Business thinking between the covers

The Great Disruption

by Paul Gilding

Bloomsbury €12.99

IT’S TOO late to just worry about climate change – we need to brace ourselves for its impact.

That is the stark message in this book from Paul Gilding, a sustainability advocate and former head of Greenpeace International.

He says that we have ignored warnings about the unsustainability of growth and consumption of finite resources over decades. We have been borrowing from the future and the debt is now due.

Gilding is not all gloom, however. He suggests a new world order could emerge from the crisis in which the extremes of poverty, consumerism and conflict could all be eliminated. We have the opportunity to build such a society that represents our highest capacities.

It would include great technology that works with, rather than against, nature, to provide abundant energy and resources and communities that would support each other.

This is not a Utopian vision but an imperative, as we have no alternative, the author believes, and it requires ordinary people around the globe to become less passive and demand change from companies and political leaders.

Well-researched and thoughtfully argued, Gilding’s work is provocative and engaging

What would Steve Jobs do?

by Peter Sander

McGrawHill €24.99

THE LEGEND around Steve Jobs, the co-founder and brains behind Apple, has grown since his death last October, spawning a number of hastily published titles. Business consultant Sandler’s offering skims across the surface of Jobs’s career and then tries to draw some lessons from it all.

Jobs applied a six-part business model to make Apple one of the most valuable companies in the world. One of the key elements of this is vision, the synthesis of ideas, products and technologies around a game-changing idea. In this ideal, products are seen as things that can change the world instead of just beating the competition.

Acknowledging that Jobs was difficult to work with, Sander concludes that he was a perfectionist rather than a megalomaniac. He suggests that leaders could build their own personal brands around many of Jobs’s personal characteristics, including optimism, passion, confidence and altruism.

Good leaders develop a consistent communications and work style that everyone knows and learns how to work with – even if, like Jobs, that style is not an easy one, he concludes.

I Love Mondays – The

Autobiography of Alec Reed

with Judi Bevan

ProfileBooks €24.99

REED TELLS the story of how he built his employment agency empire from scratch in the early 1960s to becoming a successful publicly quoted company worth £150 million at its peak. Among the tricks in his early days, he reveals, was employing pretty young women and creating a lively buzz in the chain of offices he built around London.

Floating his firm on the stock market was his biggest mistake and the company came close to collapse in the recession of the early 1980s. More damaging to him were allegations in the Mail on Sunday about Reed placing illegal immigrants in jobs ahead of other unemployed people on Merseyside.

Reed was subsequently vindicated in a police investigation, but the strain of the affair and a diagnosis of cancer led him to retire from the company in 2003.

His work continues, however. He turned his country house into a business school, he lectures on leadership and innovation and was awarded a professorship from Royal Holloway College.

A lifelong philanthropist, he founded the charities Ethiopiaid, Womankind and more recently The Big Give. He was knighted last year at the age of 76.

Reed has written a revealing biography of a varied career, characterised by highs and lows.