business – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

From Breakthrough to Blockbuster: The Business of Biotechnology

By Scott J. Pearson | April 4, 2026April 4, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Biotechnology is a hot topic in today’s global economy. It promises to help humanity, so it often receives startup funding from governments. Success stories show the strong financial potential of the right investments. Big pharmaceutical companies (“big pharma”) can purchase entire companies for large amounts of profits. Yet the risks are great, with an estimated 90% of ventures ending in non-successful outcomes. There seems little that can be done to predict success from the outset.…

Management-Business Society

The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise & the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers

By Scott J. Pearson | February 10, 2026February 10, 2026 by Scott J. Pearson

Organizational silos occur when groups of people in the same organization do not rely on each others’ insights because of various cultural reasons. While the division of labor that silos create is essential for any business, silos can inhibit an organization’s creativity and innovation. They have been weak points in or even downfalls of many great business empires. Through case studies across many organizations and industries, anthropologist Gillian Tett describes negative results silos can create…

Leadership Management-Business

HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Collaboration

By Scott J. Pearson | February 4, 2025February 4, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Since most emerging contemporary problems require team approaches, fostering a collaborative environment is a key to business success in today’s marketplace. Therefore, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) has a long list of articles available on the topic. They picked and compiled the ten best in this short guide. Much like the magazine articles they originally were, chapters cover various topics, each with its own angle. For instance, one chapter addresses how to check if the…

Fiction-Stories

The War on Sarah Morris

By Scott J. Pearson | July 27, 2024July 27, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Sarah Morris faces a problem: After working for decades with one publishing company, she’s reassigned to work with lesser responsibilities. Instead of editing books, she’s merely tagging them – boring, repetitive work. Unfortunately, this reassignment corresponds to a weakening of the country’s economy and of the wider publishing industry. She has no way to go; she’s trapped. Her friends with whom she has labored in the trenches for years are now losing their jobs. Most…

Leadership Management-Business

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works

By Scott J. Pearson | November 30, 2023September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

This book is known as a classics on strategic planning and the role of strategy in business. It speaks from the point of view of leadership over Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) numerous businesses. The company identified its organization to be weak in understanding strategy, and it sought to inculcate strategic thinking into its leadership. Although this book references a few other corporations, it consists largely of case studies around how P&G succeeded using strategy. The…

Management-Business

Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work & Succeed with Any Type of Boss

By Scott J. Pearson | September 29, 2023September 29, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

A pipe dream in college students is that your boss will always agree with your professional direction as you free yourself from teachers. The realities of the workplace often shatter this puerile dream. A boss’s personality quirks can sometimes drive their direct reports crazy. Mary Abbajay seeks to identify these personality traits and suggest adjustment strategies so that workers can get on with succeeding at their careers. I fully support the concept of managing up.…

Leadership Management-Business Writing-Communication

Simply Said: Communicating Better at Work & Beyond

By Scott J. Pearson | August 18, 2023September 24, 2024 by Scott J. Pearson

Communications form an essential skill of leadership. To be a leader, people have to follow you. For people to follow you, they first must appreciate your vision, articulated in words, and then see them followed up with actions. This is true both in the workplace and in social life. In this book, Jay Sullivan aims to provide practical and simple insights to help us achieve these goals. In the first half of the book, Sullivan’s…

Management-Business Software-Technology

World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs

By Scott J. Pearson | July 24, 2023July 24, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

In the years following this 2009 book, the central place of information technology (IT) in the business world has only become recognized more and more. The COVID pandemic accelerated trends whereby IT plays a critical role in global business culture. Peter High’s book fixed the paradigm for how successful IT might be leveraged for business success. Almost 15 years later, the question then becomes: Is it still relevant? Yes, I argue. This classic helps us…

Management-Business Writing-Communication

Effective Emails: The Secret to Straightforward Communication at Work

By Scott J. Pearson | July 19, 2023August 13, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

Email is a staple of the modern business workplace. A new employee can find that it’s easy to make dozens of simple mistakes. An experienced employee can find that they aren’t as effective or efficient as their job requires them to be. The trouble is that all of these rules of communication are unwritten and seemingly inaccessible. To help us raise our email “game,” Chris Fenning provides this concise guide to realize our best intentions…

Management-Business Software-Technology

Precisely: Working with Precision Systems in a World of Data

By Scott J. Pearson | April 7, 2023March 22, 2023 by Scott J. Pearson

In recent years, the world, empowered by computer technologies and advanced data collection, has experienced an explosion of information. Instead of focusing on a few fixed principles, decision-making increasingly takes place in light of ever-changing data points. How are business folk supposed to develop, deploy, and use these systems? In this book, Tumin and Want provide a series of case studies that illustrate how leaders across many domains have accomplished this. They then extract guidelines…