New Books in Business, Management, and Marketing

New Books Network
  • 5.0 (4)
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This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

  1. 4d ago

    On “Turtling” Versus Being Primed for Possibilities

    Tissa Richards is a leadership expert, keynote speaker, and the award-winning author of No Permission Needed and Rethinking Resilience: Fueling Your Competitive Advantage. Her mission is to help bold, high-capacity leaders become unshakable. A repeat tech founder and CEO who has raised millions in funding, Tissa advises a wide array of companies on innovation and performance. In an era when trust is eroding, holding back and failing to communicate is a greater failing than ever. Rather than act like a turtle withdrawing into your shell, be bold: that’s the message here. The better route is to be in learning more, applying lessons learned from “failures” so that you can seize on the opportunities ahead. Most of all, remember that resiliency is a team sport; the lone hero won’t cut it in a world where exponential growth happens through the chemistry of a community that provides synergy. Case in point: Tissa mentions her interview with a former Executive at Campbell’s, whose Prickly Pear Council proved to be so successful in airing and resolving conflicts that eventually it no longer needed to exist. Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    31 min

  2. Jul 5

    Paul Osterman, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment" (Harvard UP, 2026)

    A revealing look at the decline in formal employment in favor of hiring contractors, freelancers, temps, and marginal workers, who are excluded from traditional benefits and career ladders. Companies cannot exist without workers, but they are increasingly reluctant to have employees. Instead of providing the benefits and protections that have traditionally come with employee status, businesses are turning to tactics that let them treat people as interchangeable parts, to be used and discarded as needed. Drawing on an original survey of over 6,000 workers, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment (Harvard University Press, 2026) reveals the striking extent of this transformation across the occupational hierarchy, affecting everyone from janitors to nurses. Paul Osterman identifies three distinct categories of disposable workers: contractors, freelancers, and marginal employees. The marginal category, unique to Osterman’s analysis, describes workers who are employees from a narrow legal standpoint but are held at arm’s length by their firm—left without job security, skill training, or opportunities for promotion. Many low-wage service workers toil in marginal jobs, but so do white-collar professionals such as adjunct university faculty and staff attorneys at law firms. When the three categories are added up, they account for more than 35 percent of the American workforce. Not all disposable workers object to their arrangements. But most contractors and marginal employees would prefer standard employment, and there is a significant cost to their current status. In response, Disposable Workers offers a range of policy recommendations, including mechanisms to prevent over-reliance on contracting and freelancing as well as reforms to improve job quality for part-timers and marginal employees. As the deconstruction of employment affects more and more workers, the importance of such measures will only grow. Paul Osterman is Professor Emeritus of Human Resources and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His numerous books include Good Jobs America, Who Will Care for Us? (Russell Sage, 2011); and The Truth about Middle Managers (Harvard Business School Press, 2009), Who Will Care For Us: Long Term Care and the Long Term Workforce (Russell Sage,2017), Gathering Power: The Future of Progressive Politics in America (Beacon Press, 2003); Securing Prosperity: The American Labor Market: How It Has Changed and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 1999), and Working In America: A Blueprint for the New Labor Market (MIT Press, 2001). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    54 min

  3. Jul 3

    Joseph Turow, "The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

    A respected voice on technology shows how seemingly simple ads help dismantle democracy and public discourse. Whether you’re intentionally shopping or casually browsing social media, something is following you: ads. Their creators seem to know your income bracket, politics, age, location, medical conditions, and tastes in clothing, food, and romantic partners. As advertising firms use predictive AI to discover your hot buttons and generative AI to push them, your online world becomes an increasingly bespoke—and isolated—place. The fervid competition around personalization in digital marketing has given rise to an ecosystem of advertisers, media outlets, tech companies, and retailers who monetize your data while threatening the health of our media, discourse, and sense of community. In this urgent book, award-winning author Joseph Turow shows how we got here, and how to change direction.The Problem with Personalization: How Advertisers Learned to Make and Break Us from Ancient Times to the AI Age (University of Chicago Press, 2026) shatters common beliefs about advertising history by showing that individualized ads are not new. Today’s AI-enabled advertisers draw on past aspirations and assumptions about personalization while weaponizing data in unprecedented ways that drive social fragmentation and the disappearance of shared social reality. Informed by interviews with marketing insiders and covering the latest technology advances, Turow accessibly explains how artificial intelligence sifts through our data to tag and target us wherever we go with personalized videos, pictorial billboards, audio messages, and more. A logical next step for advertiser support is tailored entertainment and news, a shift that further destroys the common ground necessary for a functioning democracy. A must-read for all who care about the future of public discourse, The Problem with Personalization reveals how targeted advertising has altered how we’re seen and what we see in return. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 7m

  4. Jul 2

    Mark Rukman: Translating History Into Advertising

    I chatted with brand planner Mark Rukman about his quest to translate historical ways of thinking into advertising. Mark likes to joke that, as a historically obsessed, private-sector strategist, he thinks of himself as a nineteenth-century gentleman scholar working in the "Department of Analogies." We discuss Mark's journey from a childhood in the USSR to the lifeblood of capitalism: the advertising industry. Along the way, we explore the nonlinearity of life choices, historical rhythms and events, and even a few unresolved differential equations. Throughout our conversation, we return to history as a surprisingly powerful source of order and clarity in a chaotic world—and as an underused source of insight for brand strategy. Last but not least, we talk about Mark's witty new show, "Old Takes," in which he tackles the hottest cultural trends and historicizes them, showing that if we look back far enough, we've often seen them before. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    57 min

  5. Jul 2

    The Tin Man Model of Running a Company Is Rusty

    Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner are enterprise strategists at Amazon Web Services, based in London. Phil was previously a corporate VP and international CIO at McDonalds. Jana was formerly at DHL and studied uncertainty dynamics in academia. They are authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation published by Harvard Business Review Press. Octopus’s are nimble and amazing, as anybody who has watched the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher will verify. In contrast, the Tin Man model we know from The Wizard of Oz needs constant oil and is too rusty and rigid to function well on its own for long. This episode’s guests lean into the Octopus model, which is about earning trust and evading, in this case, the enemy within ourselves when it comes to not admitting mistakes and quickly learning from them. The value of a strong feedback loop, creating an technology infrastructure that is “thin” and allows for freedom, and not chasing metrics that prevent you from learning from anecdotal evidence of where change is necessary: those are among the topics that lively conversation pursues. A final key point the authors make is that at a time when investment in executive learning has tripled while other personnel developments remain flat is a mistake; now more than ever, human capabilities need to be built upon in an era of rapid innovation. Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    26 min

  6. Jul 1

    Alan Brender, "Pink Tsunami: The Hello Kitty Kawaii Wave that has Swept the World" (Headpress, 2026)

    In his latest book, Pink Tsunami: The Hello Kitty Kawaii Wave that has Swept the World (Headpress 2026), Alan Brender delves into Hello Kitty the marketing wonder and cultural phenomenon, who has been around for 50 years. There are theme parks, restaurants, cafes and hotels dedicated to her. There are millions worldwide who buy Hello Kitty products, superfans who don’t know when to stop and amass thousands of items bearing Kitty’s countenance, and star fans, Lady Gaga and Britney Spears to name two, who do not think twice about purchasing a $50,000 Hello Kitty necklace. In Pink Tsunami you will hear about the fans, and Kitty’s designers and marketers and how they contributed to her popularity. But all is not glittery for this Queen of Kawaii. She has a dark side that even involves murder. Dive inside this book and all will be revealed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    58 min

  7. Jun 29

    Dallas Liddle, "News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885" (Oxford UP, 2026)

    British daily newspapers transformed rapidly at the turn of the nineteenth century, ballooning in size and radically reorganizing staffing and production decade by decade. By mid-century, newspapers had grown from the folded single sheets of the previous century to large multi-page broadsheets, so impressive in the quantity of print they held and their speed of production that one of their nicknames was 'the daily miracle'. Traditional news history has overlooked a key fact for understanding this era of news: that Victorian daily newspapers were high-pressure systems. As demand for newspapers outpaced their original production capacity, newspaper organizations began to build complex technical and production mechanisms to continue to grow and compete. As these systems expanded, newspapers became dependent on them, and decisions about how daily journalism should develop began to pass from editorial choice to systemic necessity. The previously untold story of Victorian daily news is that the personalities of editors and owners and the larger social forces at work in that era were not the only (or even primary) drivers of its history. Once set in motion, the systems of Victorian news gained major shaping agency over their own development. Combining deep archival research and traditional historical analysis with modern data mining methods, News Machines: The Systems of Daily Journalism in Britain, 1785–1885 (Oxford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Dallas Liddle reconstructs the systemic workings of Victorian daily news in unprecedented detail, offering new and counterintuitive accounts of when and why daily papers expanded, how and why steam-powered printing machines developed, how specialized news discourses evolved, and how newspaper leadership was organized. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    53 min

  8. Jun 29

    Juxuan Zhang and Pierre-Yves Donzé, "Entrepreneurs and the Structural Transformation of the Chinese Apparel Industry, 1980–2020" (Journal of Evolutionary Studies in Business, 2026)

    In this interview I met with Dr. Juxuan Zhang (Osaka University) to discuss her research on the history of the Chinese apparel industry since 1979. Her paper with Prof Pierre-Yves Donzé (Osaka University) investigates the structural transformation of the Chinese apparel industry from 1980 to 2020. Following an approach of industry studies and classic business history, it focuses on the 10 largest apparel companies in the four decades since the 1980s. Drawn from a broad range of published sources and official data, it analyses the ownership transition and entrepreneurial strategies of these companies under the changing institutional context. The findings show how different types of firms were able to use regulations and policies to dominate the industry. The study contributes to literature by exhibiting the dynamics of the industry development from the perspective of companies and entrepreneurs. Read the full research for free here Presented by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández, Ph.D. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    32 min
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Ratings & Reviews

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About

This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: ⁠newbooksnetwork.com⁠ Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: ⁠https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/⁠ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork

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