“The Female Founders' Handbook: Insights from the Superwomen Who Made It,” by Anne Bowden
Anne Boden, founder of Starling Bank, doesn't believe in having a mentor for herself because the people she encountered didn't encourage her to take risks. However, her latest book reads like a 224-page mentoring session, full of anecdotes and practical advice for any woman thinking about starting a business.
The bleak backdrop is that only 2 per cent of UK venture capital goes to start-ups founded by women. The Enterprise Playbook is not an attempt to fix the system or philosophically discuss why. It's Boden's honest, sometimes sarcastic, account of the highs, lows and lessons learned in the decade she spent farming Starling before stepping down last year. Starling's story is a case study of the challenges institutions face: The bank itself struggled to raise money for two years before getting a cash lifeline from billionaire Harald McPike.
Drawing on her experience as head of a government task force looking at high-growth companies led by women, Boden also includes the voices of several women who have played a role in growing successful businesses, including venture capital investor June Angelides and skincare brand Child's Farm. Founder Joanna Jensen and PensionBee founder Romy Savova. The step-by-step guide takes readers through the journey of growing and scaling a business from inception to exit and what to do after an IPO.
Boden, who has been vague about her own plans for the future, offers her advice on everything from how to make the most of a networking event — even when you've forgotten people's names — to hiring the right co-founder (Starling left with a number of their staff to set up rival neobank Monzo). Perhaps most compellingly, the book begins with a call to “all reluctant entrepreneurs” that aims to help women define themselves as potential founders first and foremost. Akila Kino
“Growth Cultures: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations” by Mary C. Murphy
Cultures of Growth is less a self-help book than a group help book. Mary Murphy is the protégé of Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University and architect of the concept of “growth mindset,” a decades-old theory that people can change personal characteristics and abilities with effort.
Murphy's contribution is to show how this individual mindset can be developed for entire organizations to enable their employees to succeed.
In more than 260 pages, plus another 47 notes and appendices, Murphy, now a professor at Indiana University, explains how a culture of mindset can enable creativity, risk-taking, and diversity to flourish in an organization, as well as serve as a check on unethical ethics. behavior. The final section focuses on helping business owners identify micro-cultures of mindset and assess attitudes to see how a growth culture can be enabled or enhanced.
There are plenty of case studies and warnings about specific risks, such as the problem of pipelines when it comes to building a diverse workforce and the tendency of managers to work alone. Although many of the leadership stories are about large companies, especially in the technology sector, the book may be useful to heads of organizations of all sizes and types, from ambitious for-profit start-ups to charities and public sector organisations. Jonathan Moles
“Leading from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Gets Bad” by Barbara Kellerman
The prospect of Donald Trump winning re-election should worry Barbara Kellerman, but if he succeeds, it probably won't surprise her. The Harvard professor's previous book, The Enablers, explained “how Trump's team failed the pandemic and America failed.” “Once bad leadership and bad followers emerged, as they did during Trump’s first year in office, the bad got worse,” she notes in the introduction to her new book. This is predictable. But “worse driving” becomes inevitable only if it continues uninterrupted. She writes that poor leadership and dependency develop gradually, but “they only develop if we allow them to.”
Trump is essentially a ghost at your unpalatable feast. Its main courses focus instead on four other bad leaders—five, if you include Adolf Hitler. Hitler's rise to power is depicted as a sinister example of the four stages of development of bad leaders and followers: “Onward and Upward,” in which the ambitious leader reveals an almost utopian vision of the future; “Followers join”; The leader “begins” on a bad path; And “from bad to worse.” Kellerman then traces these stages in the rise of two autocrats still in office — Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Xi Jinping in China — and two disgraced corporate leaders, Martin Winterkorn, CEO of Volkswagen during the Dieselgate scandal, and Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos. .
The case study approach is effective, and Kellerman is a good writer, but readers familiar with one or more of the stories may be tempted to skip some of the lessons she draws. She includes the importance of good follow-up, which she says has been severely neglected. “Those of us who are not in leadership roles have obligations” not to become bad followers, she wrote, and to understand that we can and must choose to intervene against bad leaders in the early stages of their development. As she concludes, perhaps taking the US electoral calendar into account, “time is of the essence.” Andrew Hill
Smart Money: The Fall and Rise of Brentford Football Club, by Alex Duff
Matthew Benham made a small fortune trading derivatives for some of the biggest banks on Wall Street. He became richer by leaving high finance to become a professional gambler. He then bought the football club he had supported as a boy.
Alex Duff, author of Smart Money, reveals the history of Brentford Football Club through meticulous care brought from his own time supporting the club. The former Bloomberg News journalist eschews hagiography and digs into the club's checkered history.
As English football prepares for the emergence of an independent regulatory body mandated by the UK government, Duff's history with Brentford is a reminder that unscrupulous owners are not a new phenomenon.
What has changed is the size of payment checks. Football teams are no longer clubs but companies. Benham is a rare example of a local owner at the elite end of football, which increasingly requires institutional money to meet skyrocketing valuations.
The missing element in Smart Money is an interview with Benham himself. Duff makes up for this by talking to anyone else he can, from former directors to former players and journalists.
Benham has been at the forefront of the data revolution in football, helping Brentford gain an edge over wealthier clubs by using analytics to identify and buy undervalued players in order to reach the top division in English football.
Brentford may be in the bottom half of the table, but the book reveals the biggest surprise is that they are there at all. Samuel Ajeni
“Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together,” by Kevin Irvin Kelley
Traditional gathering places are in decline, making it difficult to meet and socialize in person. With the rapid development of digital alternatives and technological advances, it is common to feel more isolated, dislocated and displaced.
Award-winning architect Kevin Irvin Kelly presents a book that is an antidote to the anti-human digital future, offering a compelling vision for creating spaces that truly bring us together.
In an era of rapid technological development, it is essential to realize that the roles that humans play in society are undergoing a profound transformation. While technology does not have to eliminate our need for people and interaction, it will require people to do and think differently.
Kelly delivers innovative concepts that enable people to connect and collaborate. These experiences facilitate the creation of pro-social environments that foster meaningful interactions and strengthen community connections.
The book is divided into four sections: Parts One and Two lay a foundation for establishing the kinds of experiences people bring together based on how humans view, perceive, and interpret their environment. Parts Three and Four provide ideas for managing workplace success.
With real-life examples and practical recommendations, Indispensable is a call to action to foster cultures of belonging. Leo Cremonese
“You Belong Here: The Power of Being Seen, Heard, and Valued on Your Own Terms” by Kim Dabbs
Diversity, equality and inclusion have been on the corporate agenda over the past few years. This book proposes to look at “belonging” in a new and perhaps more effective way.
In You Belong Here, Kim Dabbs, a DE&I expert who has worked in the private and nonprofit sectors, draws on her personal experiences. Born in Korea, she was abandoned as a baby and adopted by an American family. With her work she is now in Germany. She acknowledges that most culture-building programs in organizations rarely explore the idea of individual identity.
It asks readers to think about belonging as an individual – what belongs to you, and not to others? How can you stop the cycle of retelling the negative narratives that form as a result of instances in which you felt “othered”?
Dabbs describes what she often told herself while growing up in the United States: “I'm too Asian. I'm too outspoken. I'm not nice enough. I'm not quiet enough.” This problem began in her childhood and worsened as she began her career, as she wrote that others' social cues “reinforced these vocal phrases in my head.”
So how do we take back control? It's about exploring and repairing identity in a more positive way.
I created a game plan that included four identities to work through. These are: living identity, which consists of aspects of identity inherited when you were born; acquired identity, which includes the parts you have chosen or claimed; The stuck identity, which you leave behind when you feel like an outsider; And a beloved identity, where you find what feels authentic to you.
Dabbs provides guidance throughout, asking the reader questions. She believes that a better understanding of past experiences and how society has created systemic barriers to entry can help people design their futures. “Instead of looking for a seat at someone else's table, we have the tools to build a new one. . . . We are able to understand who we are at our core and how we want to show up in the world.” Janina Conboy
