The Best Business Book I Read This Year

Attitudes to material acquisition have varied greatly down the ages. Frank Trentmann, in his ambitious history of the subject from medieval times to the present, carefully puts the case for and against. Karl Marx, notably, viewed consumerism as morally derelict and in some ways sinful. The consumer society he decried was made flesh in London department stores such as Harrods, where beef from Argentina, sherry from Portugal and other products of the global trade explosion of the 1870s offered unprecedented levels of “commodity fetishism”.

Trentmann, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, eschews moral judgments. But in the book’s second half he appears to question the value of fair trade and other 20th century, quasi-Christian consumer movements. Affluent consumers in the west are made to feel virtuous by buying Oxfam coffee and tea. (“Those so inclined can be buried in a fair trade bamboo coffin made in Bangladesh,” he adds.) At any rate, citizen-consumers in the west have the luxury of ethical consumption, while others do not. Consumerism (from the Latin consumere, “use up”) has an overtone of waste. A century after Marx, the Italian writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini divined a “fascist” element in consumerism.

You can even create some quick, canned copy and do a series of targeted Instagram DMs to try to recruit freelance designers you love and follow. If you don’t have the funds to do the above, you can download helpful apps like Canva and Planoly . These platforms provide out-of-the-box, sharp templates and color combos for IG Stories, grid posts, presentations, and more. They quite literally put a digital designer at your fingertips. In chapters of sparkling prose and sympathetic insight, Ronald traces Nast’s life from his birth in New York in 1873 (and his life-long reaction against the wastrel ways of his profligate father) to his early start in the magazine world ...

But the closer you are to fully owning your customer, the better. If you have a platform-based business, like an Etsy shop or a Depop page, it might feel like there’s no point leaving the nest. You’ve grown on those platforms and because of those platforms, and they’ve provided a safe environment for you to experiment and evolve. That being said, if you want to expand your business, an ownedand-operated Shopify or Squarespace site might be part of your toolkit.

And you will enjoy the piles of books I’ve got for myself in my latest Book Token Splurge, lots of interest there. This is the first novel in a two-part series Andrew Carnegie detailing the creation of an international cosmetics empire. It is set in Hollywood beginning in the late ’80s or ’90s and continues into the present. Ostensibly, it’s an insider’s look at how big business rolls, but it is also a sprawling melodrama featuring characters readers will love to hate. Babur had transitioned between two completely different places, writing his version of his story.

Despite its merits, however, the book has a few drawbacks, largely related to the author’s own cultural sympathies. The Ottoman Empire–referred to, in a rather hostile manner, as ‘the Turks’ in most instances–is portrayed as an inevitable regional disaster falling upon various enclaves in turn, rather than as a complex historical actor. Other Venetian rivals, such as Genoa and Pisa, are likewise passed over.

If workers owed their livelihoods to the company, then in the absence of the East India Company, they would have depended on another source. The “expenditure” data on Table 9.4, likewise, should be treated with great caution. They reflect cash payments including the translation of cash into other types of assets, such as goods and bullion for export. “Expenditure” thus does not signal the market value of resources actually consumed by the company in a specific period of time. The author needs a rigorous framework for measuring the economic impacts of the corporation in order to persuade the reader that the company was an economic juggernaut.

She doesn’t add a great deal to these works, with the exception of well-chosen quotations from a trove of letters Nast wrote late in his life to his second wife, which are touching and revealing about, for example, the sting he felt from business setbacks ... Breeziness is arguably a legitimate stylistic choice for a book about slick magazines. But the abundance of clichés in Condé Nast isn’t defensible ... Some sentences are case studies in what can happen when metaphors collide. Becoming Facebook shares how Facebook navigated in meeting these challenges, but always persisted on in its world disrupting mission of making the world more connected and open. By adopting and staying focused on such a bold mission, the book insists, Facebook has been able to achieve technological marvels like sharing, collecting and categorizing over a billion posts per day.