As the year draws towards it’s end it’s time to take a moment to pause and look back at some of the standout business and management titles published in 2020. It’s an understatement to suggest that the year has not unfolded as many of us may have planned in January, though with hindsight my Christmas reading last year,The End Is Always Near by Dan Carlin, was grimly prescient. Whilst Covid has swept all before it in 2020 the pandemic comes at the end of a decade of disruption, with austerity, technological change, Brexit and Trump all challenging established ways of working and thinking. With that in mind it’s perhaps not surprising that much ink has been spent in 2020 trying to make sense of the rapidly evolving environment we find ourselves in and we might most effectively adapt to our changing circumstances.
Two books in particular offer useful insights into how digital has revolutionised established businesses and provided fertile ground for new enterprises. In No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, examines with the INSEAD business school professor Erin Meyer how he transformed a company initially operating as a DVD mail order service into an online streaming service with 190 million subscribers and a market share rivaling Disney. Equally interesting is Sarah Frier’s No Filter: the inside story of how Instagram transformed business, celebrity and our culture, which looks at how Instagram has grown from the photo app purchased by Facebook in 2012 for $715 million into a business valued at $100 billion with over 100 billion users.
A number of books this year have taken a longer view on the social, economic and political ramifications of the changes the digital revolution is giving pace to. Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism explores the factors behind the decline in life expectancy in the United States over the past three years and the dramatic rise in deaths from suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism. Daniel Susskind’s A World Without Work could be seen as a more positive companion piece to Case & Deaton’s book, considering the potential benefits (and draw-backs) in the growth of automisation and AI. Alongside these two books David Goodhart’s Head Hand Heart makes a compelling case for a rebalancing of the value our society places on manual and caring labour, when compared to cognitive work.
If one thing is certain it is that new, robust and adaptable approaches to working are required if we are to address the challenges that have arisen over the last decade. In How Innovation Works Matt Ridley gives a broad, historical account of how innovative thinking and working has improved living standards and social wellbeing over the past three hundred years. Margaret Heffernan’s Uncharted: how to map the future together looks at how long-term projects developed over generations have adapted to changing circumstances, while John Kay and Mervyn King’s Radical Uncertainty examines both successful and flawed decision making methods in a world of ‘wicked problems’.
Sometimes it is necessary to look back in order to be able to move forwards. Money for Nothing by Thomas Levenson unpacks the South Sea bubble of the seventeenth century, looking at the its immediate historical impact and the broader implications for our current economic systems. Flash Crash by Liam Vaughan has the pace of a financial thriller as it investigates the cause of the unexpected and sudden market crash on 6 May 2010, revealing not just the man behind the fall but also the vulnerability of our financial systems. Jill Lepore’s If Then: how one data company invented the future takes a similar historical approach to the digital world, looking at the development of the Simulmatics Corporation and their use of computers to attempt to predict and influence customer behaviour in a way that foreshadows the world of Facebook and Cambridge Analytics.
It’s easy to loose the individual human element when discussing ideas around economic, technological and social change. As Aaron De Smet pointed out in a recent edition of the McKinsey Quarterly, change is often felt as a form of bereavement and at the moment many of our organisations are grieving (https://tinyurl.com/y5teuxpy). It’s no coincidence that many of the books published over the past few years have focused on health and wellbeing. As such my final recommendation would be Jo Owen’s Resilience: 10 habits to thrive in life and work, which offers a practical tool-kit which we can use to build and deepen our resilience in anticipation of whatever unforeseen challenges 2021 may throw at us. Happy New Year!
