The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, by Josh Kaufman, is a comprehensive guide to mastering essential business principles without the need for a formal master’s of business administration. First published in 2010, the book speaks to entrepreneurs, professionals, and independent learners seeking practical, experience-based mastery of how businesses work. Kaufman distills the fundamentals of management, marketing, systems, and psychology into a unified framework for understanding value creation and organizational success. He challenges the... Read The Personal MBA Summary

The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias is a work of nonfiction by Dolly Chugh, an award-winning social psychologist and management professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Interweaving stories and science, Chugh redefines what it means to be a good person, focusing not on the binary categories “good” and “bad” but instead on being “good-ish,” or receptive to learning. Grounded in scholarship, while using accessible language, voice, and... Read The Person You Mean to Be Summary

The Phoenix Project is a 2013 business novel by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford. Gene Kim is the former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Tripwire, and he describes himself as a researcher with a passion for high-performing technology. George Spafford is a Vice President (VP) Analyst at Gartner, focusing on DevOps, and he has written many articles and books on improving Information Technology (IT) services. Kevin Behr founded the Information Technology Process Institute... Read The Phoenix Project Summary

The Pivot Year: 365 Days to Become the Person You Want to Be by Brianna Wiest is a paradigm-shifting guide designed to help individuals navigate personal transformation over a year. Published in 2023, Wiest opens her book with the line, “I hope this year you change your life” (p. 0). Through 365 meditations, the book encourages readers to bridge the gap between their current state and their aspirations, uncovering and connecting with their true selves. Wiest... Read The Pivot Year Summary

The Post-American World is a 2008 book by television journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria. Its main thesis revolves around the multi-century dominance of Western powers, chiefly represented by the United States for most of the 20th century and into the 21st, and the idea of American Power in a Post-Hegemonic World. Zakaria argues that it is coming to an end and that non-Western powers—most notably China and India but also including South Africa, Indonesia, and... Read The Post-American World Summary

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a 1974 biography of American urban planner Robert Moses, written by journalist Robert Caro. The book charts the rise of Moses in the New York political system, illustrating how he came to shape the city according to his own designs. The book was widely praised by critics and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, though Moses and his associates disagreed with several points... Read The Power Broker Summary

In The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills argues that power is exercised through the dominant institutions in American society, specifically corporations, the military, and the executive branch of the national government. Those holding the top positions in these institutions make the consequential decisions and do so without democratic accountability in the US in the mid-20th century. Mills held a Ph.D. in sociology and was a sociology professor at Columbia University. Originally published in 1956, this... Read The Power Elite Summary

Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business investigates the science behind habit formation in the human brain. Drawing on corporate case studies and pioneering scientific experiments, Duhigg analyzes how individuals, organizations, and societies can use the knowledge of habit formation to change their behaviors. Published in 2012 by Random House, the nonfiction book has reached a broad public readership and landed on the New York Times... Read The Power of Habit Summary

The Power of One More: The Ultimate Guide to Happiness and Success by Ed Mylett is a self-help book published in 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. The book is a combination of advice related to personal development, performance, and business. The “one more” philosophy is a mindset in which one always strives to put in additional effort on any given task, no matter how small. The one more philosophy also encompasses types of... Read The Power of One More Summary

The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink was published in 2022. It challenges the popular mantra “No regrets” that has dominated Western culture. The book claims that toxic positivity can stymie personal growth and one’s potential to achieve a better life. It is, in essence, an antithesis to popular self-help books that champion blind positivity over conscious consideration of regrets. Pink argues that by embracing the feeling of... Read The Power of Regret Summary

Written by Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind is a classic best-selling self-help book that focuses on the subgenre of mind dynamics—the act of harnessing thought processes to achieve positive results. Published in 1963, this seminal work by an ordained minister with a PhD in psychology is designed to provide actionable techniques for controlling and directing the subconscious mind. With an upbeat focus on the power of imagination and visualization, the book teaches... Read The Power Of Your Subconscious Mind Summary

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation is an academic monograph written by historian of slavery Daina Ramey Berry and published by Beacon Press in 2017. Berry’s first book, Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia, was published in 2007 by University of Illinois Press. In Swing the Sickle Berry examines the relation... Read The Price for Their Pound of Flesh Summary

In 2007 the United States experienced an economic downturn that caused the standard for living for millions of Americans to plummet. While the share of national income dropped for 99 percent of Americans, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their wealth increase, in some cases considerably. Joseph E. Stiglitz published The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future in 2012 to explain this income gap and offer some hope that it... Read The Price of Inequality Summary

Anthony Abraham Jack’s 2019 nonfiction book The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students is based on sociological research the author conducted between 2013 and 2016 on the campus of an unnamed elite Northeastern university. There, he observed events on campus while also conducting interviews with 76 undergraduates from underprivileged backgrounds and 27 Black students from middle-class or upper-income families in order to find out how social class impacts students’ adjustment to college... Read The Privileged Poor Summary

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power is an influential work by Daniel Yergin that was originally published in 1991. Yergin, a highly regarded American historian and economic researcher, examines the history and influence of the global oil industry. With a background in energy economics and policy, Yergin brings a wealth of expertise to this comprehensive examination, providing a detailed narrative of the oil industry’s evolution and its substantial impact on global... Read The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power Summary

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a book written by German historian and sociologist Max Weber in 1905. Weber is often considered to be one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, and The Protestant Ethic is one of his most famous texts. As a work of sociology, the book seeks to analyze broad changes in both the economic and the religious structures of Western European and American societies. Over the... Read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Summary

The Psychology of Money is a bestselling 2020 book by American finance expert Morgan Housel. Housel’s book examines people’s financial decisions through the lenses of history and psychology. Housel argues that financial management is a relatively new phenomenon that everyone approaches differently depending on their personal experiences, beliefs, and biases. According to Housel, people who do not have a formal financial education can still succeed financially by learning the “psychology of money” (9). Housel uses... Read The Psychology of Money Summary

Chris Gardner’s memoir, The Pursuit of Happyness, details his pursuit of the American Dream and desire to rise against the challenging circumstances of his birth and attain success. From the outset, life is difficult for Gardner, a poor black child growing up in the Milwaukee ghetto with his mother, sisters and violent, abusive stepfather, Freddie. Gardner’s mother, Bettye Jean, had her own dreams taken away from her, when her father refused to pay for her... Read The Pursuit of Happyness Summary

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote The Razor’s Edge in 1944. The novel’s title comes from a quotation translated from the Katha Upanishad, with the assistance of Christopher Isherwood: “Rise, wake up, seek the wise and realize. The path is difficult to cross like the sharpened edge of the razor." The story has been adapted for film twice, once in 1946 starring Tyrone Power and again in 1984 with Bill Murray. When World War I air... Read The Razor's Edge Summary

Prominent expert on Russia Fiona Hill’s There’s Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century (2021) asserts that the United States is on the same path as modern Russia. Hill uses her life experiences to examine the issues that brought US democracy so close to the brink of ending, and she explores methods that can be used to buttress our institutions in the future.SummaryPart 1: “The Coal House” is about Hill’s childhood and... Read There Is Nothing for You Here Summary