Summary: This week on CIO Playbook with Jeffrey Hurley I am continuing my summary of the best business books of 2013. Finishing the Forbes list of Best Business Books of 2013 and then moving on to Strategy & Business's Best Business Books of 2013. In last week's episode I covered the Globe and Mail's article on the Best Business Books of 2013 and made it through to number five of Forbes' Best Books of 2013. Below I continue through the Forbes list from where I left off last week. Forbes Magazine’s best books of 2013 by Frederick E. Allen 6)The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, by Nina Muck Nina Munk, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is a journalist and author whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Fortune In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors, Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries. Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea. For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs’s formula for ending global poverty. Amazon: 4.5 stars with 50 review, Goodreads: 4.17 stars with 60 ratings, Barnes and Noble: no rating Nina Munk 7) I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford. By Richard Snow Richard Snow was born in New York City in 1947, raised in Westchester County, and returned to Manhattan to go to Columbia College, where he studied English and history, thereby inadvertently preparing himself for how he’d spend the rest of his life. After he graduated from high school, he got a summer job as a mail boy at the American Heritage Publishing Company. He didn’t damage any mail, and so was asked back during succeeding summers, and given a staff job on the firm’s history magazine, American Heritage, upon graduating from college in 1970. He worked there for the next 37 years, spending seventeen of them as editor-in-chief. Summary: In many ways, of course, Ford’s story is well known; in many more ways, it is not. Richard Snow masterfully weaves together a fascinating narrative of Ford’s rise to fame through his greatest invention, the Model T. When Ford first unveiled this car, it took twelve and a half hours to build one. A little more than a decade later, it took exactly one minute. In making his car so quickly and so cheaply that his own workers could easily afford it, Ford created the cycle of consumerism that we still inhabit. Our country changed in a mere decade, and Ford became a national hero. But then he soured, and the benevolent side of his character went into an ever-deepening eclipse, even as the America he had remade evolved beyond all imagining into a global power capable of producing on a vast scale not only cars, but airplanes, ships, machinery, and an infinity of household devices. Amazon: 4.5 stars with 37 reviews, Goodreads: 3.85 stars with 59 ratings, Barnes and Noble: 4 stars with 1 review Richard Snow 8) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone
