Business thinking between the covers, compiled by FRANK DILLON

Winning the Story Wars

by Jonah Sachs

Harvard Business Review Press €24.99

Most marketing messages, be they in traditional or digital form, fail to make an impression with consumers. Recipients prefer to seek out their own messages instead. Getting attention in an overcrowded media marketplace is therefore a huge challenge.

In this book, Sachs argues that the most effective messages are those with compelling stories. Many of these stories are drawn from ancient mythology. Themes often include the victory of humanity over tyranny, of the natural world over soulless machines, of people restoring ethics to a corrupt society.

A common theme in many of these tales is people reaching for their highest potential and struggling to create a better world.

According to the author, a small group of storytellers have either known or sensed this all along, building successful brands, entertainment and political messages that become legendary by understanding this formula.

Sachs has used this approach himself to help hundreds of social brands and causes make an impact. The opportunity for breakthrough is wide open, he says, because only a select few brands and causes have learnt how to tell compelling stories.

Watermelons

by James Delingpole

Biteback Publishing €19.99

Delingpole is a conservative blogger and author who nails his colours firmly to the mast in this polemic against the green lobby. He is best known for his exposure of the collusion of scientists to manipulate data on global warming in a scandal that came to be known as “Climategate”.

The sub-title of this book, “How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your childrens future”, sets the tone from the outset. Delingpole invites readers to imagine a world in which organic food, sustainability, biofuels and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) were more harmful to humanity than GM food, industry oil and ExxonMobil and where carbon dioxide was our friend.

Delingpole’s thesis is that much of the concern about the planet is at best well-intentioned but misinformed. Take, for example, claims about the Arctic shrinking. Yes, he says, an average 3.8 million miles of sea ice melts every summer, but it is restored every year in winter by freezing. He is sceptical about the work and motives of environmental groups and highlights the large salaries paid to chief executives of many of these groups. The book is written with great humour, but there’s a serious side that will raise the hackles of environmentalists.

Positive Linking – How Networks Can Change the World

by Paul Ormerod

FaberFaber €14.99

Ormerod is a respected economist and author of The Death of Economics and Why Most things Fail. In this book, he argues that the financial crisis has shown us that conventional economics is drastically limited by its failure to comprehend networks. Economists need to change the way they think and the way they forecast to take account of this, he says.

This recent crisis in which network effects are a driving force is completely different from the world of conventional economics in which isolated individuals weigh up the costs and benefits of any particular course of action. While incentives have not disappeared as a driver of human behaviour, network effects can be far more powerful than incentives.

Nobody understood the full ramifications of the world that had been created in the years leading up to the crisis in 2008 and gradually doubts began to seep across the network of banks about whether it was possible to know the true potential extent of the losses of another bank.

Ormerod’s book questions many of the conventional financial models used by economists and central bankers. It is a useful book for students of economics but not light reading for the general reader.