Past is prologue, so they say. In 1903, as chocolate magnate Milton Hershey was preparing to build his new, utopian town of Hershey, Pa., he declared it would be a place with "no poverty, no nuisances, no evil."

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Bob Sutton is a provocateur. The Stanford B-school professor'sThe No Asshole Rule jolted readers with its descriptions of unacceptable workplace behavior and a willingness to expose CEO offenders. The book's unconditional directive: Companies should ban bullying personalities from their ranks.

Earlier Sutton books included Weird Ideas That Work (on creativity) and Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths & Total Nonsense (on "evidence-based management") -- and once again, the titles said it all.

Now Sutton is back with a follow-up: Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best...and Learn from the Worst (Business Plus, $23.99). With its lists of dos and don'ts aimed at a readership of managers, this volume is more conventional and less lively than its predecessor -- but it's still well worth a read.

"Squelch Your Inner Bosshole"

Not that Sutton has totally laid down his Uzi. A chapter entitled "Squelch Your Inner Bosshole" instructs managers on how to face up to and overcome their own bad habits. The author cites a 2007 Zogby survey to the effect that 72% of workplace bullies are bosses. He even tells of one case in which a manager actually waterboarded an employee to encourage him to sell more.

"If a team of world-class behavioral scientists designed a job that was optimized for turning occupants into assholes, the result would be disturbingly similar to many, if not most, bosses' jobs," the author writes. In short: Bosses have power over others and are themselves under lots of pressure, which they too often shove down to underlings.

So what's the remedy? One idea is to "post a bosshole bounty: Pay twenty dollars to anyone who tells you when you have been a jerk." And if you're really out of control, you could team up with a "toxic handler" who'll help you clean up your messes.

Incentive Systems a Thorny Matter

A great deal of Sutton's advice involves developing "the right mindset." Getting the proper balance between being too assertive and not assertive enough. Concentrating on small wins, and helping your subordinates get their work done while experiencing dignity and pride. Accepting at least some of the blame when things go wrong."Giving your followers more credit than you think they deserve" -- since bosses routinely get more credit than they deserve.

Incentive systems can be a thorny matter, Sutton says. Companies must be on guard that "anointed stars" do not undermine the performance of others.

Reward systems such as the bonuses at Merrill Lynch, says the author, can encourage selfishness and the hoarding of skills that make it tough for new employees to learn anything. Overall organizational performance can suffer as a result.

Be Hypersensitive

The best bosses "protect their people from red tape, meddlesome executives, nosy visitors, unnecessary meetings and a host of other insults, intrusions and time wasters." Sutton even encourages "creative incompetence" as a way of minimizing "half-assed" tasks imposed from on high. (Computer-generated performance reviews, anyone?)

The author concludes with an unexpected, seemingly un-Sutton-like maxim: "To be a great boss, you've got to think and act as if it is all about you." An invitation to egomania? In this case, no. Sutton says managers should be hypersensitive to the impression they make on subordinates -- becoming very conscious of "what it feels like to work for you."

Because, after all, in hierarchical organizations, it really is all about them.

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There will always be an England, they say. But where would the sceptered isle be without its tea? Sans Early Grey, would Churchill have been as staunch a warrior or Laurence Olivier as nimble a thespian?

Around the year 1700, tea was effectively a controlled substance. It was heavily taxed by the government, costly to import from China, and sometimes illicit, having been smuggled in by criminal gangs. Not until the last quarter of the 19th Century did tea become a British household staple, after a Scottish adventurer stole some heavily guarded seedlings from China and facilitated the development of tea plantations in British-controlled India.

By the late 1880s, the average Briton drank thirty-five gallons of tea each year. But even then, much of it was low quality, often moldy and musty-tasting.

From Glasgow to Riches

Enter Thomas Lipton, the subject of Michael D'Antonio's entertaining and instructive new book, A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton's Extraordinary Life and His Quest for the America's Cup (Riverhead Books). The Glasgow native who'd briefly lived in America was the owner of some 150 bright and attractive food shops -- the application of merchandising methods he'd picked up from such Yanks as department-store magnate A.T. Stewart. Lipton attracted customers with low prices, superior goods, and virtually constant promotion and advertising. In one stunt, he paraded pigs through the streets bearing signs with such slogans as: "Lipton's: The Best Shop in Town for Irish Bacon."

Lipton entered the tea market with gusto: He received sizable discounts from the controlling middlemen in exchange for bulk purchases. He obtained high-quality stuff, advertised heavily in newspapers, and priced his tea well below that of competitors. And he branded his wares, offering Lipton Tea in bright yellow paper packages rather than selling it loose as most others did.

Lipton Tea became the company's signature product and, alongside Cadbury chocolate, one of the earliest consumer brands. And in 1890, the merchant solidified his position by purchasing thousands of acres of tea plantations in Ceylon. Soon, Lipton took on the U.S. market and, employing the same promotional methods, taught Americans to sip what they'd previously regarded as an alien brew. Before long, he had new products and new stores -- from Newfoundland to New Zealand -- and a sprawling 14-acre factory-and-office complex in London. The Lipton name was everywhere -- on ads in train stations and in shop windows, and on the sides of a fleet of company motor trucks. Asked the secret of his success by a journalist, Lipton replied: "Secret of it? Make no secret of it. Advertise all you can."

Boating Consumes Him

Much like Lipton's life, D'Antonio's stimulating and informative volume falls into two parts. With his fortune secure, and after receiving a knighthood in 1897 thanks to his much-publicized charitable works, Lipton made himself into an international sportsman. There was little in the way of big-time athletics during that era; the biggest sporting event in the world was the America's Cup, a series of sailing races pitting one British yacht against one American, and held at irregular intervals off the New Jersey shore. The New York Yacht Club entry was the perennial winner, with the 1893 British defeat marred by post-race accusations of favoritism and cheating. Lipton, who knew as much about yachting as about igloo-making, determined to take up the baton.

In a series of five Cups held between 1899 and 1930, Lipton repeatedly challenged the Americans -- and never won. He spent millions upon millions of dollars on the design and construction of a new, presumably faster ship for each race. The New Yorkers were, of course, spending equivalent amounts of money and effort, even into the early years of the Great Depression.

D'Antonio offers exciting accounts of each race. The author describes the design and building of Lipton's Shamrock I through Shamrock V, and the various American craft, Columbia, Reliance, Resolute, and Enterprise. The first contest proved dramatic. Thousands of visitors descended upon New York, where two days of banquets, concerts, fireworks displays, and oratory celebrated the event. Perhaps coincidentally, Admiral George Dewey, fresh from the U.S. triumph in the Spanish-American War, arrived on the scene, accidentally met up with Lipton, and became a pal to the Briton. The races were initially frustrated by an absence of wind, but this changed, and on the morning of the second heat, Shamrock's topmast snapped in the wind. The American ship won all three heats decisively.

"The Good Millionaire"

Lipton was ever gracious in defeat -- perhaps because he had a broader agenda. Win or lose, he was using the contests as a way of building recognition for his tea and other wares. The tony America's Cup, accompanied by lavish society balls and attended by princes and Presidents, became just one more advertising opportunity. Equally significant, Lipton was turning himself into a recognizable brand. Consistently attired in an open frock coat, yachting cap, white high-collared shirt, and polka-dot bow tie, the tall, mustachioed gent became, over the decades, as recognizable as Theodore Roosevelt -- or Mickey Mouse. In contrast to such Robber Barons as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Lipton was "the good millionaire," in D'Antonio's words - a paragon who'd risen from Glaswegian poverty to riches via his exemplary personal attributes. And anticipating such figures as Noel Coward and Alistair Cooke, the much feted and congratulated Lipton became America's professional Englishman -- a worthy candidate for a special relationship.

Lipton was treated like royalty during trips to the United States. A 1931 visit, though, was special, as Lipton was presented with a "loser's cup" fashioned by Tiffany. Given a police escort to New York's City Hall, cheered by thousands outside and inside the building, he was praised by Mayor Jimmy Walker as "the greatest sportsman of our time."

But he didn't have long to bask in the afterglow of Walker's praise. Lipton died that fall, felled by a respiratory infection. You can, of course, still buy Lipton's primary product, and many, many people do. With $3.5 billion in annual sales, the brand commands a tenth of the global market for tea.

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What do George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Maria Bartiromo have in common? If you guessed that they are all once-powerful people who still inform the global conversation you are partly right. All three are also publishing books this fall. They join a raft of lesser-known authors highlighted at this past week's trade fair, BookExpo America in New York City. Each year the event draws roughly 30,000 book-industry folks, including bookstore owners, publicists and marketers, writers, and publishing-house executives and staffers. They come to get a glimpse of the all-important fall season's books, and perhaps to collect a signed book from such brand-name authors as Barbra Streisand (yes, really) or Mary Higgins Clark.

Here is a sampling of forthcoming titles that were heralded at the recently concluded event.

Bush's volume, Decision Points, will be out from Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, in November. Described by the publisher as "a strikingly candid journey through the defining decisions of his life," the autobiography is likely to get the full-court promotional treatment: TV talk-show promos, front-page stories, and wide-ranging reviews.

Crown paid Bush an estimated $7 million. But that publisher has more than one horse in this race -- and a horse of a far different color, at that. In August, readers can pick up Arianna Huffington's Third World America, in which the much-televised Web mogul tells how "the promise of the American dream - that our children will be better off than we are - has been broken."

A separate Random House imprint, the prestigious Alfred A. Knopf, will publish Blair's book in September. A Journey, says the publisher, is "an intimate, far-reaching, and hugely revealing memoir." (Is there any other kind, according to publishers?) Knopf, too, offers dissenters a bit of balance with former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich's Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future. The volume includes "an assessment of what must be done to ensure that prosperity is widely shared" going forward. That book is out in September, as well.

Hot Topic: The Economy

CNBC anchor Bartiromo's The Week That Changed Wall Street: An Eyewitness Account will be published by Penguin (PSO) imprint Portfolio in September. Supporting this "thrilling narrative," the publisher says, are the author's interviews with former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, former AIG Chairman Hank Greenberg, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and more. A less-breathless treatment from the same publisher is financial analyst Eric Janszen's The Post-Catastrophe Economy: Prospering After the Great Recession, which suggests there are even more economic woes to come. And in November Portfolio will issue yet another financial-meltdown analysis, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis by Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair magazine and New York Times columnist Joe Nocera. For the first time, the publisher promises, we'll read about the true roots of the crisis.

Of course, there are a host of non-blockbusters also coming in the fall. Consultants Bill Jensen and Josh Klein tell how to circumvent your company's stupid rules to improve efficiency in Hacking Work (Portfolio). Social networking is explored in consultant and former Web executive Lisa Gansky's The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing and in Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams' Macrowikinomics, both from Portfolio. Stanford University professor Robert Sutton, author of the 2007 best-selling The No-Asshole Rule, is back in September with Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best...And Learn From the Worst (Business Plus). Former Lazard Freres and Quadrangle Group executive Steven Rattner describes his role in the car-industry bailout in Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry (Houghton, Mifflin Harcourt), coming in October.

Business History and Big Ideas

Big idea books include What Technology Wants (Viking) by former Wired editor Kevin Kelly, an October release with "a refreshing view of technology as a living force in the world." Aspen Institute president and former CNN chairman Walter Isaacson's Profiles in Leadership: Historians on the Elusive Quality of Greatness will be published by W.W. Norton in October. And Stanford University historian Ian Morris's Why The West Rules-For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is also out in October.

And then there's business history. In December, Forbes writer Emily Lambert's The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator and the Origins of the World's Biggest Markets (Basic Books) details past and present doings at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, "the original (and eventually largest) futures market." In November comes Felix Rohatyn's Dealings: A Political and Financial Life (Simon & Schuster), in which the former Lazard Freres managing director looks back on his eventful career. And last but let's hope not least, my own book, The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy (Basic Books) hits stores in September. It describes how two strands of capitalism -- one utopian, the other exploitative and profiteering -- have competed for ascendancy in the United States.

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If you were to spot Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (Harper, $26.99) on a bookstore shelf, you might imagine from the snappy title that it's one of the many recent volumes on behavioral economics -- or even a book of personal finance tips. And to be sure, his book does contain Freakonomics-like references to lab experiments involving chimps, and allusions to the oft-cited "prisoners' dilemma" research.

But Ridley's volume is something else again -- a big-idea book with sweeping theories about civilization somewhat in the mode of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ridley's thesis: "The great headlong experiment of human economic 'progress' " is the result of the eons-old emergence of barter and exchange, which in turn allowed for the division of labor, specialization of work, innovation, and the evolution of our collective, cumulative intelligence.

Don't get the idea, though, that The Rational Optimist is a slog -- or a work to be gulped down quickly. Rather, it is a cleverly written, deeply researched effort meant to be savored slowly. My guess is that readers will find themselves often quoting its tasty bits of evidence, or even reading it aloud to others. Did you know that chickpeas may have been the first farm crop, cultivated some 11,000 years ago? Or that in early Mesopotamia, the word for accountant was the same as the word for high priest? (Casts new light on the expulsion of the money changers from the temple, doesn't it?) Or that ancient Rome's hegemony was the result not of military conquest but of trade, particularly with India, "the world's economic superpower"?

Ridley, who holds a doctorate in zoology from Oxford, is the former science editor of The Economist and the author of numerous books, including the best-seller Genome, and a biography of biologist and DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick. The Rational Optimist includes chapters on everything from the emergence of trust in human relations to the Green Revolution and the triumph of cities.

In Praise of Innovation and Competition

Trade is at the center of the book's action, and Ridley emerges as a free-trade fundamentalist: "There is not a single example of a country opening its borders to trade and ending up poorer," he writes, offering noticeably little sympathy to displaced European shoemakers or U.S. autoworkers. Too bad for such folks, but they are not, in his narrative, the great enemies of progress. Instead, he consistently shows the villains of history to be greedy, "rent-seeking" aristocrats and bureaucrats -- "elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society's income by interfering more and more in people's lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce."

He shows this dead-hand function stifling innovation in one empire after another, from Egypt through Greece and Rome and especially in the Ming dynasty in China. His heroes, on the other hand, include the ancient Phoenicians, whose seagoing entrepreneurship prompted "a burst of specialization all around the Mediterranean," in which various peoples discovered their respective competitive advantages.

Trade and markets are key to the optimism of the book's title. "The market process of exchange and specialization ... gives a vast reason for optimism about the future of the human race," he writes. One threat after another goes down to defeat in Ridley's pages: Malthusian overpopulation, inadequate production of food, Africa's stalled economic growth, even climate change.

Not every reader will find his wide-ranging arguments persuasive, of course. And there are problems with Ridley's historical pageant. For one thing, the author underplays the extent of past conflicts. Without denying that the Industrial Revolution entailed exploitation and poverty, he asserts that mid-19th century British laborers, much like the American, Taiwanese, and Chinese workers of later periods, "flocked to the factories from the farms" to escape the even more grinding toil and misery of rural life. Missing from this paean to free will is the element of coercion, including the falling prices for agricultural products that encouraged people to migrate. Ridley overemphasizes the carrot and averts his eyes from the stick.

The Libertarian's Lament

The author also gives little credit to the role of government. He asserts that the "tiny nation" of Britain, with its mere 8 million people in 1750, outperformed far more populous and productive lands thanks to the rare confluence of such advantages as sufficient capital, freedom, education, and culture. So what about the Royal Navy, which patrolled the sea, opened shuttered ports, eliminated the slave trade, and enforced free-trade imperialism? Ridley is simply not a fan of any government, and although he gives the state credit for some innovations -- nuclear weapons, the Internet -- he is more comfortable dwelling on its failed bets, such as interactive television.

That goes with the author's libertarian bent. The primary reason to be optimistic about the future, he says, is the way humanity's collective intelligence -- generally facilitated by market mechanisms, especially the exchange of ideas -- has overcome so many threats and obstacles over the years. In every age, Ridley believes, pessimists have dominated the public debate, and our era is no different. But humanity will overcome, he asserts, so long as ideas "continue to have sex with each other" -- i.e., intermingle and stimulate novel thinking. What's more, "economic evolution will raise the living standards of the twenty-first century to unimagined heights," he predicts.

In the era of the BP oil spill, big Toyota blunders, and Wall Street meltdowns, it's difficult to be quite as sanguine about a capitalistic future as Ridley is. Nevertheless, his book should seduce and charm thinking readers everywhere.

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Once upon a time New York City was home to a lot of people who enjoyed watching the construction of high-rise buildings. Fences around sites even had portholes to facilitate the practice. Today the pastime is less popular, perhaps due to the fact that, according to the New York City Department of Buildings, there are currently about 600 stalled construction projects in town.

No matter. A somewhat similar, watch-'em-work experience can be had while reading Made By Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World (Portfolio, $25.95) by Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder of the wonder-eyed website BoingBoing and editor-in-chief of Make magazine, the do-it-yourself Bible.

Here is Frauenfelder describing his efforts to convert a backyard shack into a chicken coop: "I used a clamping miter box to cut the 45-degree angles for the frame and used the brackets to join the pieces. Things were going surprisingly well until I tried to attach the fourth piece and discovered that the furring strips I had bought were so twisted that I couldn't complete the frame without seriously warping it. The wood was against me. Fortunately, I had that extra piece of furring strip, and it seemed straight, so I cut it to size... I didn't want to make another trip to Home Depot unless I absolutely had to, so I forged ahead with the less-than-perfect materials at hand forcing the pieces into position."

And on and on: Frauenfelder's blow-by-blow account of how he built the chicken coop continues for eight pages. Then the family moves and he has to build another chicken coop, only this time there's a problem with coyotes breaking in and killing chickens, so further construction is necessary. This involves "eleven metal fence posts, fifty feet of wire screen, and one hundred cable ties." And forget about the work of caring for the actual chickens and their, um, byproducts.

Whew!

Does Making Things Make Life More Meaningful?

Despite such indulgent tales of sweated labor, the author makes a persuasive case that a DIY approach can help its practitioners achieve "a richer and more meaningful life, a life of engagement with the world." Moreover, we should probably pay attention, as the "real simple" movement seems to be attracting enthusiastic followers. Make magazine has over 100,000 subscribers, at least some of whom must actually build the compressed-air rockets, solar tracking platforms, and cat toys described in its pages. Over 75,000 people attended that publication's 2009 Maker Faire, a DIY expo held in San Mateo, California.

But if, like me, your primary exposure to miter boxes comes by way of This Old House reruns, your feet firmly up on the coffee table, Made By Hand will be less than totally gripping. I applaud those who can install solar panels and drain their backyard cesspools while cultivating Amish Deer Tongue lettuce and home-schooling their kids. Soldier on, comrades! Me, I'll be sitting in the shade with a cold drink.

That said, I found Frauenfelder's later chapters more engaging. In one, he tells how to construct a "dronestick" -- a simple, three-string musical instrument -- out of scrap lumber and matchsticks. Then he makes a wooden kitchen spoon from a broken-off tree branch. Then he figures out how to make a simple fermented tea ... fermented? As in bathtub gin? Suddenly Made By Hand had my attention. It wasn't long, however, before the author moved on to beekeeping and my interest waned again.

Why not simply buy a cheap, secondhand guitar rather than construct your own musical instrument? Well, that would be giving in to the "mainstream music industry, which works to drive the lust to buy things." The DIYers of today have succeeded "in deprogramming themselves of the lifelong consumer brainwashing they've received" and have stopped "depending so much on faceless corporations to provide them with what they need." At a simpler level, Frauenfelder says working on DIY projects teaches us that "mistakes are not only inevitable - they're a necessary part of learning and skill building." And who can't relate to that?

Frauenfelder is hardly one of those black-clad anarchists now seen in the streets of Athens or even a Gen-Y Abbie Hoffman. But readers can discover in his book a provocative anti-capitalist ideology for the 21st Century: Tune in, turn on, make stuff.

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There's a long tradition of Westerners going to the Far East to make their fortunes. British novelist Jane Gardam captures it the title of her novel Old Filth, which is both the nickname of her central character and an acronym for "Failed In London, Try Hong Kong."

A recent practitioner of the approach is Stephen H. Greer, who recounts his experiences in Starting From Scrap: An Entrepreneurial Success Story (Buford Books, $25). Like the character "Old Filth," Greer struck out in several attempts to land a Wall Street job, then in 1993 determined to make his pile in Hong Kong. There, he first considered becoming an importer of chicken feet, a much-sought-after delicacy in China.

But serendipity pointed him in the direction of the scrap-metal trade, of which he knew nothing. It's hardly the most glamorous of businesses, conjuring up images of auto graveyards and rusty E. coli-infected cans. But the upbeat and resilient Greer makes it interesting. He also is an engaging tour guide to the landscape of developing-world capitalism.

Talking the Talk

In China, Greer discovered that he was a good bluffer and talked his way into various company offices and deals. He also had the good fortune early on to meet and partner up with a shrewd Chinese woman, Mei, who would help show him the Asian ropes and in time become his wife. They first tried the "ornamental gift item" trade (toothbrush holders, anyone?), but quickly recognized the considerable opportunities available as a middleman in scrap metal.

Soon Greer's company, dubbed Hartwell International after his middle name, was deeply involved in purchasing magnesium ingots in China and shipping them to Japan and in acquiring stainless steel from various Southeast Asian dealers on behalf of a German recycling company. Within a few years -- dates aren't a strong suit in Starting From Scrap -- Greer's businesses were generating "a six-figure net income."

A piece of cake, it seems, although Greer was doubtless aided in his success by his daily habit of "kowtowing three times in front of a random deity" at a local Buddhist temple.

Wheeling and Dealing

Then the fun began. With four Southeast Asian scrap yards and operations in such far-flung places as Mexico, China, and South Carolina, he was hit by a plague of employee theft and gouging. His general manager in Guadalajara bought substandard metals, booked the shoddy stuff as expensive stainless steel and pocketed the difference.

Greer soon learned that another Mexican employee was strong-arming suppliers into giving kickbacks. In China, both his key operative and customs officials proved greedy and dishonest. In Malaysia, petty theft of inventory was a persistent problem. Even his German customer, he says, was underhanded, attempting to renege on contracts.

Such experiences prompt Greer to offer a number of conclusions: In China, "the contract is just a guideline for future negotiations" and nothing likely to be honored. In Southeast Asia, "Chinese family businesses" have difficulty making deals with outsiders, whom they see as "a threat to internal family stability." In Mexico, "an antiquated legal system, which is constantly under repair, simply makes doing anything productive extremely complicated."

In 2001, The South China Morning Post and DHL recognized Greer as the "entrepreneur of the year." Within four years, he had sold his company to Sydney-based Smythson Recycling, and by 2008, he was out of the business altogether. Initially stunned that his scrap-metal adventure was at an end, he concludes that "selling the business was in some way a great relief."

He doesn't tell readers how much he got for his company, but you can be sure it wasn't chicken feet.

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That's the kind of thing that worries me about The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity (Harper, $26.99), Florida's attempt to find a silver lining inside the cloud of our current economic malaise.

'The Great Reset'

There's much in this book to provoke thought. Surveying previous great economic meltdowns, the author asserts that "crises inevitably give rise to critical periods in which an economy is remade in ways that allow it to recover and begin growing again." Such a "Great Reset," as he terms it, is likely to "take shape around new infrastructure and systems of transportation [and] give rise to new housing patterns.... Eventually, it ushers in a whole new way of life."

But as in Florida's previous works, including The Rise of the Creative Class and Who's Your City?, this book seems at times to celebrate a Darwinian survival of the hippest, most youthful and most flexible sector of the global workforce. Kids, families, roots -- who needs 'em?

I don't want to overstate the book's shortcomings. After all, Florida, who teaches at the University of Toronto's business school, must be commended for his optimism, for taking the long view and for making an attempt to figure out what lies ahead in the not-so-distant future. This volume is certain to prompt plenty of stimulating discussion, both on the airwaves and in business circles.

Depression Brings Innovation

The author begins with succinct and well-researched examinations of two previous economic crises, the so-called Long Depression of 1873 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Along with the suffering in each case, he discovers immense technological advances, featuring inventions from the modern bicycle to the research laboratory and Fordist mass production. He says we may look for such innovation to follow in the wake of our own crisis.

Each earlier period also brought a geographic redistribution of the U.S. population -- the rapid growth of urban areas at the end of the 19th century and the burgeoning of suburbia as a consequence of the recovery from the 1930s depression. (Strangely, Florida has little to say about World War II, which also profoundly reshaped the society and the economy.) These reshufflings of population are central to Florida's analysis.

Drawing upon the work of geographer David Harvey, Florida argues that "technological fixes are insufficient to solve economic crises" and "the solution also always involves new patterns of real estate development and of economic geography broadly." It's just such a "spatial fix" that we must expect in our current recovery, argues Florida. Bye bye suburbia, especially in the Sunbelt. Hello, resilient postindustrial cities.

Deja Vu

At this point, the book may begin to seem a bit familiar to those who have read the author's previous works. Florida surveys city after city, finding promise in such places as New York, the District of Columbia and Charlotte, North Carolina, and dim prospects in Detroit, Akron, Elkhart, Indiana and more. He also lists the many advantages of Toronto, while deriding the Sunbelt, where he says "whole cities and metro regions became giant Ponzi schemes" thanks to the housing bubble. Florida's followers will find little that's truly novel in such chapters, but that's OK. The author is simply building upon and refining his previous work.

How will the anticipated "new way of life" look? That's difficult to say, Florida admits, even as he makes an attempt. A new economic landscape must "power new kinds of demand and undergird a new round of growth," just as the suburbs did for the auto age. Among the prominent features of this new landscape: High-speed trains to transport us and congestion pricing of roads to discourage auto use.

"Megaregions" such as "Char-lanta" (Atlanta, Charlotte, and Raleigh-Durham) and "Hou-Orleans" (Houston and New Orleans) are already emerging as "the seeds of a new spatial fix." Work must be enriched, especially given that 45% of today's jobs are in the low-paid service sector. The author says we must, as a society, de-emphasize the predatory finance sector and shift from "a trading to a building orientation." Finally, there must be a new social compact that emphasizes flexibility (especially with portable benefits) and personal development.

Altogether, it's a libertarian vision that favors creativity, youth, diversity (he's down on immigration restriction) and local government. And what of the financial bailout? Government "squanders precious resources that could support...future-oriented, prosperity-boosting efforts when it chooses to bail out old industries, breathe life back into outmoded institutions, or place Band-Aids on problems" such as those of Wall Street and Detroit automakers. It seems there's little place for ex-autoworkers or laid-off bond-traders in the Great Reset.

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It definitely seemed like a turning point.

Lehman Brothers was bankrupt, Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch had each been sold for a song, and the biggest institutions were pleading for government aid during the fall of 2008. A new title hit bookstore shelves: The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street as We Know It.

But the end was only a new beginning, it now seems.

"While some fabled institutions have vanished, the survivors have emerged larger, more profitable, and even more powerful," write MIT professor and onetime International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson and former McKinsey consultant James Kwak. Wall Street only became stronger, they say, thanks to the government ties that allowed its institutions a free ride on the backs of U.S. taxpayers.

"Washington has behaved like an emerging market government in the 1990s -- using public resources to protect a handful of large banks with strong political connections," Johnson and Kwak assert.

Break Up the Oligarchy

The authors' dense but compelling 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (Pantheon, $26.95) is a cri de coeur to break up the "oligarchy" that the authors say now dictates economic policy in the U.S. They are far from the only Establishment figures to take this position. As they point out, this past October former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the onetime champion of an unfettered free market, declared of the biggest financial institutions: "If they're too big to fail, they're too big."

The government bailout -- cheap capital infusions to the nine biggest banks, an $85 billion credit line to insurer AIG (AIG) and the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that allowed government purchase of worthless financial instruments -- represented nothing less than a blank check, say the authors. Unless further steps are taken, they go on, the effect will be further extravagant risk-taking and further financial crises in the future.

What really steams Johnson and Kwak is that the Obama administration seems as susceptible to Wall Street influence as did that of George W. Bush. This is not only a reflection of the fact that the Street spreads its largesse around, say the authors, who track the recent quadrupling of financial-sector campaign contributions, from $61 million in 1990 to $260 million in 2006. It's also because of the revolving door that circulates policymakers between Wall Street and Washington.

Same as the Old Bosses

If Goldman Sachs (GS) veteran Henry Paulson was the face of government economic policy at the end of the Bush term, the Street's influence hardly diminished as a new team stepped in, featuring the likes of ex-New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner, hedge-fund veteran Lawrence Summers, former Goldman partner Gary Gensler, and former investment banker Rahm Emanuel.

Perhaps even more important, the authors say, is the fact that the ideology of Wall Street -- the idea that "unfettered innovation and unregulated financial markets were good for America and the world" -- has become "the consensus position in Washington on both sides of the political aisle." As evidence, they offer a quote from Obama, speaking before a gathering of the 13 powerful bankers referred to in the book's title: "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks" of an aroused mob."

How can this be, when a seemingly wide gulf separates the pro-business GOP from the reformist Democrats? One answer: The increasingly technical nature of investing.

"On many issues crucial to the financial sector -- such as derivatives, securitization, or capital requirements -- all the people with relevant expertise were Wall Street veterans." As finance took on "the trappings of a branch of engineering," few outsiders have had the knowledge to intervene or even comment.

A Safe System Got Dismantled

It took decades for this state of affairs to develop. In a brief recounting of U.S. economic history, the authors describe past efforts to control bankers' power, beginning with Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and culminating in the regulatory legislation passed under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

"The Great Depression created the opportunity for a sweeping overhaul of the relationship between government and banks," the authors write. With passage of the Glass-Steagall banking act of 1933 and other laws, policymakers achieved "the safest banking system that America has known in its history."

But step by step, that state of affairs broke down, first with new financial innovations in the 1970s and 1980s -- junk bonds, arbitrage trading, derivatives -- and with wave after wave of bank mergers that created new, multistate mega-institutions. Glass-Steagall, regarded as quaint thanks to the pace of change, was repealed in 1999.

Johnson and Kwak also examine numerous emerging-market crises of the 1990s, including those in Korea, Indonesia and Russia. At the time, "few people, if any, thought that these crises had anything to teach the United States," say the authors, who recount how a smug U.S. regularly offered such lands a formula for reform.

Nationalize, Break Up Banks

But by 2009, the worm had turned: "If you hid the name of the country and just showed them the numbers, there is no doubt what old IMF hands would say," the authors wrote then in The Atlantic: "Nationalize troubled banks and break them up as necessary."

That's still a formula that Johnson and Kwak favor.

"All banks, including risk-seeking ones, should be limited to a size where they do not threaten the stability of the financial system," they say. That's probably no more than 4% of GDP, or roughly $570 billion in assets, and no more than 2% of GDP, or $285 billion, in the case of investment banks.

In fact, such limits would affect only six banks now: Bank of America (BAC), JP Morgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFS), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (MS).

Breaking them up would hardly be so very radical. Antitrust prosecution led to the end of the Standard Oil trust in 1911 and threatened Microsoft in 2000. The alternative, say the authors: Another crisis, sooner or later, and another no-win choice for taxpayers between bailout and disaster.

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Go to any newsstand, and you will see a clear demonstration of market segmentation: There are specialty magazines aimed at brides, fly fishermen, sports car enthusiasts, Latino moms, and African-American singles.

But there's always the possibility of splitting these interest groups into even smaller, and more elite, clusters. That's the premise of Black Is the New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans (Palgrave Macmillan, $35) by Uptown Media Group CEO Leonard E. Burnett Jr. and marketing consultant Andrea Hoffman.

There are three distinct segments of the African-American audience, say the authors, distinguished by age, education, income, and cultural tastes. "Affluent African Americans," or AAAs as they call their target group, are too frequently confused with an urban hip-hop crowd for whom ads featuring young black pop stars or athletes are best suited. "One-dimensional references," they assert, "have overshadowed the very real 'silent majority' that is this affluent group," which tends to be older and to have more sophisticated tastes. The authors estimate the buying power of this elite at $87.3 billion and rising.

So how should outfits with something to offer to upmarket African-Americans seek them out? A key way, say the authors, is via events marketing: Partnering with "a Black-oriented, member-based or philanthropic organization," such as the professional women's organization The Links, Incorporated or the professional men's group 100 Black Men of America. One company that has successfully organized such events, say the authors, is Aetna, whose foundation has co-sponsored various health initiatives with 100 Black Men of Atlanta. These have included efforts to improve awareness of childhood obesity and diabetes.

But print publishers will be happy to hear that the authors don't understate the importance of print advertising. "Put your ads where your audience is," they say. "The only publications expressly for the AAA audience are Black Enterprise, NV, Essence, and Uptown magazines." That's just a teeny bit self-serving: Burnett is Uptown's publisher.

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In every crisis there is danger -- and opportunity. For Joel Kurtzman, today's difficult economic scene offers organizations the rare chance to "bring down mindless hierarchies."

Don't get the idea that Kurtzman is a bomb-thrower. After all, he's a well-connected business consultant, senior fellow at Wharton, and former editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review. His new book, Common Purpose: How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary (Wiley, $27.95), is a paean to outfits that forge a "creative, dynamic, brave, and nearly invincible we" -- a team spirit built on inclusiveness and mutual goals. But it seems that the imperial CEO and the know-it-all executive have little place in Kurtzman's ideal outfit. After all, he argues that the fault of the current economic mess lies in "bad -- and in many cases, abysmal -- leadership within a large group of global institutions."

It's the author's opinion that the worst of the crisis is over, since he finds that many companies are rehiring. There are, of course, those organizations that are bringing on more top executives even as they lay off rank-and-filers. But that's not the primary problem today, he argues: Worse is inertia -- an uncertainty about how to proceed, that leads to inaction. "Some are stuck," he tells DailyFinance. "They've let people go or cut their hours, and now they don't know how to move forward."

As a model worthy of emulation, he points to FM Global, a 175-year-old property-insurance company with $5 billion in revenues. FM has had no layoffs and understands that its fortunes depend on the knowledge its employees possess. "When you walk into a hallway at that company, you can just feel that people there are committed and that they sense that what they do matters," Kurtzman told a hundred guests at a Manhattan book party at Michael's Restaurant, a publishing-industry favorite, last Wednesday.

FM Global has an unusual approach, the author says: Unlike most insurers, it employs no actuaries -- it depends instead on a staff of 1,400 trained engineers who examine a client's property and price policies, depending on potential problems they discover. The approach means decision-making is widely spread throughout the organization. And that, in turn, means an unusual level of loyalty -- and employment longevity -- among FM Global's workforce.

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Some social critics say companies that lay off employees are doing permanent damage to themselves. After all, they've spent years training the workers they're casting aside. Moreover, they may be abruptly discarding a great deal of institutional memory.

It turns out there's another cause for concern: Laid-off workers could be a valuable source of information to corporate spies. Such spooks have been known to stage fake job interviews to ferret out information about a former employer's ways and future plans. Even still-employed workers "can be surprisingly candid about their own company when they think they're interviewing for a job," writes Politico correspondent Eamon Javers.

At its best, Javers's uneven, intermittently absorbing new book, Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage (Harper, $26.99), exposes a little-known world of black ops, eavesdropping, and corporate skullduggery. But the book is marred by an elastic definition of corporate espionage, stretched to include everything from routine financial investigations to ordinary detective work conducted by Kroll Associates. Worse, the volume's historical chapters are poorly researched and larded with extraneous detail.

'Mafiya' Wars

Javers kicks off the book with one of his strongest stories: an account of a covert 2005 operation, Project Yucca. Conducted by private intelligence firm Diligence LLC for the Russian financial-industrial conglomerate Alpha Group Consortium, the mission entailed finding out as much as possible about Bermuda-based rival IPOC International Growth Fund. The operatives, all veterans of Western intelligence services, targeted an impressionable British-born KPMG accountant, Guy Enright.

In clandestine meetings, Diligence agents hinted that IPOC, a KPMG client, might be tied to the Russian mob -- and that Enright could serve his country by turning over confidential financial documents. This he did, furtively leaving such papers at designated, secret drop-off points. Cue the James Bond theme, running through Enright's Walter-Mitty-like brain. "It was a huge intelligence haul for Diligence," Javers writes, "which used it to stir up problems for IPOC." But within months, the operation was short-circuited when KPMG was tipped off by parties unknown -- and the accountancy filed suit against the intelligence firm. The spook outfit, which still maintains an office two blocks from the White House, today says that it has changed its roguish ways.

The Spies from Mars

Another engrossing tale involves the anything-but-sugary relations between chocolate giants Nestlé and Mars Inc. In 1997, the Swiss-based Nestlé encountered a sudden, seemingly well-organized campaign of resistance when it began marketing a new brand, Nestlé Magic: a small chocolate ball enveloping a plastic shell that contained a tiny Disney-themed toy. Although the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission had O.K.'d the product, numerous federal agencies and state attorneys general were inundated with complaints suggesting that the toy was a choking hazard.

Suspecting that rival Mars was somehow stirring up the problem, Nestlé hired Kroll Associates and, later, spy firm Beckett Brown International. After an investigation involving both surveillance and that yucky practice known as Dumpster-diving, Beckett fingered a Virginia consulting firm as the organizer of a Mars campaign against Nestlé.

But Beckett's activities didn't end there, Javers writes: Soon, on Nestlé's behalf, Beckett was running its own media-and-regulatory attack against Whetstone Candy Co., a small manufacturer that was producing its own toy-inside-a-chocolate product. Whetstone's goodies tanked -- but things turned out badly for Beckett, too, as that company fell apart in 1999.

Secret History

In contrast to such gripping recent tales, Javers really falls short in his historical chapters, which tend to be thinly sourced and, consequently, contain inaccuracies, sometimes in the service of sensationalism. We get a full chapter on Allan Pinkerton, America's first private eye and the founder of the sometimes-notorious detective firm that carried his name. (Since 1999, the Pinkerton Agency has been part of Sweden-based Securitas AB.) That section is drawn largely from one book, James Mackay's Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye. There's also material on Abraham Lincoln and Jesse James, both presumably somehow tied to corporate espionage.

Perhaps the most flawed section looks at the Pennsylvania coal-field wars of the 1870s, and the so-called "Molly Maguires" who were charged with numerous shootings and murders of coal-company officials. Again, possibly due to his overreliance on too few sources, Javers fails to take account of historians' growing understanding that there probably was no such organization: Some (but not all) of the 20 men who were tried and hanged may have been involved in acts of violence -- but their organizational link was probably not to Molly but to a respectable Irish fraternity, the Ancient Order of Hibernians. In fact, the chief infraction of these "terrorists" may have been to be on the other side of a labor war with the wily and ruthless head of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Franklin Gowen.

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Continue reading Books@Daily Finance: Balancing Reason and Emotion in Business

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Continue reading Books@DailyFinance: Henry Paulson's Meltdown Memoir

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Talk about stakeholder power. In 2001, a new eBay (EBAY) policy had regular sellers on the site storming the barricades and all but ready to lynch the CEO. Company executives had figured: Hey, maybe we could generate more action by steering the losers in one auction to other auctions, where similar products are on offer.

Continue reading Books@DailyFinance: eBay's Meg Whitman Looks Back in Wonder

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Continue reading Books@DailyFinance: Atul Gawande's Simple Fix for Business Distractions

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