These books on business can help fill out your summer reading list

By now you’ve used your time in isolation to read all those books you meant to get to, gone through the stack of old magazines that threatened to topple over, reduced a similar stack of newspapers to recycling-bin filler and are now reduced to reading the side panel of boxes of cereal you don’t much like.

What to do?

Here to your rescue is the annual summertime list of recommended business books. It’s a bit light on nominations this year, in that there weren’t a lot of “ya gotta read this” books worth recommending. The current crisis has also rendered a lot of what’s been written in recent books about business and economics irrelevant, although it’s likely to spur a flood of books in the coming months about the pandemic and What It All Means.

Still, here are a few worth your time and attention, at least until the next cereal box.

▪ “The Ride of a Lifetime,” Robert Iger. Even though some of its business lines are presently taking a pummeling (theme parks), Disney is one of those companies likely to survive this mess and to position itself to capitalize on whatever the new reality of the entertainment business turns out to be. What a nice bit of timing, for example, to have built an online streaming service just as millions of potential customers were stuck at home with time to kill. Iger’s book is an entertaining and educational look at how the juggernaut of a company was built and how it managed its own set of challenges, and for a CEO the ego content is low. Over the years Disney has inspired multiple interesting books looking at the company’s highs and lows, and there’s likely another one in the works for whenever COVID-19 takes a break.

▪ “That Will Never Work,” Marc Randolph. We’ve written a lot during the pandemic about companies with the skill to pivot quickly, such as manufacturers designing, building supply chains for and producing personal protective equipment in a matter of days. Netflix has done it twice in its short existence. It began as an online retailer off DVDs, switched to movie rentals by mail, then moved to streaming (commissioning its own content could be considered a third pivot). This book by a Netflix cofounder is a great business case study for understanding the combination of foresight, mistakes and luck that led to those pivots. And do you remember that Netflix was in talks for major deals, one with Amazon, the other with Blockbuster? How differently life might have turned out if one of those had been consummated.

▪ “Secondhand,” Adam Minter: What happens to used but still usable stuff? How does Goodwill select, price and move its inventory? And why doesn’t anyone want the heavy wood furniture and fine china so valued by my parents’ generation? It turns out there’s a global trade in selling secondhand personal goods, leading to the creation of entire companies of chain outlets and new professions (the people who attend to household possessions when their owner has died). A fascinating and quick read.

▪ “Burn the Ice,” Kevin Alexander. Even in good times it’s amazing that restaurants make it as long as they do, their finances being as tricky as they are. Read this book and you’ll wonder how they manage to open in the first place. “Burn the Ice” (a restaurant kitchen term) analyzes the American foodie scene (with a close look at Portland) and “The American culinary revolution and its end.” Remember that this was written before coronavirus showed up to really spoil the party. The epilogue is being written in real life, and it won’t be a happy chapter.

There, that ought to keep you reading, at least until the next cereal box.

Bankruptcy hits big brands

While we’re on the depressing subject off the economy …

Hertz, Chuck E. Cheese and Brooks Brothers. Did you ever expect to see those three brands mentioned in one sentence as having some commonality?

But there they are, fellow inductees into that growing fraternity of companies that have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection.

What’s worrisome is not so much that these and so many other companies have filed, it’s that:

• A lot of companies are holding out hope that maybe the pandemic will break, maybe there will be another stimulus/bailout package and maybe there will be school and football (the sport that pays the bills for so many) this fall. Maybe, but right now the trend is not our friend. If those maybes fail to become definitelys, then a whole lot more companies large and small will be headed to the courthouse.

• Companies continue to operate in Chapter 11, and some even make it out but even those that do operate with fewer employees, fewer locations and with creditors having to write off money they were owed.

• A lot of companies that won’t wind up in Chapter 11 will still be trimming expenses to cope with the new reality, including customers of their own that have gone bust.

That’s a lot of added burden on an economy struggling to get back to growth mode. The longer this goes, the longer the uncertainty persists, the heavier burden gets. It wasn’t that long ago when some thought the country could be fully back to work by Easter. If not then, surely by late spring/early summer. No? Then we’ll be back to school and life as normal this fall, right?

Don’t count on it. And you don’t have to be a chronic pessimist to start wondering whether we’ll be rid of this by the holidays.

Fact is, nobody knows anything.

This story was originally published July 11, 2020 at 7:00 AM.