2020.1.20 New Arrivals

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

AUTHOR : Ben Horowitz (Author), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Foreword)

PUBLISHER : Harper Business

Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times best-selling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times.

In “What You Do Is Who You Are,” he turns his attention to a crucial question: How do you create and sustain the culture you want?

To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or 30 hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake.

“What You Do Is Who You Are” explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture building: the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the samurai, who ruled Japan for 700 years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture.

Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, Hillary Clinton, how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonald’s, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications.

“What You Do Is Who You Are” is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: Who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted?

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China

AUTHOR : Jung Chang

PUBLISHER : Jonathan Cape

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history.

Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the “Father of China” Sun Yat-sen and rose to be Mao’s vice chair.

Little Sister, May-ling, became Madame Chiang Kai-shek, first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China and a major political figure in her own right.

Big Sister, Ei-ling, became Chiang’s unofficial main adviser - and one of China’s richest women.

All three enjoyed tremendous privilege but also endured constant danger.

They showed courage and experienced love, as well as heartbreak. They remained close emotionally, even when they embraced opposing political camps, and Ching-ling dedicated herself to destroying her sisters’ worlds.

“Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister” is a gripping story of love, war, intrigue, bravery, glamour and betrayal, which takes us on a sweeping journey from Canton to Hawaii to New York City, from exiles’ quarters in Japan and Berlin to secret meeting rooms in Moscow, and from the compounds of the Communist elite in Beijing to the corridors of power in democratic Taiwan. In a group biography that is by turns intimate and epic, Jung Chang reveals the lives of three extraordinary women who helped shape 20th-century China.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

AUTHOR : Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo

PUBLISHER : Penguin

Why do the poorest people in India spend 7 percent of their food budget on sugar?

Does having many children actually make you poorer?

This eye-opening book overturns the myths about what it is like to live on very little, revealing the decisions that millions make daily. Looking at some of the paradoxical aspects of life below the poverty line - why incentives that seem effective to us may not be for them, and why, despite being more risk-taking than high financiers, they start businesses but rarely grow them - the book offers a new understanding of the way the world works.