Grow the Pie

How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit

By: Alex Edmans

Narrated by: Alex Edmans

Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

What is a responsible business? Common wisdom is that it's one that sacrifices profit for social outcomes. But while it's crucial for companies to serve society, they also have a duty to generate profit for investors - savers, retirees, and pension funds.

Based on the highest-quality evidence and real-life examples spanning industries and countries, Alex Edmans shows that it's not an either-or choice - companies can create both profit and social value. The most successful companies don't target profit directly but are driven by purpose - the desire to serve a societal need and contribute to human betterment. The audiobook explains how to embed purpose into practice so that it's more than just a mission statement, and it discusses the critical role of working collaboratively with a company's investors, employees, and customers.

Rigorous research also uncovers surprising results on how executive pay, shareholder activism, and share buybacks can be used for the common good.

©2020 Alex Edmans (P)2020 Cambridge University Press

Very interesting and insightful book

Alex is a brilliant author. He gets across academic rigor in a down-to-earth manner. I love all the examples that he provides. It gets the meaning across super clearly. I highly recommend this book to anyone.

Worthy concept. Narrative could have been better

First of all, the concept of growing the pie, for everyone is awesome, even though I knew about it before reading the book. I loved how the author presented several key ideas about how exactly you grow the pie as a leader, and how it is linked to purpose work.

I understand that this book has a lot of studies to back up insights packed in it. However, comparing this book to “Give and Take” or the “Good to Great”, which also teaches how to manage for the better and are also based on a lot of work, I find this book lacking a narrative.

The author did a great job collecting all the studies, but I think that his “Data over Anecdote” approach fails when it comes to presenting the results.

After reading this book like any normal human being would, I remember specific stories about Vodafone and Merck very well, but I have a strong feeling that I have missed out on all the data presented in the book, like I have listened to it, but I haven’t remembered a thing in detail.

This feels like reading at work in a scientific magazine that is trying to transform itself into a management book and succeeding at times, but also failing at times. I guess it is better to read it on paper and then quote the studies mentioned in it then to listen to it.

But then, again, the concept of Pieconomics and the sheer amount of work that was put into making this book far overweights the lack of narrative. Thank you for an amazing work!