Best summer books of 2023: Business

The Four Workarounds: How the World’s Scrappiest Organizations Tackle Complex Problems by Paulo Savaget, John Murray/Flatiron Books

A richly illustrated guide to how to work around rules and norms to solve complex problems, with examples from areas as diverse as cryptocurrencies and medicine distribution. Savaget outlines the managerial and domestic benefits to make a wider point about the advantages of adopting a “workaround mindset”.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner, Macmillan/Currency

Stories of gigantic and costly failures, from the Sydney Opera House to successive editions of the Olympic Games, are entertaining and chastening in equal measure. But Flyvbjerg and Gardner also manage to extract valuable lessons about how to plan, forecast and execute any size of project, be it a kitchen remodelling or a high-speed trainlink.

Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It by Amy Finkelstein, Liran Einav and Ray Fisman, Yale University Press

With a focus on the US, Risky Business tackles knotty questions such as the impact of genetic data on health insurance and how insurers pick the “right” customers. The FT’s reviewer Oliver Ralph applauded how the authors bring “a chatty, breezy style”, reminiscent of the bestseller Freakonomics, to this unpromising subject.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans, Torva/Henry Holt

A story of the extraordinary business success of Tony Hsieh, whose quest for happiness first turned footwear retailer Zappos into an ecommerce phenomenon, then aimed to regenerate downtown Las Vegas, even as his mental health disintegrated. In this cautionary tale, reporters Au-Yeung and Jeans unsparingly shed light on what went wrong.

The Case for Good Jobs: How Great Companies Bring Dignity, Pay, and Meaning to Everyone’s Work by Zeynep Ton, Harvard Business Review Press

MIT’s Ton has assembled a hard-to-dispute argument that better and better-paid jobs contribute to a virtuous circle of greater competitiveness, productivity and, above all, worker dignity and wellbeing. In her latest book, she draws on examples from retail to fast food to reinforce her case that there is a profitable, sustainable alternative to low wages, inflexible contracts and long hours.

Summer Books 2023

All this week, FT writers and critics share their favourites. Some highlights are:

Monday: Environment by Pilita Clark
Tuesday: Economics by Martin Wolf
Wednesday: Fiction by Laura Battle
Thursday: Critics’ picks
Friday: Politics by Gideon Rachman
Saturday: History by Tony Barber

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith, Penguin Press

An energetic, insidery account of the revolution in digital media led by listicle-festooned BuzzFeed and clickbaity blog Gawker Media. Smith explains how the success of these sites encouraged a craving for traffic across all media. The FT’s John Gapper called it “an amusing story of New York ambition and hubris”, but with “deeper social significance”.

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Hollywood Media Empire by James B Stewart and Rachel Abrams, Cornerstone Press/Penguin Press

An extraordinary account of the real-life Succession saga that unfolded around ageing sex- and power-obsessed media mogul Sumner Redstone towards the end of his long, colourful life. Christopher Grimes, reviewing it for the FT, described it as “a deeply reported account of one of the trashiest episodes in recent business history”.

The Rise of Corporate Feminism: Women in the American Office, 1960-1990 by Allison Elias, Columbia University Press

An academic book, but one that Isabel Berwick described as “one of the most engaging and original accounts of women in the workplace” that she had ever read. Elias centres her history on women doing clerical and secretarial work and gradually organising to fight low pay, lack of promotion, poor working conditions and sexual harassment.

The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems — and What to Do about It by Rob Cross and Karen Dillon, Harvard Business Review Press

Tiny moments of stress barely register but the build-up of these microstresses — triggered by work or domestic pressures — can take a terrible toll. “Microstress seeps into our thoughts, saps our energy, and diverts our focus. Little by little, it’s stealing our lives,” write Cross and Dillon in this highly relatable analysis of the problem — and guide to how to rise above it.

The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens our Businesses, Infantilizes our Governments and Warps our Economies by Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington, Allen Lane/Penguin Press

Successive UK governments are in the crosshairs of this polemic against failures in their outsourcing of public services that, the authors suggest, enriched consultancies while letting down the citizens who were supposed to benefit. It is hard to draw the line between state and private activity, but “where The Big Con is spot on is in noting how hard it is to wind the clock back”, economist Diane Coyle wrote in her FT review.

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