Business Society

According to futurists Rolf Jensen and Mika Aaltonen, we are currently "between dreams". We've managed to achieve many of our material goals, only to face ever-growing global competition in an ever-slowing economy. Here's the good news: With the rise of social media and online resources, consumers are growing more powerful. Individuals are exploring more options. And smart businesses are discovering more ways to appeal to this powerful new community. Welcome to The Renaissance Society.

Twenty-one years after its incorporation and 16 years after its stock peak, Yahoo sold for 96% less than its value on January 3, 2000, when it had closed at an all-time high of $118.75 per share, resulting in a market capitalization of $120 billion. Wall Street valued Yahoo!, at that time in business less than six years, higher than it did Disney, News Corporation, and Comcast combined. Yahoo!'s story is one of missed strategies, failed opportunities, and poor execution.

If you've ever read a book on an e-reader, unleashed your inner rock star playing Guitar Hero, built a robot with LEGO Mindstorms, or ridden in a vehicle with child-safe air bags, then you've experienced first hand just a few of the astounding innovations that have come out of the Media Lab over the past 25 years. But that’s old hat for today’s researchers, who are creating technologies that will have a much deeper impact on the quality of people’s lives over the next quarter century.

Certain ideas about business leadership are held to be timeless, and certain characteristics of leaders - often including a square jaw, a deep voice, and extroversion - are said to be universal. In Leading in the Digital World, Amit Mukherjee argues that since digital technologies are changing everything else, how could they not change leadership ideologies and styles? Drawing on a global survey of 700 mid-tier to senior executives and interviews with C-level executives from around the world, Mukherjee explains how digital technologies are already reshaping organizations.

Covid-19 has heightened career uncertainty in a work landscape dominated by turbulence and change, and it is directly impacting how people are entering—or re-entering—the workplace. But as Lindsey Pollak makes clear, the pandemic merely accelerated trends that have been building. While this new world is complicated, you won’t have to navigate it alone. For twenty years, Pollak has been following the trends and successfully advising young professionals and organizations on workplace success. Now, she guides you through the changes currently happening—and those to come.

In Sovereign Soldiers, Grant Madsen tells the story of how this cast of characters assumed an unfamiliar and often untold policymaking role. Seeking to avoid the harsh punishments meted out after World War I, military leaders believed they had to rebuild and rehabilitate their former enemies; if they failed they might cause an even deadlier World War III.

Drawing on four decades of hands-on management experience, the founder of Richer Sounds argues that ethically run businesses are invariably more efficient, more motivated and more innovative than those that care only about the bottom line. He uncovers the simple tools that the best leaders use to make their businesses fair, revealing how others can follow suit. And he also delves into the big questions that modern capitalism has to answer if it is to survive and to thrive.

Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.

When businesses try to "do AI", they place an abstract solution before problems and customers without fully considering whether it is wise, whether the hype is true, or how AI will impact their organization in the long term. Often absent is sound reasoning for why they should go down this path in the first place. Doing AI explores AI for what it actually is - and what it is not - and the problems it can truly solve.

For years, executive Martin Fiore has been advising leaders from a wide range of industries about technological trends that are reshaping the world of business, from artificial intelligence and the rise of autonomous systems to human/machine convergence. Now, in Humanity Reimagined, Fiore explores how these trends are disrupting industries, changing the world of work, transforming the economy, and creating both threats and opportunities for leaders at all levels, from entrepreneurs nurturing start-up businesses to C-suite leaders at the world's biggest corporations.

By utilising the latest thinking in health and behavioural economics, social psychology, neuroscience, management and social network analysis, Fully Connected will provide a blueprint for how to use social health to foster well-being and productivity. At every level, each person, department and organisation is struggling to find a way to navigate this challenging era; Fully Connected will be a blueprint for anyone looking to reclaim time, space and identity in our world.

In these challenging economic times, it is more important than ever for nonprofits to focus on shaping policy, building capacity, developing talent, improving their marketing and promotion, fundraising, and developing partnerships/collaboration for organizational success. Shift & Reset: Strategies for Supporting Causes in a Connected Society teaches the nonprofit/social change/philanthropy/cause community how to take advantage of rapidly changing technologies and new communication ecosystem that exist in our connected society.

In modern history, the story of capitalism has been a story of firms and financiers. That's all going to change thanks to the Big Data revolution. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, best-selling author of Big Data, and Thomas Ramge, who writes for The Economist, show, data is replacing money as the driver of market behavior. Big finance and big companies will be replaced by small groups and individual actors who make markets instead of making things: think Uber instead of Ford, or Airbnb instead of Hyatt. Will this be an age of prosperity or of calamity?

With Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives, new media pioneer Randi Zuckerberg offers an entertaining and essential guide to understanding how technology and social media influence and inform our lives online and off. Zuckerberg has been on the front line of the social media movement since Facebook's early days and her following six years as a marketing executive for the company. Her part-memoir, part-how-to-manual addresses issues of privacy, online presence, networking, etiquette, and the future of social change.

Are we driving off a digital cliff and heading for disaster, unable to focus, maintain concentration, or form the human bonds that make life worth living? Are media and business doomed and about to be replaced by amateur hour? Both visionary and practical, I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works captures the zeitgeist of an emerging age, providing the understanding of how a radically changed media world is influencing human behavior.

In Digital Vertigo, Andrew Keen illuminates today's social media revolution as the most wrenching cultural transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Fusing a fast-paced historical narrative with front-line stories from today's online networking revolution, and critiques of "social" companies like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, Keen argues that this social media transformation is weakening, disorienting, and dividing us rather than establishing the dawn of a new egalitarian and communal age.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

With Expand: Stretching the Future By Design, authors Jens Martin Skibsted, a multiple-award-winning designer, entrepreneur, and design philosopher, and Christian Bason, political scientist and CEO of the Danish Design Centre, take listeners beyond "design thinking" to challenge current habits and carve out new space for more sustainable innovation. From transforming the ways we do business and reimagining health care, to creating planet-restoring housing and humanizing our digital lives in an age of AI, Expand explores how expansive thinking across six key areas.

Keith C. Wolaridge writes about the love of his father, a faithful man committed to his family, especially during the toughest of times. Keith witnessed his father’s life-long grasp of "goodness" in the face of a cold, privileged world never meant for him; and yet, holding true to the set of righteous principles, his father's pillars above the rest! It’s these very pillars that shaped Keith into the man, the father, the business owner he is today.

In a world of endless distraction, we have given away two of our most valuable assets: time and attention. Technology has given us the incredible gift of access to an ever-increasing amount of information and has opened the door to a vast array of choices and opportunities. However, having more options doesn’t correlate to an increase in our success. Research shows that having more to choose from causes anxiety and decreases our likelihood of taking action.