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SeptOct2011

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bookshelf THE FACULTY LOUNGES AND OTHER REASONS WHY YOU WON'T GET THE COLLEGE EDUCATION YOU PAID FOR AUTHOR: Naomi Shaefer Riley PUBLISHER: Ivan R. Dee, US$19.95 DESPITE HER TITLE, journalist Riley isn't taking aim at material faculty perks in her outraged and hard-hitting book; it's tenure she can't abide. Considering it a convention that's long out- lived its usefulness, she takes apart various arguments used to defend it—that it preserves academic freedom; that it protects older professors from job insecurity; that it improves teaching. Instead, she believes it encourages the publi- cation of books and articles that "are narrower than before, often more trivial, and always filled with jargon." Mean- while, the act of teaching is mostly handed off to poorly paid and poorly regarded adjuncts often too overworked to perform well. Her solution? Abolish tenure at the vocational institutions where "academic freedom is an almost irrelevant concept," and consider five-year renewable contracts elsewhere. Riley's position isn't new—she extensively quotes other authors—but her passion and her depth of reporting add weight to her side of the contentious debate. THE INNOVATOR'S DNA AUTHORS: Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Press Review, US$29.95 STEVE JOBS and Jeff Bezos might pos- sess some of the most inventive minds in business today but, like other innovators interviewed for this book, they employ specific behaviors that anyone can learn. Their primary skill is "asso- ciational thinking," or "making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems, or ideas." They couple that with four other tireless behaviors—ques- tioning, observing, networking, and experimenting—until they hit upon new combinations that result in radically redesigned products. For instance, a college class Jobs took on calligraphy helped inform the beautiful typography of the 74 September/October 2011 BizEd Macintosh computer he designed ten years later. The authors—Dyer of BYU, Gregersen of INSEAD, and Christensen of Harvard—are unyielding in their insistence on the critical importance of innova- tion. "Imagine how competitive your company will be ten years from now without innovators," they invite. "Clearly your company would not survive." Their words provide plenty of motivation for CEOs to learn what born innova- tors already know. WORLD 3.0 AUTHOR: Pankaj Ghemawat PUBLISHER: Harvard Business Review Press, US$29.95 EXULTANT PRO-GLOBALIZATION economists believe the world is already flat, or soon will be; wor- ried anti-globalization activists think the recent broad economic crisis proves nations need to dis- engage and shrink back behind their own borders. IESE's Ghe- mawat doesn't have much patience with either perspective, which he labels World 1.0 and World 2.0 respectively, or with the folks who blame every financial disaster on too much or not enough govern- ment intervention. In his vision of the future—World 3.0—some level of government regulation will encourage a certain amount of market integration that still takes into consideration national borders and cultural preferences. So countries will be globalized but differentiated, engaging in cross- border trade without merging into one indistinct mass. He acknowledges that this will be a tricky world to create, but he's generally upbeat about the path we're on: "While some fail- ures and fears do need to be taken seriously, the truth is far less scary than it is made out to be." Absorbing and thought-provoking, World 3.0 is both a serious and hopeful book.

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