100 Books Like The Power of Geography

This book expanded my thinking and provided a fresh perspective, reminding me of why I became interested in this important topic years ago and continue to be fascinated by the complexity and nuances of cross-cultural communication.

Now, more than ever, we are all interconnected through advances in technology that bring us closer together. We are working increasingly with a global workforce that inherently comes with very different backgrounds, languages, histories, foods, music, religions, social norms, customs, traditions, and values.

We need to grow our understanding of people from cultures different from our own and Erin's book is a complimentary contribution to this body of knowledge; it is not duplicative but singularly unique and a refreshing read.

Consumer behavior is deeply rooted in culture. Where we live and grow up in the world shapes how we think and what we buy.

As a marketing executive, I loved learning from Rapaille’s examples, which are rooted in experience with some of the most successful product launches and advertising campaigns in history. He has used these principles to achieve international business success for some of the world’s most iconic brands. His theory helped Chrysler with the PT Cruiser launch. He also influenced the famous Procter & Gamble campaign for Folger’s Coffee, one of the most successful ad campaigns in history.

This is my top pick for international business professionals who want to learn how to build a successful global brand.

Inclusive marketing and culture to help companies create lasting business and social impact?

This book was written by a brand strategist and cultural theorist who works at Reddit, and it speaks straight to my heart as a marketing executive in technology. What I love most are the examples from leading brands, such as Microsoft, Unilever, Pinterest, Nike, and P&G. I also appreciated the examples from marketing leaders from Dentsu, Edelman, Digitas, WPP, and others.

What I really enjoy about this book is that it presents an entire system to help marketers understand how to embed cultural fluency into various aspects of their marketing strategies.

Global business and remote work often go hand in hand. Having worked in a large multinational business, I’ve seen how the issues Tsedal covers actually play out in practice. She talks extensively about two important goals for any remote global team: productivity and trust, and how to achieve both in cross-national remote work settings.

I’ve always found that creating a stable and repeatable operating cadence is critical for driving success with remote global teams. Remote workers crave predictability, and Tsedal talks about how important this is, based on her research and work as a professor at Harvard Business School.

I appreciate that she highlights the fact that preferences around synchronous and asynchronous communication can change depending on employees’ cultures and language competence levels. 

I could have recommended several books by this author. Still, his 2023 offering is particularly pertinent to borders in the 21st century as it demonstrates that we exist in both a world of flows and a bounded, territorial system. Though this may seem contradictory, this book demonstrates how territoriality and barrier-bordering dynamics have always been but one aspect of international relations.

That which crosses borders and elides controls of the nation-state system plays powerfully into the very politics, economics, environments, and daily lives occurring within it. To understand borders as filters and barriers is the only way to apprehend the geopolitics of the 21st century. 

When we think of maps, we usually assume they are about established geography, but that is completely wrong. Maps have been used to hold and elucidate everything about human behavior, especially politics and world affairs, and they vary dramatically in their presentations; the word “geopolitics” is spot on. 

You might envision the world as a blue, green, and brown sphere, but geographers (and world leaders and their kind) then load on every layer possible about how humans divide up this global space. Think of nations, names of continents, where people live, what they eat. And then think of maps that illustrate over the global landscape where we get sick (or not), what we eat, what we grow, how we earn money, where we shop—it’s mindboggling how geography can explain much of what people do, and how that can be exploited.  

During much of our lives, we don’t even think about… show more.

The book that has come closest to making me think it may really all be about oil after all! Or energy at least. Although written before the all-out Russian invasion of Ukraine, Thompson shows that the origins of the war go back far beyond 2014 or even 1991, but rather lie in the 1950s – when Anglo-French power in the MENA region was broken, first by the 1956 Suez War and then by Algeria’s secession from France in 1962, which in turn would lead to West Germany becoming dependent on the USSR for energy – a dependence that lasts to this day. Her account of the geopolitical consequences of the US fracking revolution is superb – prompting me to think that the Ukraine war can be seen as a battle over who will supply the European energy market. Once the LNG terminals in northern Europe are built, the US has… show more.

Although the Napoleonic Wars are most commonly discussed from a French perspective, with their roots in ideology and the Wars of the French Revolution, they are increasingly being understood as the climax of conflicts over power and colonial possessions that had raged between the major European powers across the long eighteenth century. In this hugely ambitious and highly readable book, Alex Mikaberidze considers the Napoleonic Wars as part of a wider global conflict in which France and Britain struggled for dominance, a conflict that extended to the Americas, Egypt, Iran, the Indian Ocean, even to China and Japan, and assesses their role in defining the post-war world.

As soon as I encountered Don Doyle’s elegant formulation of the Civil War’s “public diplomacy,” I knew it would move future accounts of the 1860s in exciting new directions. That seemingly simple term, offered as a key concept for the book as a whole, drew into focus how advocates of North and South shaped the overseas responses to Americans’ military conflagration.

Its fast-paced series of chapters provided me a newfound appreciation for the relatively understudied responses of the French, Italian, and German publics.

With strikingly clear prose, the book helped me understand how a transfixing North American war spurred a frothy worldwide discussion about the future prospects of popular government, bound labor, and national self-preservation.

This well-researched book, using prime sources, is an objective and important history. It explains why Washington failed to forge a new European security order in working with Moscow at the end of the “first” Cold War.

Sarotte examines the question as to why Mikhail Gorbachev appeared to be promised by then-US Secretary of State James Baker (and other Western officials) that NATO membership would not expand beyond East Germany at the time of German unification. Just as importantly, Sarotte’s book examines why the US-proposed “Partnership for Peace”―which could have helped to establish a new system of security for eastern European states with Russian cooperation, in my view―was not pursued.

Instead, as I had argued in Dangerous Crossroads, Clinton opted to pursue the NATO “Self-Limitation”  approach (no troops, no nuclear weapons), knowing full well that both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin had warned that NATO’s expansion without strong Russian input… show more.