Global Business

Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together.

Corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and acting ethically are all accepted business aims, but their meaning and implementation in a global context is far less clear-cut. Global Business Ethics cuts through the confusion to provide a coherent basis for ethical decision-making within the complications of the international business landscape.

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo have pioneered the use of randomized control trials in development economics. Work based on these principles, supervised by the Poverty Action Lab, is being carried out in dozens of countries. Drawing on this and their 15 years of research from Chile to India, Kenya to Indonesia, they have identified wholly new aspects of the behavior of poor people, their needs, and the way that aid or financial investment can affect their lives. Their work defies certain presumptions: that microfinance is a cure-all, that schooling equals learning....

From its creation as a mail-order record company to the literal launch of Virgin Galactic, today Virgin is one of the premier ‘way-of-life’ brands in the world, trusted and enjoyed by many millions of people. In Business Stripped Bare, Sir Richard Branson shares the inside track on his life in business and reveals the incredible truth about his most risky, brilliant and audacious deals.

In No Ordinary Disruption, the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, the flagship think tank of the world's leading consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, dive deeply behind current headlines to analyze the key forces transforming the global economy over the next two decades - and most importantly, to explain what business and government leaders need to do to reset their intuitions and take advantage of the disruptions ahead.

What explains the massive worldwide success of video games such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Pokemon Go? Game companies and their popularity are poorly understood and often ignored from the standpoint of traditional business strategy. What lessons can we draw from its major successes and failures about the future of entertainment?

In conversation with social entrepreneur Badr Jafar, philanthropic leaders including Bill Gates, Baroness Valerie Amos, Kristalina Georgieva, David Miliband, Razan Al Mubarak and many more discuss their hopes and priorities for the world of today and tomorrow. Their insights shed new light on the increasingly important role that strategic philanthropy is playing in helping to address some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Online quizmaster Jay Flynn was down on his luck as the Covid pandemic broke. He'd lost his pub, The Crown in Lancashire, which he'd been running with his wife, and was looking for ways to keep the loyal locals together for whom the regular weekly quiz was a lifeline. He set up a quiz night on Facebook but forgot to mark the event as private. Before long 800 people had registered their interest and it was about to go viral around the world.

Leading in the Global Matrix offers a real-world perspective of working in a matrix while using examples from the authors’ actual coaching of business leaders. This book tackles the critical, “unspoken” dimensions that are often underestimated and unaddressed in the global business world, helping listeners learn specific skills and insights that can help them be successful in the trenches; how to deal with day-to-day realities - which include complexity, pressure, and demand to deliver results with speed; what to do, why it’s important, and how to accomplish each task.

"Blueprint for Building a Successful Brand" by Arthur Harrison is an essential guide for creators, influencers, startups, and businesses aiming to navigate the complex world of brand-building in the digital age. This book provides listeners with actionable insights into crafting a compelling brand identity, positioning themselves in a competitive market, and creating meaningful connections with their audiences.

Ann Armbrecht describes her journeys to herb collection sites, farms, and factories in North America, Europe, and India to tell the stories of the people and places behind the bottles of herbal products on grocery store shelves. The Business of Botanicals is the first resource of its kind for listeners who wish to take the extra step in curating ethically sourced products.

Thirty-five-year-old Mohammed bin Salman's sudden rise stunned the world. Political and business leaders flew out to meet with the crown prince and came away convinced that his desire to reform the kingdom was sincere. He spoke passionately about bringing women into the workforce and toning down Saudi Arabia's restrictive Islamic law. He lifted the ban on women driving and explored investments in Silicon Valley. But 'MBS' began to betray an erratic interior beneath the polish laid on by scores of consultants and public relations experts like McKinsey & Company.

What can you learn from the most successful companies in the world? The NBA Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled the exciting basketball league to become the powerhouse it is today.

Merchants of Doubt has been praised—and attacked—around the world, for reasons easy to understand. This book tells, with “brutal clarity” (Huffington Post), the disquieting story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.

As head of TED for the past 20 years, Chris Anderson has had a ringside view of the world's most significant thinkers sharing their boldest ideas across every imaginable discipline. Yet there's a single theme that stands out in his mind as the essential connecting thread: generosity. It may seem simple, but generosity has played a key role in building the tools, knowledge, and institutions that have allowed civilisation to flourish. Now, in our unsettled modern world, beset by disruption and division, Anderson believes our collective future depends on reconnecting to this vital human trait.

Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? At the heart of today's financial and economic crisis is a problem hiding in plain sight. In modern capitalism, value extraction is rewarded more highly than value creation: the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. From companies driven solely to maximise shareholder value to astronomically high prices of medicines justified through big pharma's 'value pricing', we misidentify taking with making, and have lost sight of what value really means.

Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World: Thriving in the New VUCA Context is the thoughtful analysis of nine expert authors from around the globe who put VUCA under the microscope and take the listener on a journey that looks at VUCA from a number of different leadership perspectives. Through their research and writing these nine authors seek to provide sense-making and insights that are combined with practical tips and frameworks to help leadership embrace this new VUCA context and learn how to thrive within it.

Many executives overlook the single-most critical aspect of leadership. Have you? The most important driver of overall success is your own self-leadership. Without it, your career may stall. Why? Because how you lead yourself directly impacts your ability to lead others, and that, in turn, can prevent you from reaching your full career potential.

Tumult in Mecca masterfully weaves Henrik’s personal quest for fulfilment with the global turbulence of 1979, capturing the tension between career and adventure, ambition and family, security and risk.

Empty shelves, queues for petrol and energy shortages: crises more familiar to those who lived through the 1960s and 1970s have now become a reality as global shipping times are squeezed, containers lie unopened at docks and supply shortages push up inflation, increasing the cost of consumer goods from milk to cars to building materials. In Sold Out!, economic forecaster James Rickards (The Road to Ruin, The Death of Money) explains why the shelves are empty, who fractured the supply chain and why shortages will persist.