we may be subject to a wave of rather bad Covid-19 books before we get to the good one. We’ve started using Instagram. by Jill Lepore As you say, in being a book about corporate culture, it’s squarely in the traditional business book genre. The Financial Times and McKinsey & Co. have named Sarah Frier’s No Filter as the winner of its 16th annual Business Book of the Year award. Do you ever compare current practices to themselves? He is also the author of Ruskinland: How John Ruskin Shapes Our World. Is she trying to be funny? Ed Luce—our Washington-based commentator, who has himself written books about the state of the US—reviewed the book for us. She’s very positive about purpose-driven capitalism, but she’s also clear-eyed enough to spot where things have gone wrong, where some of the well-meaning efforts by companies decline into cynicism and scepticism and don’t work. So the robots are going to take our jobs? No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, by Sarah FrierJournalist Frier landed interviews with Instagram's founders, executives, and competitors to chronicle the company's meteoric growth as it hooked the world on visual storytelling, followed by its sale to and rocky relationship with Facebook. In Always Day One he explains how such companies maintain a constant state of urgency and reinvention to avoid stasis and irrelevancy. Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever. Best Business Books 2020: Marketing by Tony Case One theme emerging from the crisis has been an erosion between what is public and what is private, between what is properly the concern of the social sector and what responsibility is held by business. Yes, though I think there are elements in the policy part of the book that don’t look big enough, given the scale of the problems that they describe. 8 min read. There was another CEO- written book: Winning Now, Winning Later: How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term by David Cote, who used to be the CEO of Honeywell. #MeToo in the Corporate World: Power, Privilege, and the Path Forward, by Sylvia Ann HewlettFor decades Hewlett, an economist, has illuminated the practices and power structures obstructing women in the workplace. What I liked about it was, first of all, that if you’re a serving CEO or executive writing a book about your company, it’s quite a high bar to cross because there’s a very strong tendency towards self-congratulation: you tend to gloss over the errors and big-up the successes. “I like to think that we’ve stretched the genre”. Read. Yes, whenever a big oil company claims to be very environmentally friendly I get extremely suspicious. She looks, for example, at the way the German economy was rebuilt after the Second World War, and the forced collaboration between employers, government and trade unions. Now, obviously he didn’t crush it completely, because Instagram is still going and we’re all using it. With the presidential election this year, this is a book that’s been taken up very strongly as one of the data points, if you like, for explaining what’s going on behind the extraordinary divisiveness and inequality in the United States. This book fits in the category of ‘very important economics books’, which the FT prize has identified and brought out right from the start. Also: Marquee users like Anna Wintour and Kris Jenner discuss how they craft their personal brands. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Essentially the process works in two ways. Well, the title is hyperbole, it’s not a world without work. Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, by Stefan ThomkeThirty years ago Peter Senge encouraged companies to become learning organizations. What I expect will happen in 2021 is that somebody will write the equivalent of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book, Too Big to Fail, which was a minute-by-minute account of the financial crisis. Business Books The 6 Best Business Books of 2020 That's according to the shortlist for the Financial Times and McKinsey's annual prize. It’s also quite interesting on the different personalities. “Once you’ve got the best team in place…then you can start to trust them with this no rules corporate culture”. It makes you feel there’s something specific to focus and work on. I suppose a question mark raised when we reviewed the book was just how important all this is, whether we’ll look back and think of this as a little blip in cultural history or whether this is an important moment, where Facebook takes out Instagram and perhaps stifles something that might have developed in a different way. This is Reimagining Capitalism by Rebecca Henderson, who is a professor at Harvard Business School. Comments. For example: try delivering information ("I'll start again at 11 a.m.") instead of instruction ("Be back by 11 a.m.). Amazon also announced the top 10 books across all categories and genres that have already published in 2020. There’s the top-down, ‘What books are out there that are making a buzz?’ Those would tend to be books that have already been published by the closing date for entries, June 30th. New Business Books You Need to Read in 2020. Andrew Hill is Management Editor of the Financial Times and organiser of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. It’s very successful in lots of ways. Share. That over-cautiousness, in turn, narrows the pipeline to the C-suite, where we need diversity to end this crap once and for all. Though I help organize the judging I’m not one of the judges and, slightly to my surprise, both those books were knocked out at the longlist stage. This book was written before the pandemic, but its relevance has become greater since. They’ve done a lot of digging into the data for rising suicide rates and deaths from drugs overdoses and alcohol abuse —the ‘deaths of despair’ of the title—and how and why those have gone up. It’s a great story of the feuds of Silicon Valley, I suppose. So I’m expecting there’ll be some books of that sort. “We may be subject to a wave of rather bad Covid-19 books before we get to the good one”. As well as having a dialogue, the book also has a progression: it shows you that you can’t do the most radical bits of the radical culture if you haven’t already done the first steps. In the book, epidemic preparedness is one of the case studies that she picked. Yes, normally you’d find business books in a specific section in the bookshop or online. 6 Tell me about it and why it’s good. I set it up for the book that I published last year, which was nothing to do with the Financial Times. 5 It’s essentially a book about some of the human economic pain that lay behind Trump’s success. No Filter's publisher promises previously unreported dramatic details of Kevin Systrom's and Mike Krieger's departures from the company they spawned. Those traditions have helped keep German factories running during the pandemic. There’s a bit in the book where the chief executive, who is an academic focusing on social networks, foresees the data-mad and near-totalitarian 21st century that he was instrumental in helping to create. A lot of the solutions that she puts out—the cooperation and collaboration between government, business and communities—work for the crisis we’re going through now, as well as the crisis that she was mainly writing about at the time. Big names tackle big subjects (see Michael Porter on politics and Sylvia Ann Hewlett on #MeToo). Also, I don’t think there’s much in their policy prescriptions that looks at the cultural elements that seem to me, as a non-economist, to be so important when you’re looking at the mudslinging that’s been going on between the two halves of the US political environment. If your New Year's resolutions include "leadership--get better at it," publishers in 2020 have some refreshingly non-theoretical offerings: one about word choice and one that's a kind of lead-as-you-go field manual. You’ll remember that Instagram was a funky photography app with hardly any staff and Facebook paid a billion dollars for it, which shocked everyone at the time. But will it ultimately hoist that country to world domination? It’s economic history-focused, but it’s very much written for the lay person. Were you saying the Netflix culture can’t be replicated? It's not possible to read them all, but the best business books … So it’s got lots of uses. Today, I'd like to bring you my TOP 10 PICKS out of all the books I read in Last Year. I wouldn’t say she’s neutral. What Jill Lepore has done here is unearthed a company that most people had forgotten about. As is often the case, we may have to wait a while for the book that tells us how the world of work has been affected or what is going to happen, because we’re still living through this. A bit like If Then and No Rules Rules, it’s another book about corporate cultures. I quite liked that book, but it didn’t get through to the shortlist. Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. 2020 has been a crazy year and it’s understandable if reading business books has slipped down your priority list. It’s US-specific analysis, but one that has wider implications for the way in which we think about economic and cultural divisions around the world. With 2020 being the year that it was, many have turned to non-fiction, business-related books as a means of staying productive with the extra time during the pandemic. No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram By Elana Dure. What’s this book about? Sarah Frier has gone heavily on the side of the story that is told by Instagram’s co-founder, Kevin Systrom. It is an attempt to shape and direct policy and insert that into the presidential campaigns. We publish at least two new interviews per week. Best books of 2020: Sport. Here are the three you need to crush 2020. Before we get to the books that made the 2020 shortlist, can you give me a general sense what the Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award is about? An interview environmentally friendly I get extremely suspicious a book about corporate cultures FBI 's counterintelligence behavioral program... Josh Tetrick, who are both economists at Princeton stasis and irrelevancy rosamund has! Buy or is she seriously going to take Our jobs baby out with the Financial Times and McKinsey 's prize... “ I like the way they pin the blame firmly on the different personalities ’ t it. The entrepreneur inside of you Sylvia Ann Hewlett on # MeToo ) the.... 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