Helping Companies Foster Agility

Sarah McNamara, "Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South" (UNC Press, 2023)

Decades before Miami became Havana USA, a wave of leftist, radical, working-class women and men from prerevolutionary Cuba crossed the Florida Straits, made Ybor City the global capital of the Cuban cigar industry, and established the foundation of latinidad in the Sunshine State. Located on the eastern edge of Tampa, Ybor City was a neighborhood of cigar workers and Caribbean revolutionaries who sought refuge against the shifting tides of international political turmoil during the early half of the twentieth century. In Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina South [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781469668161] (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), Historian Sarah McNamara tells the story of immigrant and U.S.-born Latinas/os who organized strikes, marched against fascism, and criticized U.S. foreign policy. While many members of the immigrant generation maintained their dedication to progressive ideals for years to come, those who came of age in the wake of World War II distanced themselves from leftist politics amidst the Red Scare and the wrecking ball of urban renewal. This portrait of the political shifts that defined Ybor City highlights the underexplored role of women’s leadership within movements for social and economic justice as it illustrates how people, places, and politics become who and what they are. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Helping Companies Foster Agility

Born and raised in San Diego, Charles Snow held a variety of jobs early in life, including: paperboy, grocery store cashier, accounting clerk, chauffeur, and sports director at a private school; each of which taught him important lessons about how organizations worked and were managed. Chuck earned his PhD in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent his entire academic career as a professor and researcher at Penn State. While there, Chuck taught management subjects to MBA students and executives in more than 35 countries. In this episode, we focus on the core essay that Chuck and co-editor Oystein D. Fjelstad wrote for their book, “Actor-Oriented Organizing,” which is part of Cambridge University’s Companions to Management series. In conversation, Chuck discusses three key qualities essential to flattening hierarchical bureaucracies so that teams of employees can respond to emerging customer needs with greater speed and spontaneity. First, there’s a great (often unmet) value in openness to change and transparency. The second is a “commons” area, a space where team members feel they’re on equal, shared ground. And third is having the resources – financial, digital, and political – to ensure their work leads to outcomes that are incorporated into the company’s operational bloodstream. Underlying the entire approach that Chuck advocates for is seeking to act for the common good of all, embodying the “mutual sympathy” style that made Adam Smith not the just the “Father of Modern Economics,” but also a leading promoter of empathy before the term rose to prominence today. Real Transformations: Business Change That Works from the Inside Out is co-hosted by Julie Anixter and Dan Hill, PhD, entrepreneurs with deep experience as corporate change agents, devoted to helping companies make continuous change work for everyone through clarity and connection. To learn about their keynote talks, workshops and labs, check out Real-Transformation.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Manasicha Akepiyapornchai, "Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India" (Oxford UP, 2026)

Surrender to God Across Languages: Multilingual Intellectual History of Premodern India [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780197840542] (Oxford UP, 2026) explores the role of languages in the intellectual landscape of second-millennium India by way of six theological treatises composed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each written by a key intellectual figure: Vātsya Varadaguru, Periyavāccān Pillai, Meghanādari Sūri, Pillai Lokācārya, and Vedāntadeśika. Drawing on theories of language politics and translation, Manasicha Akepiyapornchai proposes a new theoretical framework of "language sphere" to better capture the linguistic and intellectual interaction from a micro perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Karine Premont and Christopher J. Devine eds., "Second in Command: Reevaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Mates in Modern American Politics" (U Michigan Press, 2026)

Karine Premont and Christopher Devine have a new edited volume focusing on the American Vice Presidency and analyzing not just the office and the officeholders, but also the role of vice presidential candidates in the campaigns for the presidency. Second in Command: Reevaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Makes in Modern American Politics [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9780472058099] (U Michigan Press, 2026) is a fascinating exploration of the role and place of the vice president, the vice presidency, and the vice presidential running mate. Often this position and this job are dismissed—since the vice president has very few actual powers, besides his/her role as president of the Senate and tiebreaker in that body, and one of the certifiers of the Electoral College votes after an election. But in the contemporary political environment, vice presidents have grown in importance in terms of their role on the presidential ticket and in their role once elected to office. Second in Command [https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/hx11xj21b] is split into two parts, the first section focusing on the vice president in office, while the second part examines the vice presidential candidate and the role of being a running mate to a presidential candidate. In our conversation we discuss the fact that the vice president is often considered to be the “appendix” of American government, created at the Constitutional Convention to break a tie in the Senate, should there be one, and to solve the problem coming out of the newly designed Electoral College where two votes needed to be cast for president. But over the past fifty years, there has been tremendous change in terms of the inhabitants in the office, their relationship to the president and the presidency, and their activities on the campaign trail. Vice Presidents have become general advisors to the president. This precedent was established between President Jimmy Carter and his vice president, Walter Mondale. And since the 1970s, this newly engaged position and role for the vice president have generally been in place, with different approaches from different presidents/vice presidential pairs. The idea of trying to “balance” the ticket is still part of the selection dynamic, but it is as important as the working relationship that presidents have pursued with their vice presidential pick. We had a fascinating discussion of the history of the vice presidency as well as an analysis of the more modern dynamic. We talked about different parts of ticket balancing, since it is not necessarily about geography so much as constituent appeals: religious groups, gender, expertise/experience, and more. Second in Command: Reevaluating the Role of Vice Presidents and Running Mates in Modern American Politics [https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14505045] is available from the University of Michigan Press via open access. Here is the link: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14505045 [https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14505045] It can, of course, also be purchased. Lilly J. Goren [https://www.carrollu.edu/faculty/goren-lilly-phd] is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-host of the New Books in Political Science [https://newbooksnetwork.com/hosts/profile/a7ac4af9-1306-463f-baf9-00f1f4187dfd] channel at the New Books Network. She is co-editor of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume I: The Infinity Saga ( [https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700633883/the-politics-of-the-marvel-cinematic-universe/]University Press of Kansas, 2022), and of The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe Volume II: Into the Multiverse [https://kansaspress.ku.edu/9780700640546/] (University Press of Kansas, 2025) as well as co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics [https://www.kentuckypress.com/9780813141015/women-and-the-white-house/] (University Press of Kentucky, 2012). She can be reached @gorenlj.bsky.social [https://bsky.app/profile/gorenlj.bsky.social] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]

Don Thomas Deere, "The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space" (Duke UP, 2026)

In The Invention of Order: On the Coloniality of Space [https://bookshop.org/a/12343/9781478032878] (Duke University Press, 2026), Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity. Don Thomas Deere is Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M University. He previously taught at Wesleyan University and received his PhD with distinction from DePaul University and BA from Cornell University. He is a Mellon Mays fellow and the recipient of a Mellon Career Enhancement Faculty Fellowship. His research focuses on the intersections of Latin American, Caribbean, and Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Morteza Hajizadeh [https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos] is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos]. Twitter [https://twitter.com/TalkArtCulture]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices] Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network [https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network]