Some of My Favorite Business Books for 2022
/You still have time to share digital editions of these three great books or find them in your local (or airport) bookshop. To spice up my end-of-year book list, I jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon. I offer two sets of comments for my final review: Mine and then one version from ChatGPT. Also new to this post, I describe the AI-enabled tools I use in my writing. I hope knowledge workers will share their tools just like photographers often caption their images with a description of their camera and setup.
Happy holidays!
My comments are in the order I read the books. You can follow my Goodreads list here. So many fantastic books to read!
The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart
The No Club was an easy purchase (and the book for which I've made the most 1:1 recommendations). Anytime I'm asked about women negotiating in the workplace, I cite Professor Linda Babcock and women and the workplace authority Sara Laschever's earlier book, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Here, Professors Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart take a discussion about their workloads and turn it into a science-backed playbook for women in organizations (and life).
They start with identifying the critical issue that brought them together: Women do more non-promotable tasks than their male colleagues. "A non-promotable task matters to your organization but will not help you advance your career" (pp. 16-17). They build out strategies for assessing the situation, making effective decisions about what work to take on, and how to effectively say no.
The Basics
Get the Information You Need to Understand the Task
Consider Who Is Asking You
Avoid the Traps that Lead to Yes -- don't underestimate the costs (something I do all the time)
Use a "Yes, No, Yes" Strategy (p. 131-132). Here’s an example they share:
"Thank you for thinking of me, Joe. I have so much on my schedule the next two quarters with leading the new product launch that I won't be able to devote the time that organizing the meeting really requires, so I'm going to have to decline. But Don would be a great person to take on the task, and he could benefit from the opportunity to interact with others from across the company. I am confident he'd do a fantastic job."
The Long Term
Having given us an individual playbook, they switch to an organizational focus:
...organizations need to fully embrace responsibility for correcting the current imbalance of [non-promotable tasks]. That is our primary lesson. This is not a fix-the-women problem (pp. 232-233).
Read, The No Club, then keep it close by. Follow the authors' advice to take your time before answering a request. Use that time to skim the book again. The No Club is a book for many women you know -- and for the men working alongside them.
(My tools: Google auto-complete and Grammarly, paid account)
Low-Code/No-Code: Citizen Developers and the Surprising Future of Business Applications by Phil Simon
Low-Code/No-Code is a fantastic book for all of us (this is a common theme in these summaries). We all need to do more to build our tools and craft our work. As leaders and managers, we need to make sure our organizations function by having the best talent and tools aligned with the times and toward our targets.
Contribution
Besides the engaging voice and dry humor I expect from Phil Simon’s work, Low-Code/No-Code also presents benefits for citizen developers and examples and implementation strategies for managers. Whether you take on low-code/no-code approaches as small bites or as an overarching organizational strategy, you will benefit from this book.
Aside
As these tools spread, I hope we move away from a language of “code.” I fear that thinking of this work as coding may be a barrier to some. The vocabulary train has likely left the station, but I’d rather have a language of apps.
Conclusion
Regardless of what we call these tools, if you can use a smartphone, you can be a citizen developer. Read Low-Code/No-Code to learn more.
(My tools: Google auto-complete and Grammarly, paid account)
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb
I enjoyed their previous book, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, but agree with the authors’ insight here -- we need more about how AI fits into our broader sociotechnical systems: the full design and outcomes of our organizations and work.
System Mindset
In Power and Prediction, Professors Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb help us understand where AI fits into the broader picture. They show AI as a piece of an overall system and that:
"[t]he successful adoption of AI presents what we will term here the system mindset. It stands in contrast to a task mindset in that [the system mindset] sees the bigger potential of AI and recognizes that to generate real value, systems of decisions, including both machine prediction and humans, will need to be reconstituted and built" (p. 112).
Actionable Framework
They also offer an “AI Systems Discovery Canvas" (p. 241) to support leaders' thinking about AI's strategic and integrative roles in their organizations.
My Vancouver Perspective
As happy as I am with the book's insights, I am a little sad (given I work in Vancouver) about their 2017 prediction cited in the preface: "Where do you expect to see Canada's first AI unicorn—the first AI startup to reach a billion-dollar valuation?" Our bet: "Montreal. Or maybe Toronto. Or possibly Edmonton" (p. 8). It turns out my wishes and their predictions were both off. Verafin, from St. John's, Newfoundland, hit 2.75B USD in its acquisition by Nasdaq in 2020…..
I look forward to Vancouver playing a strong role at least in the bottom-up applications of AI. My RA, Nitish Gupta, and I contribute to the basics by organizing a quarterly list of AI-enabled tools for personal automation.
Taking Action
I do my best in class and workshops to share a systems-level approach (Thinking in 5T) and will be adding the system mindset advice from Power and Prediction.
(My tools: Google auto-complete and Grammarly, paid account)
The Future of Work
Low-Code/No-Code and Power and Prediction need deeper dives than I offer here. I am not doing the significance nor the nuance justice in these short mentions. I look forward to other ways I can integrate more of these ideas into my teaching, workshops, and work. You will also find value in reading, discussing, and most importantly, applying the material.
What ChatGPT Has to Say about Power and Prediction:
I thought it only fitting that Power and Prediction be the focus of my ChatGPT test. I fed it this prompt:
Write a review of Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. Include page numbers for quotes. Include hyperlinks. Write in the active voice.
I have no clue what edition of the book ChatGPT is using -- the pages noted below do not match my Kindle version. Maybe it’s making them up (just like some humans I know).
In Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence, Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb delve into the economic implications of artificial intelligence (AI). As experts in the field of AI and economics, they offer unique insights on how AI is transforming the way we do business and the way we live.
The authors introduce the concept of "prediction power," or the ability of an AI system to accurately predict the future, as a key factor in unlocking the economic value of AI (p. 3). They provide numerous examples of how companies use AI to gain a competitive edge, such as optimizing supply chains to reduce costs and improve efficiency (p. 25).
The book also discusses "creative destruction," or the disruption of existing industries and the creation of new opportunities by new technologies (p. 7). The authors examine how AI is driving creative destruction in industries such as transportation, healthcare, and finance, with a particular focus on how it is enabling doctors to make more accurate diagnoses and treatment recommendations (p. 87).
Overall, Power and Prediction offers a thorough and timely analysis of the economic impacts of AI. It is a must-read for those interested in the future of technology and its effects on society.
Links [NOTE: all of these are wrong, common problem with generative AI — use links above]:
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Prediction-Disruptive-Economics-Artificial/dp/0198805068
Ajay Agrawal: https://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/FacultyAndResearch/Faculty/FacultyBios/AjayAgrawal
Joshua Gans: https://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/FacultyAndResearch/Faculty/FacultyBios/JoshuaGans
Avi Goldfarb: https://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/FacultyAndResearch/Faculty/FacultyBios/AviGoldfarb
All in all, not a bad write up from ChatGPT, aside from the fake links. I will build and share a workflow leveraging ChatGPT for transactional writing. I also look forward to rethinking my homework assignments. More in the New Year!
