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Book Reviews

Book Review – TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson

Book review provided by Sophia Constanti, BSc Business Management student This book is a collection of tools to enhance an individual’s speaking and presentation skills. This book emphasises the importance of presenting in a way that suits the individual rather than a set structure for everyone to follow. I was curious to uncover what is involved in a successful presentation and this book reveals the necessary skills to deliver an effective talk. Continue reading →

Book Review: Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

‘If I keep doing good over the time, I will eventually be rewarded’, that is one of the core principles that have been highly influential in shaping my personality from a very young age. And my stance for this ideology has ever since persuaded me to believe that the acts of sharing, helping and collaborating with others would lead to personal and general satisfaction. Continue reading →

Book Review: Accelerating Out of the Great Recession: How to Win in a Slow-growth Economy

  How do you, not just survive, but thrive in the aftermath of a recession where so many failed to do so? The subtitle of this book is what immediately jumped out at me when I pulled it off the library shelf. To be able to say this book provides an answer on how to win in a slow growth economy in just 202 pages is quite a claim considering the struggle of most businesses post-recession. Continue reading →

Book Review: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead

.   Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg, examines a decline in females achieving leadership positions, the root causes of this and potential solutions. I was greatly affected by Sandberg’s TED talk titled ‘Why we have too few women leaders’, and her experience as COO of Facebook and as a former VP at Google affords the author much credibility. Continue reading →

Book Review: Alibaba – The House That Jack Ma Built, by Duncan Clark

Ma Yun, whose English name is Jack Ma, is one of the most famous entrepreneurs in China. A few years ago, his name always appeared on TV news in Hong Kong because his company’s Initial Public Offerings on the New York Stock Exchange raised $25 billion, the largest stock market flotation in history. A few months later, Alibaba’s shares soared, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth almost $300 billion. Continue reading →

Book Review: Wonderland, by Steven Johnson

  Steven Johnson likes to take the long view. His latest book Wonderland: How play made the modern world is a long view of something we often consider to be short-term fun, inconsequential, and childish; that thing is play. This 297 page book, the latest in a series by Johnson on the history of innovative, is organised into six lengthy chapters: fashion and shopping, music, taste, illusion, games, and public space. Continue reading →

Book Review – Messy

You are about to give a major performance, and you discover that your tools are faulty. What do you do? Do you take to the stage and risk your hard-won reputation? Or do you cancel the event, preventing the risk of a substandard performance, but disappointing the audience? This was the dilemma jazz pianist Keith Jarrett faced in 1975 at the Cologne Opera House. Continue reading →