Carter’s Holiday Pick: Truthless

The cynical view of the financial world says that Wall Street is run by a special breed of traders who exploit investors’ collective fear and greed to enrich themselves however they can, without any care for the havoc they might wreak. In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis backs up this opinion with a first-hand account of the pursuit of ill-gotten riches at the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the 1980s. As a Salomon employee, Lewis took part in its wealth-chasing culture and witnessed the start of its downward spiral.

This guide will explore Lewis’s portrayal of Wall Street, the boom and bust of the mortgage bond market, and the rise of junk bond investments. We’ll also take a broader look at the financial world and alternate views showing there’s room for ethics and level-headed investing. We’ll conclude with Salomon Brothers’ troubles in the 1990s, which occurred after this book’s publication.

“Sex, drugs, and stock manipulation” are the words that describe the world of Jordan Belfort and his brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. Belfort and his staff of young traders became incredibly rich via illegal trading practices, then used their wealth to indulge their every hedonistic whim. The Wolf of Wall Street is Belfort’s confessional memoir of his illegal actions, which led to a self-destructive spiral into drug addiction and life-threatening behavior.

In this guide, we’ll explain how Belfort grew his wealth through stock manipulation and money laundering, how he attempted to evade prosecution for his crimes, and how his lifestyle of drug abuse and self-indulgence almost killed him before he accepted the need to change. This guide will also examine whether Belfort’s crimes are still commonplace in modern finance, how the acquisition of wealth affects people, and how drug addiction and recovery can alter a person’s self-awareness and sense of accountability.

Talking to Strangers is a book about the impossibility of truly understanding a stranger. By breaking down some of the most famous events in recent human history, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell shows us the strategies we often use when dealing with people we don’t know—and how deeply flawed those strategies are.

In this book, you’ll learn:

• How Hitler fooled so many prominent world leaders
• Why the financial industry failed to stop Bernie Madoff for so long
• What really happened to Sandra Bland

Information technology is so deeply embedded into every facet of the modern world that businesses today live or die based on the strength of their IT departments. If a company fails to properly manage IT services, it risks losing its competitive edge and the goodwill of its customers. In The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford present a fictional case study of a business that’s failing because it doesn’t align the work of IT services with the company’s goals. The authors then show how an IT department can turn itself around and get back in the game.

In this guide, we’ll dissect the three pillars of IT management that Kim, Behr, and Spafford recommend for any modern business. In addition, we’ll clarify the authors’ basic concepts and explore further ideas on management, leadership, workplace culture, and productivity.

Even a successful, long-lasting business can be undone by a harmful workplace culture. If a company fails to trust its employees, focuses on blame instead of solving problems, and drowns every decision in a sea of red tape, its rivals will outpace it in the market. In The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim presents a fictional case study of a business that falls behind its competitors because of its soul-crushing work conditions, leading a band of rebellious employees to figure out a new, more productive way of working.

In this guide, we’ll look at Kim’s diagnosis of the problems that exist in a toxic workplace, as well as the changes he recommends to foster creativity and productivity. We’ll discuss how Kim’s themes align with those of other business experts, and because Kim demonstrates his ideas through fiction, we’ll direct you to other nonfiction works in which his core concepts are fully explained.

Meetings are the lifeblood of an organization—they are central to its success, but they often seem useless and too long. This presents a paradox—how can you make meetings productive when your staff views them as pointless? The answer is to make meetings better.

Death By Meeting uses the parable of a struggling executive to provide a roadmap for consistently productive meetings. Learn why attempting to defuse tension among employees is a mistake, and how injecting more drama into four unique types of meetings is the key to a more passionate, engaged, and successful team.

The cynical view of the financial world says that Wall Street is run by a special breed of traders who exploit investors’ collective fear and greed to enrich themselves however they can, without any care for the havoc they might wreak. In Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis backs up this opinion with a first-hand account of the pursuit of ill-gotten riches at the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the 1980s. As a Salomon employee, Lewis took part in its wealth-chasing culture and witnessed the start of its downward spiral.

This guide will explore Lewis’s portrayal of Wall Street, the boom and bust of the mortgage bond market, and the rise of junk bond investments. We’ll also take a broader look at the financial world and alternate views showing there’s room for ethics and level-headed investing. We’ll conclude with Salomon Brothers’ troubles in the 1990s, which occurred after this book’s publication.

In When Genius Failed, financial journalist Roger Lowenstein explores the spectacular rise and catastrophic 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Lowenstein explains how LTCM, initially hailed as a financial genius, used complex mathematical models and sophisticated trading strategies to generate massive profits. The fund's founders and managers believed that they’d discovered a way to eliminate or at least greatly minimize market risk through their strategies. Their overconfidence in their models ultimately led them to make highly leveraged—that is, debt-financed—bets on various financial instruments.

In this guide, we’ll explore the history of LTCM, how its models operated, how it achieved such dizzying success, and how it suffered such a crushing and ignominious fall. Throughout the guide, we’ll supplement Lowenstein’s account with commentary from other financial experts and analysts, including commentators who wrote after the book’s initial publication in 2000—adding insights to the LTCM story in light of subsequent events.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine takes us inside the madness, corruption, and greed at the heart of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It tells the story of an eccentric collection of investors who saw the folly of the subprime mortgage-backed securities market—and found a way to bet against it. By focusing on individuals who saw these worthless securities for what they truly were, The Big Short explores the complexities and irrationalities of modern capitalism and forces us to seriously question the wisdom (and motivations) of the financial elites who wield so much power over our economy, society, and politics.