Books

MIT Sloan faculty and alumni are important contributors to the library of management literature. Through their research and their personal business experience, they create some of the must-read management texts of our time. Many are the authors of textbooks adopted in courses worldwide, but they are also producing works, like Lester Thurow's seminal book Building Wealth, that attract large, enthusiastic audiences from the wider reading public.

Publications
X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press) Deborah Ancona, Henrik Bresman The X-Team is much more than just the latest B-school theory -- it's a well-established, but often hidden, reality that's now being highlighted by this new book. Challenging the traditional notions of what makes a successful team, the authors' years of research support a new way of doing things. This new kind of team, dubbed X-Teams, has team spirit, but the team also projects upwards and outwards. The group establishes cooperative relationships, seeks out key information from other teams and outside sources, evangelizes the team's mission to key stakeholders, and actively pursues support from management. The poorest-performing teams, on the other hand, focused inward. The book explains that X-teams not only are able to adapt in ways that traditional teams aren't, but that they actually improve an organization's ability to produce creative ideas and execute them -- increasing the entrepreneurial and innovative capacity within the firm. More >>
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins) Dan Ariely Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money. More >>
Breaking the Mold (ILR Press) Lotte Bailyn In this second edition of Breaking the Mold, MIT Sloan Professor Lotte Bailyn maintains the long-standing separation between work and family life is an outdated concept. She contends that unless American business radically rethinks some of its basic assumptions about work, time, and career paths, both employee and employer will experience setbacks in today's intensely competitive business environment. Bailyn shows how the structure and culture of corporate life could be changed to integrate all of an employee's obligations and interests. And she illustrates the benefits that such change can have for the organization itself. More >>
The Outside-in Corporation (McGraw-Hill) Barbara E. Bund This book presents a new approach that enables business people to design and operate their businesses (both strategies and actions) based firmly on a customer perspective -- in other words, from the outside in. The approach works despite the real-world challenge that there is never as much available information about customers as business people want and need. It leads to marketplace strategies with a clear, explicit customer reason for every marketplace action -- strategies with improved probabilities of success, that can be communicated throughout an organization and then understood and implemented by employees at all levels, and that can be adapted effectively as conditions change. More >>
Dynamic Analysis in the Social Sciences (Elsevier Science) Emilio J. Castilla The study of social dynamics using quantitative methodology is complex and calls for cutting-edge technical and methodological approaches in social science research. This book presents the existing statistical models and methods available for understanding social change over time. It provides step-by-step instructions for designing and conducting longitudinal research, with special focus on the longitudinal analysis of both quantitative outcomes (for the modeling of change in continuous variables) and qualitative outcomes (for the modeling of events occurring over time). More >>
Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World (Oxford University Press) Michael A. Cusumano Cusumano explains the six critical principals that put today's top companies at the front of the line-and kept them there. Drawing on real-life examples, he illustrates how the best companies put these principles into practice, identifying precisely how these ideas have lead to concrete success time after time. More >>
Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies (Harvard Business School Press) David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee Catalysts are the new business powerbrokers. Fueled by the increasing interdependence of global markets, technology, and consumers, catalysts are reshaping entire industries as they mobilize two or more distinct customer groups around a common platform to create value and drive profits. Some of the world's most important businesses -- from Lloyd's of London and Hearst Newspapers to Microsoft and Google -- have made profits by simultaneously bringing together distinct customer groups who need each other onto the same platform. Their successes demonstrate that, to succeed, catalysts must defy traditional business and economic wisdom when designing business models, pricing schemes, and organizational incentives. Catalyst Code shows executives and entrepreneurs how to innovate and profit by detailing new economic theory and business history, as well as through extensive interviews with established and emerging catalysts. More >>
Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries (MIT Sloan School of Management, Research Paper Series) Andrei Hagiu, David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee As they wait in long lines to buy the latest game console, few shoppers realize that the most important element of that Xbox (as well as of their cell phones, PDAs, web-based software such as eBay, and far more) is something they can't even see. Invisible Engines tells the important story of how invisible but powerful software platforms are driving not only today's technology, but tomorrow's innovations and economy. The book recounts the growth, development and marketing of software platforms, which have turned devices such as Sony's PlayStation and Apple's iPod into household names and tools for everyday life. Because software platforms can be used by independent companies or developers to offer a wide range of products and services, the authors note, they function as "invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century." More >>
The Delta Model: Reinventing Your Business Strategy (Springer) Arnoldo C. Hax Strategy is the most central issue in management. It has to do with defining the purpose of an organization, understanding the market in which it operates and the capabilities the firm possesses, and putting together a winning plan. There are many influential frameworks to help managers undertake a systematic reflection on this issue. The most dominant approaches are Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy" and the "Resource-Based View of the Firm," popularized by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. Arnoldo Hax argues there are fundamental drawbacks in the underlying hypotheses of these approaches in that they define strategy as a way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. More >>
The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press) Thomas W. Malone Imagine organizations where bosses give employees huge freedom to decide what to do and when to do it. Imagine electing your own bosses and voting directly on important company decisions. Imagine organizations where most workers aren't employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life--money, interesting work, helping other people, or time with their families. More >>
Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business School Press) Andrew McAfee "Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. More >>
Principles of Corporate Finance, 9th ed. (McGraw-Hill) Stewart Myers, et al. Principles of Corporate Finance is the worldwide leading text that describes the theory and practice of corporate finance. Throughout the book the authors show how managers use financial theory to solve practical problems and as a way of learning how to respond to change by showing not just how but why companies and management act as they do. More >>
The Truth About Middle Managers (Harvard Business Press) Paul Osterman "Middle management" is a term associated with relentless downsizing, corporate drudgery, and career dead-ends. Bashed by management gurus, dismissed by social scientists, and painted as victims by the media, middle managers seem permanently relegated to the sidelines of corporate power. More >>
Business Education (Harvard Business School Press Book) Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson Top performing companies like 7-Eleven Japan, ING Direct, MetLife, and UPS are using enterprise architecture to reduce costs while increasing strategic effectiveness and business agility. Based on research at over 200 companies, this book describes how these and other leading companies use architecture to guide the evolution of a core foundation of systems and processes to ultimately create a more competitive business. More >>
The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday Currency) Peter Senge A revolution is underway in today's organizations. As Peter Senge and his co-authors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end "business as usual" tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Today's most innovative leaders are recognizing that for the sake of our companies and our world, we must implement revolutionary--not just incremental--changes in the way we live and work. More >>
Human-Induced Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Assessment (Cambridge University Press) M. Schlesinger, H. Kheshgi, J. Smith, F. de la Chesnaye, J. Reilly, T. Wilson, C. Kolstad Urban air pollution and climate are closely connected due to shared generating processes (e.g., combustion) for emissions of the driving gases and aerosols. Thus policies designed to address air pollution may impact climate and vice versa. We present calculations using a model coupling economics, atmospheric chemistry, climate and ecosystems to illustrate some effects of air pollution policy alone on global warming. More >>
Design-Inspired Innovation (World Scientific Publishing Company) James M. Utterback, Eduardo Alvarez, Sten Ekman, Susan Walsh Sanderson, Bruce Tether, Roberto Verganti Design-Inspired Innovation takes a unique look at the intersection between design and innovation, and explores the novel ways in which designers are contributing to the development of products and services. The book's scope is international, with emphasis on design activities in Boston, England, Sweden, and Milan. Through a rich variety of cases and cultural prisms, the book extends the traditional design viewpoint and stretches the context of industrial design to question -- and answer -- what design is really all about. It gives readers tools for inspiration, and shows how design can change language and even create human possibilities. More >>

Publications

X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed (Harvard Business School Press)
Deborah Ancona, Henrik Bresman

The X-Team is much more than just the latest B-school theory -- it's a well-established, but often hidden, reality that's now being highlighted by this new book. Challenging the traditional notions of what makes a successful team, the authors' years of research support a new way of doing things. This new kind of team, dubbed X-Teams, has team spirit, but the team also projects upwards and outwards. The group establishes cooperative relationships, seeks out key information from other teams and outside sources, evangelizes the team's mission to key stakeholders, and actively pursues support from management. The poorest-performing teams, on the other hand, focused inward. The book explains that X-teams not only are able to adapt in ways that traditional teams aren't, but that they actually improve an organization's ability to produce creative ideas and execute them -- increasing the entrepreneurial and innovative capacity within the firm. More >>

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins)
Dan Ariely

Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart and why honest people may steal office supplies or communal food, but not money. More >>

Breaking the Mold (ILR Press)
Lotte Bailyn

In this second edition of Breaking the Mold, MIT Sloan Professor Lotte Bailyn maintains the long-standing separation between work and family life is an outdated concept. She contends that unless American business radically rethinks some of its basic assumptions about work, time, and career paths, both employee and employer will experience setbacks in today's intensely competitive business environment. Bailyn shows how the structure and culture of corporate life could be changed to integrate all of an employee's obligations and interests. And she illustrates the benefits that such change can have for the organization itself. More >>

The Outside-in Corporation (McGraw-Hill)
Barbara E. Bund

This book presents a new approach that enables business people to design and operate their businesses (both strategies and actions) based firmly on a customer perspective -- in other words, from the outside in. The approach works despite the real-world challenge that there is never as much available information about customers as business people want and need. It leads to marketplace strategies with a clear, explicit customer reason for every marketplace action -- strategies with improved probabilities of success, that can be communicated throughout an organization and then understood and implemented by employees at all levels, and that can be adapted effectively as conditions change. More >>

Dynamic Analysis in the Social Sciences (Elsevier Science)
Emilio J. Castilla

The study of social dynamics using quantitative methodology is complex and calls for cutting-edge technical and methodological approaches in social science research. This book presents the existing statistical models and methods available for understanding social change over time. It provides step-by-step instructions for designing and conducting longitudinal research, with special focus on the longitudinal analysis of both quantitative outcomes (for the modeling of change in continuous variables) and qualitative outcomes (for the modeling of events occurring over time). More >>

Staying Power: Six Enduring Principles for Managing Strategy and Innovation in an Uncertain World (Oxford University Press)
Michael A. Cusumano

Cusumano explains the six critical principals that put today's top companies at the front of the line-and kept them there. Drawing on real-life examples, he illustrates how the best companies put these principles into practice, identifying precisely how these ideas have lead to concrete success time after time. More >>

Catalyst Code: The Strategies Behind the World's Most Dynamic Companies (Harvard Business School Press)
David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Catalysts are the new business powerbrokers. Fueled by the increasing interdependence of global markets, technology, and consumers, catalysts are reshaping entire industries as they mobilize two or more distinct customer groups around a common platform to create value and drive profits. Some of the world's most important businesses -- from Lloyd's of London and Hearst Newspapers to Microsoft and Google -- have made profits by simultaneously bringing together distinct customer groups who need each other onto the same platform. Their successes demonstrate that, to succeed, catalysts must defy traditional business and economic wisdom when designing business models, pricing schemes, and organizational incentives. Catalyst Code shows executives and entrepreneurs how to innovate and profit by detailing new economic theory and business history, as well as through extensive interviews with established and emerging catalysts. More >>

Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries (MIT Sloan School of Management, Research Paper Series)
Andrei Hagiu, David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

As they wait in long lines to buy the latest game console, few shoppers realize that the most important element of that Xbox (as well as of their cell phones, PDAs, web-based software such as eBay, and far more) is something they can't even see. Invisible Engines tells the important story of how invisible but powerful software platforms are driving not only today's technology, but tomorrow's innovations and economy. The book recounts the growth, development and marketing of software platforms, which have turned devices such as Sony's PlayStation and Apple's iPod into household names and tools for everyday life. Because software platforms can be used by independent companies or developers to offer a wide range of products and services, the authors note, they function as "invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century." More >>

The Delta Model: Reinventing Your Business Strategy (Springer)
Arnoldo C. Hax

Strategy is the most central issue in management. It has to do with defining the purpose of an organization, understanding the market in which it operates and the capabilities the firm possesses, and putting together a winning plan. There are many influential frameworks to help managers undertake a systematic reflection on this issue. The most dominant approaches are Michael Porter's "Competitive Strategy" and the "Resource-Based View of the Firm," popularized by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. Arnoldo Hax argues there are fundamental drawbacks in the underlying hypotheses of these approaches in that they define strategy as a way to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. More >>

The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press)
Thomas W. Malone

Imagine organizations where bosses give employees huge freedom to decide what to do and when to do it. Imagine electing your own bosses and voting directly on important company decisions. Imagine organizations where most workers aren't employees at all, but electronically connected freelancers living wherever they want to. And imagine that all this freedom in business lets people get more of whatever they really want in life--money, interesting work, helping other people, or time with their families. More >>

Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges (Harvard Business School Press)
Andrew McAfee

"Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence. Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. More >>

Principles of Corporate Finance, 9th ed. (McGraw-Hill)
Stewart Myers, et al.

Principles of Corporate Finance is the worldwide leading text that describes the theory and practice of corporate finance. Throughout the book the authors show how managers use financial theory to solve practical problems and as a way of learning how to respond to change by showing not just how but why companies and management act as they do. More >>

The Truth About Middle Managers (Harvard Business Press)
Paul Osterman

"Middle management" is a term associated with relentless downsizing, corporate drudgery, and career dead-ends. Bashed by management gurus, dismissed by social scientists, and painted as victims by the media, middle managers seem permanently relegated to the sidelines of corporate power. More >>

Business Education (Harvard Business School Press Book)
Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill, David Robertson

Top performing companies like 7-Eleven Japan, ING Direct, MetLife, and UPS are using enterprise architecture to reduce costs while increasing strategic effectiveness and business agility. Based on research at over 200 companies, this book describes how these and other leading companies use architecture to guide the evolution of a core foundation of systems and processes to ultimately create a more competitive business. More >>

The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday Currency)
Peter Senge

A revolution is underway in today's organizations. As Peter Senge and his co-authors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end "business as usual" tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Today's most innovative leaders are recognizing that for the sake of our companies and our world, we must implement revolutionary--not just incremental--changes in the way we live and work. More >>

Human-Induced Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Assessment (Cambridge University Press)
M. Schlesinger, H. Kheshgi, J. Smith, F. de la Chesnaye, J. Reilly, T. Wilson, C. Kolstad

Urban air pollution and climate are closely connected due to shared generating processes (e.g., combustion) for emissions of the driving gases and aerosols. Thus policies designed to address air pollution may impact climate and vice versa. We present calculations using a model coupling economics, atmospheric chemistry, climate and ecosystems to illustrate some effects of air pollution policy alone on global warming. More >>

Design-Inspired Innovation (World Scientific Publishing Company)
James M. Utterback, Eduardo Alvarez, Sten Ekman, Susan Walsh Sanderson, Bruce Tether, Roberto Verganti

Design-Inspired Innovation takes a unique look at the intersection between design and innovation, and explores the novel ways in which designers are contributing to the development of products and services. The book's scope is international, with emphasis on design activities in Boston, England, Sweden, and Milan. Through a rich variety of cases and cultural prisms, the book extends the traditional design viewpoint and stretches the context of industrial design to question -- and answer -- what design is really all about. It gives readers tools for inspiration, and shows how design can change language and even create human possibilities. More >>

Innovative Thinking

Books