The standard way of thinking about decisions is backwards, says Ralph Keeney: people focus first on identifying alternatives rather than on articulating values. A problem arises and people react, placing the emphasis on mechanics and fixed choices instead of on the objectives that give decisionmaking its meaning. In this book, Keeney shows how recognizing and articulating fundamental values can lead to the identification of decision opportunities and the creation of better alternatives. The intent is to be proactive and to select more attractive decisions to ponder before attempting any solutions.

Keeney describes specific procedures for articulating values by identifying and structuring objectives qualitatively, and he shows how to apply these procedures in various cases. He then explains how to quantify objectives using simple models of values. Such value analysis, Keeney demonstrates, can yield a full range of alternatives, thus converting decision problems into opportunities. This approach can be used to uncover hidden objectives, to direct the collection of information, to improve communication, to facilitate collective decisionmaking, and to guide strategic thinking. To illustrate these uses, Keeney shows how value-focused thinking works in many business contexts, such as designing an integrated circuit tester and managing a multibillion-dollar utility company; in government contexts, such as planning future NASA space missions and deciding how to transport nuclear waste to storage sites; and in personal contexts, such as choosing career moves and making wise health and safety decisions.

An incisive, applicable contribution to the art and science of decisionmaking, Value-Focused Thinking will be extremely useful to anyone from consultants and managers to systems analysts and students.

In Values-Driven Authentic Leadership: Essential Lessons from the LeadershipWWEB Podcast Series, Andrew Braham, Matthew Waller, and John English examine the intersection of values, authenticity, and leadership. Drawing upon numerous conversations with a wide range of professional leaders, including several Fortune 500 CEOs, the authors identify six key opportunities for leadership growth: having a mentor, being in a group, knowing yourself, navigating transitions, being a mentor, and values and company culture. By sharing their own experiences, Braham, Waller, English, and the leaders they interview bring the facets of authentic leadership to life with personal insight.

Whether you are a mentor or a mentee, a student or a professional, Values-Driven Authentic Leadership will help guide you on your own leadership journey.

Nancy Folbre challenges the conventional economist's assumption that parents have children for the same reason that they acquire pets--primarily for the pleasure of their company. Children become the workers and taxpayers of the next generation, and "investments" in them offer a significant payback to other participants in the economy.

Yet parents, especially mothers, pay most of the costs. The high price of childrearing pushes many families into poverty, often with adverse consequences for children themselves.

Parents spend time as well as money on children. Yet most estimates of the "cost" of children ignore the value of this time. Folbre provides a startlingly high but entirely credible estimate of the value of parental time per child by asking what it would cost to purchase a comparable substitute for it.

She also emphasizes the need for better accounting of public expenditure on children over the life cycle and describes the need to rethink the very structure and logic of the welfare state. A new institutional structure could promote more cooperative, sustainable, and efficient commitments to the next generation.

In Varieties of State Regulation, Yukyung Yeo explores how, despite China’s increasing integration into the global market, the Chinese central party-state continues to oversee the most strategic sectors of its economy. Since the 1990s, as major state firms were spun off from the ministries that managed them under the central planning system, the nature of the state in governing the economy has been remarkably transformed into that of a regulator.

Based on over 100 interviews conducted with Chinese central and local officials, firms, scholars, journalists, and consultants, the book demonstrates that the form of central state control varies considerably across leading industrial sectors, depending on the dominant mode of state ownership, conception of control, and governing structure. By analyzing and comparing institutional dynamics across various sectors, Yeo explains variations in the pattern of China’s regulation of its economy. She contrasts the regulation of the automobile industry, a relatively decentralized sector, with the highly-centralized telecommunications industry, and demonstrates how China’s central party-state maintains regulatory authority over key local state-owned enterprises. Placing these findings in historical and comparative contexts, the book presents the evolution and current practice of state regulation in China and examines its compatibility with other contemporary government practices.

“An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.”
—New Yorker

“An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.”
—Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

“A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.”
—New Republic

“Extremely interesting, readable, and informative…Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.”
—Arthur Rock

“In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time…[A] first-rate history.”
—New Yorker

VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth.

Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.

A bold new biography of the thinker who demolished accepted economic theories in order to expose how people of economic and social privilege plunder their wealth from society’s productive men and women.

Thorstein Veblen was one of America’s most penetrating analysts of modern capitalist society. But he was not, as is widely assumed, an outsider to the social world he acidly described. Veblen overturns the long-accepted view that Veblen’s ideas, including his insights about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, derived from his position as a social outsider.

In the hinterlands of America’s Midwest, Veblen’s schooling coincided with the late nineteenth-century revolution in higher education that occurred under the patronage of the titans of the new industrial age. The resulting educational opportunities carried Veblen from local Carleton College to centers of scholarship at Johns Hopkins, Yale, Cornell, and the University of Chicago, where he studied with leading philosophers, historians, and economists. Afterward, he joined the nation’s academic elite as a professional economist, producing his seminal books The Theory of the Leisure Class and The Theory of Business Enterprise. Until late in his career, Veblen was, Charles Camic argues, the consummate academic insider, engaged in debates about wealth distribution raging in the field of economics.

Veblen demonstrates how Veblen’s education and subsequent involvement in those debates gave rise to his original ideas about the social institutions that enable wealthy Americans—a swarm of economically unproductive “parasites”—to amass vast fortunes on the backs of productive men and women. Today, when great wealth inequalities again command national attention, Camic helps us understand the historical roots and continuing reach of Veblen’s searing analysis of this “sclerosis of the American soul.”

A consultant with McKinsey & Company surveys the international aluminum industry and asks why its various activities are divided among firms in the way that they are. These components include the minding of bauxite, its refining into alumina, aluminum smelting, fabrication, and manufacture of the final product. What is it about this industry that encourages joint ventures in some cases, long-term contracts in others, and vertical integration and merger in still others?

The author identifies and analyzes the factors which motivate firms to adopt one or another of these patterns of doing business. He draws on and extends recent developments in theory relating to the operation of markets and organizations, and tests the power of theories to explain what is observed in the industry. He has assembled a great deal of empirical evidence, focusing on the United States, Japan, and Australia. The book should become the standard study of the aluminum industry.

In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.

Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.

This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.

Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.

In the late 1980s, most of the world still associated Vietnam with resistance and war, hardship, refugees, and a mismanaged planned economy. During the 1990s, by contrast, major countries began to see Vietnam as both a potential partner and a strategically significant actor—particularly in the competition between the United States and an emerging China—and international investors began to see Vietnam as a land of opportunity.

Vietnam remains a Leninist party-state ruled by the Communist Party of Vietnam that has reconciled the supposedly irreconcilable: a one-party system and a market-based economy linked to global value chains. For the Party stability is crucial and, recently, increasing economic openness has been combined with growing political control and repression.

This book, undertaken by scholars from Vietnam, North America, and Europe, focuses on how the country’s governance shapes its politics, economy, social development, and relations with the outside world, as well as on the reforms required if Vietnam is to become a sustainable and modern high-income nation in the coming decades.

Despite the challenges, including systemic ones, the authors remain optimistic about Vietnam’s future, noting the evident vitality of a determined society.

In spite of the hopes raised and achievements attained by the “Green Revolution,” the less developed rural countries of the world still must struggle for economic growth. Social scientists now focus on the human dimension of development. They search for change agents—men and women who have the initiative to cast aside traditional techniques and who are willing to introduce modern methods to their communities.

The Village Entrepreneur is a timely update on the new strategy of development. With financial backing from the Ford Foundation and the Indian government, Wayne G. Broehl and his associates undertook a comprehensive study of the village entrepreneur in South India. They interviewed hundreds of rural businessmen and attempted to pinpoint the qualities that distinguished change agents from their tradition-bound comrades. Further, they attempted to define the ways in which these agents can be used as conduits of progress. A significant section of the book describes a pilot program established to engender innovative attitudes. The book also provides a working model that will help apply the concept of change agents to other fields and other countries.

A categorical, but controversial, assumption of this work is that change is the sine qua non of development. Broehl believes that such change will necessarily be both economic and social and is likely to be political as well. Realistically presented and forcefully expressed, his findings are a strong contribution to recent development theory.

“A fascinating book about how platform internet companies (Amazon, Facebook, and so on) are changing the norms of economic competition.”
—Fast Company

Shoppers with a bargain-hunting impulse and internet access can find a universe of products at their fingertips. But is there a dark side to internet commerce? This thought-provoking exposé invites us to explore how sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching are changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Introducing into the policy lexicon terms such as algorithmic collusion, behavioral discrimination, and super-platforms, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke explore the resulting impact on competition, our democratic ideals, our wallets, and our well-being.

“We owe the authors our deep gratitude for anticipating and explaining the consequences of living in a world in which black boxes collude and leave no trails behind. They make it clear that in a world of big data and algorithmic pricing, consumers are outgunned and antitrust laws are outdated, especially in the United States.”
—Science

“A convincing argument that there can be a darker side to the growth of digital commerce. The replacement of the invisible hand of competition by the digitized hand of internet commerce can give rise to anticompetitive behavior that the competition authorities are ill equipped to deal with.”
—Burton G. Malkiel, Wall Street Journal

“A convincing case for the need to rethink competition law to cope with algorithmic capitalism’s potential for malfeasance.”
—John Naughton, The Observer

The role of large-scale business enterprise—big business and its managers—during the formative years of modern capitalism (from the 1850s until the 1920s) is delineated in this pathmarking book. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the distinguished business historian, sets forth the reasons for the dominance of big business in American transportation, communications, and the central sectors of production and distribution.

The managerial revolution, presented here with force and conviction, is the story of how the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of market forces. Chandler shows that the fundamental shift toward managers running large enterprises exerted a far greater influence in determining size and concentration in American industry than other factors so often cited as critical: the quality of entrepreneurship, the availability of capital, or public policy.

In Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950, Mark Hampton argues that qualities expected of the contemporary British press--lively writing, speed, impartiality, depth, and the ability to topple corrupt governments by informing readers--are not obvious attributes of journalism but derive from more than a century of debate. He analyzes the various historical conceptions of the British press that helped to create its modern role, and demonstrates that these conceptions were intimately involved in the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hampton surveys a diversity of sources--Parliamentary speeches and commissions, books, pamphlets, periodicals and select private correspondence--in order to identify how governmental elites, the educated public, professional journalists, and industry moguls characterized the political and cultural function of the press. The resulting blend of cultural history and media sociology demonstrates how once optimistic visions of the press have given way to more pessimistic contemporary views about the power of the mass media.

With clarity and panache, this book shows that many competing conceptions continued to influence twentieth-century understandings of the press but did not remain satisfactory in new political, cultural, and media environments. Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850-1950 provides a rich tapestry against which to understand the contemporary realities of journalism, democracy, and mass media.

Ai Hisano exposes how corporations, the American government, and consumers shaped the colors of what we eat and even the colors of what we consider “natural,” “fresh,” and “wholesome.”

The yellow of margarine, the red of meat, the bright orange of “natural” oranges—we live in the modern world of the senses created by business. Ai Hisano reveals how the food industry capitalized on color, and how the creation of a new visual vocabulary has shaped what we think of the food we eat. Constructing standards for the colors of food and the meanings we associate with them—wholesome, fresh, uniform—has been a business practice since the late nineteenth century, though one invisible to consumers. Under the growing influences of corporate profit and consumer expectations, firms have sought to control our sensory experiences ever since.

Visualizing Taste explores how our perceptions of what food should look like have changed over the course of more than a century. By examining the development of color-controlling technology, government regulation, and consumer expectations, Hisano demonstrates that scientists, farmers, food processors, dye manufacturers, government officials, and intermediate suppliers have created a version of “natural” that is, in fact, highly engineered. Retailers and marketers have used scientific data about color to stimulate and influence consumers’—and especially female consumers’—sensory desires, triggering our appetites and cravings. Grasping this pivotal transformation in how we see, and how we consume, is critical to understanding the business of food.