Economics & Finance
Strategy & Leadership
- Reading beyond one’s discipline can unsettle assumptions and sharpen the questions researchers bring back to their own field.
- The selections show how books make abstract ideas vivid, from nationalism and debt to incentives, experiments and public capacity.
- Across the episode, research begins less with certainty than with a change in perspective.
In a special Books episode of Breakthroughs, five HEC Paris academics choose works that stayed with them professionally. The result is a set of encounters with a theory of nations, a call to build, a behavioral economics classic, a guide to experiments, and an anthropological challenge to economics.
Seungah Sarah Lee
Seungah Sarah Lee, Assistant Professor of Management and Human Resources at HEC Paris in Doha, chose Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities because it “helped (her) think beyond simple national differences and ask how people imagine belonging.” For someone teaching intercultural leadership and international business, the book became a way to understand how communities, nations and social groups are constructed, inherited and lived. “This book really allowed me to think about what a community is.”
Olivier Darmouni
Olivier Darmouni, Associate Professor of Finance and Pierre Andurand Chair in Sustainability, chose Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance for its pragmatic insistence that many solutions are already visible. What struck him was the book’s shift from diagnosis to delivery, and from ideological stalemate to the practical question of how societies build housing, clean energy, infrastructure and public capacity. “If we want to improve the world, we need to build more things, and better things,” he explained.
Quirin Fleckenstein
Quirin Fleckenstein, Assistant Professor of Finance, chose Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational because it made academic research feel alive at a decisive moment in his own career. The book’s experiments on decision-making, social norms and monetary incentives showed him how researchers could ask sharp questions about ordinary behavior, then test them with ingenuity. “I found it very contagious and very inspiring to read about the curiosity of such a researcher a in understanding human behavior.”
Michelangelo Rossi
Michelangelo Rossi, Associate Professor of Marketing, arrived with two books: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Michael Luca and Max Bazerman’s The Power of Experiments. The first remains, for him, a living source for understanding behavioral economics and the persistence of decision-making biases; the second is a clear route into experiments, causality and what organizations can learn when they test rather than assume. On Kahneman: “Still now, we can find several settings in which the channels and forces highlighted in this book are present.” On Experiments: “If our listeners want to understand how to disentangle correlation from causation, this book is very recommended.”
Brian Hill
Brian Hill, CNRS Research Professor in Economics and Decision Sciences, chose David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years precisely because it comes from outside economics. Graeber’s anthropology of debt pushed him to think about money as a single measure that can flatten human relationships, and helped lead him toward research on disclosure, sustainability and the social and environmental information hidden behind exchange. “One of the best ways of opening your mind is to look beyond your field,” he said.
Enjoy the HEC Breakthroughs podcast for a lively exchange with Seungah Sarah Lee, Olivier Darmouni, Quirin Fleckenstein, Michelangelo Rossi and Brian Hill on the books that nudged, shook or sharpened their research thinking.
This series is in collaboration with the HEC Learning Center.
