Philippa Kaur

In 2021 graphics cards were hot stuff. Video-game devotees and cryptocurrency miners queued overnight to get their hands on the latest high-end offering from Nvidia or amd, two American chipmakers. And graphics processors were far from the only sizzling semiconductors. An acute shortage of chips disrupted the production of everything from smartphones to cars and missiles, just as demand for all manner of silicon-bearing devices boomed. Last year the chip industry’s revenues grew by a quarter to $580bn, according to idc, a research firm. Chipmakers’ market values soared. tsmc, a giant Taiwanese contract manufacturer, More

In 2021 graphics cards were hot stuff. Video-game devotees and cryptocurrency miners queued overnight to get their hands on the latest high-end offering from Nvidia or amd, two American chipmakers. And graphics processors were far from the only sizzling semiconductors. An acute shortage of chips disrupted the production of everything from smartphones to cars and missiles, just as demand for all manner of silicon-bearing devices boomed. Last year the chip industry’s revenues grew by a quarter, to $580bn, according to idc, a research firm. Chipmakers’ market values soared. tsmc, a giant Taiwanese contract manufacturer, More

India inc’s business calendar has only one contender to rival Berkshire Hathaway’s famous shareholder gathering. The subcontinent’s equivalent of that “Woodstock for capitalists” is the annual general meeting of Reliance Industries. Like Warren Buffett’s shindig it usually features a celebratory crowd of devoted investors (although not the same quality of corporate-finance insights). The company’s founder, Dhirubhai Ambani, an upstart entrepreneur from Gujarat, was also an outsider with a nose for opportunities. He built India’s largest company from a humble trading and textiles firm into a vast conglomerate. It has continued to expand after his death under the leadership of his son Mukesh Ambani and today encompasses petrochemicals, refining, telecoms, a shopping app and retail stores—among other things. The importance of the resulting entity to India is impossible to overstate. With a market value of $206bn, the firm’s revenues are the equivalent of 3% of the country’s gdp. Among India’s largest 500 public companies, it is responsible for 6% of sales and profits, 7% of total capitalisation and a staggering 18% of capital investment. Jio, the telecoms division, provides service to 410m Indians, and is the latest in a series of massive, stomach-churning capital-intensive bets that have paid off over the years. The retail operations are by far the largest in India, encompassing 15,000 shops. Its refinery and petrochemicals operation in the north-west of the country is among the biggest in the world. In short, any change at Reliance affects India as a whole—and it appears that change may well be on the way.The rumour mill has been abuzz because this year the annual meeting, usually held in June or July in Mumbai, has yet to be scheduled. Mr Ambani seems to have largely withdrawn from public appearances. The company says he is spending time in Jamnagar, the site of the company’s massive oil refinery. India’s gossipy business world, where no figure receives more attention, is alight with talk that he may be suffering from health problems. The company says he is well and continues to attend public functions within the restrictions of a pandemic. On June 28th the company said that Mr Ambani would step aside from the chairmanship of Jio Infocomm, a subsidiary of the telecoms arm, in favour of his 30-year-old son, Akash. The next day reports emerged that Akash’s twin sister, Isha, would soon head Reliance’s retail operations. And on July 3rd the Hindu Business Line, a newspaper, said that Mr Ambani’s wife, Nita, already a director of Reliance, was favoured by some on the board to become a vice-chairman of the company. Another son, Anant, is also said to be positioned to take over running part of its energy operations.Interpreting these rumours is tricky. Perhaps they reflect prudent succession planning. Mr Ambani is 65, not old for an Indian tycoon, but it is time to start teeing up the next generation of leaders. Even if his children were to take over the running of some of the group’s major subsidiaries, they would ideally have years more experience at management and building teams before even being considered as candidates qualified to take over Reliance itself. And Reliance’s history shows the drawbacks of leaving it too late. Soon after Dhirubhai died in 2002 a brutal succession battle broke out between Mr Ambani and his brother, Anil, which ended with the company being split into two, and Anil’s side of the business fading into obscurity. Whenever he departs, there is little debate that Mr Ambani’s exit would constitute a huge loss for the company. Reliance has a loyal cadre of managers but he is regarded as the driving force behind every facet of Reliance’s business from strategy to finance. He is seen as having the ability to deal with the complicated judicial, political and economic currents of India better than anyone. Whether in telecoms, energy or retail, Reliance has navigated and benefited from innumerable rules and rulings that make hamstrung competitors seethe with envy. Ensuring that this continues will be a tall order for the next generation at Reliance. Perhaps most important, Mr Ambani has continued a pattern that his father began: betting the firm on enormous and risky projects within India. Some of these wagers have not worked well: Reliance’s attempt to develop gas fields in the Bay of Bengal has been underwhelming, for example. But some have been been both jaw-droppingly daring and successful. Reliance’s telecoms and digital operation required huge upfront investments—its assets are now $49bn, according to Bloomberg data, up from close to zero a decade ago. And by bringing cheap communications to the masses it has helped transform Indian society. This may go some way to explaining the respect now shown to Reliance even by its critics. Unlike classic crony capitalism where the extraction of rents is paramount, Reliance’s huge level of reinvestment mean its return on capital is modest: below 10% every year for the past decade. Already the next big bet is being lined up. Profits from refining are providing tens of billions of dollars for investments in renewable energy infrastructure in a country with a shortage of power generation and an over-dependence on fossil fuels that will need to be remedied soon.A reliable appetite for riskOne theory is that the annual meeting has been delayed while a break-up of the company is debated. The firm is certainly in good nick. After India went into lockdown in 2020 it brought minority investors, including Google, into its digital arm. The cash was used to slash debt. Refining profits are at high levels, notwithstanding the recent imposition of a windfall tax by the government. Jio enjoys a steady subscriber base and rising tariffs. Reliance’s retailing arm is profitable and expanding. All this suggests Reliance, or its constituent parts, could plod on without Mr Ambani at the helm. But would the group still have the appetite to undertake some of the boldest bets in global business?■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

If investors in equities and debt markets will remember anything of the first half of 2022 it will be generational sell-offs. But the turmoil in public markets has not yet fully bled into private equity: fundraising has marched on, large deals are still being consummated and paper returns look strong. The blood, however, may be about to flow. Buy-out barbarians made their names in the late 1980s, not the 1970s, for good reason. The corporate buy-out is a financial ploy unsuited to the coming period of slow growth and high inflation; no previous boom-and-bust cycle in private-equity’s 40-year history has been like it. Most important, cheap debt is unlikely to be able to save the day. If trouble is to strike, it will hit an industry that is now hubristic and vast. The amount of money invested, or waiting to be invested, by private-equity funds has swelled from $1.3trn in 2009 to $4.6trn today. This was driven by a scramble for yield among pension funds, insurance companies and endowments during a decade of historically low interest rates in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007-09. Many have more than doubled their allocations to private equity. Since 2015 the ten largest American public-sector pension funds have collectively committed in excess of $100bn to buy-out funds.In the search for market-beating returns, some $3.3trn managed by private-equity firms is currently invested in private companies. A chunk of this reflects the $850bn of buy-out deals done during 2021 (see chart 1). It is not by the genius of private-equity bosses that this capital has been posting impressive paper gains (see chart 2). Rather, company valuations have until recently been on a tear; low interest rates push up the valuations of firms, which have been chased by buy-out firms armed with cheap debt. Buy-outs have been increasingly common in sectors with the highest valuations, including technology, driving the average valuation multiple for American transactions to take firms private to 19.3 times ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) in 2021, compared with 12.6 in 2007, according to Bain & Company, a consulting firm. The stockmarket crash this year will take months to wash through private markets. But a reckoning is on the horizon. Private equity benefits from a fig leaf of illiquidity, resulting in a delay between real and reported fund valuations. In the absence of a liquid market to price investments, private-equity funds assess the current “fair value” of their portfolio based on the price an investment would realise in an “orderly transaction”, which should look similar to the valuations of comparable companies in the public markets.But such “orderly” exits are drying up fast. Market turmoil means stockmarket listings are off the table and companies are thinking harder about spending cash on acquisitions ahead of a recession. Sales from one private-equity fund to another will not sustain an alternative reality of high valuations. For some fund managers, adjusting valuations will be painful. Funds which bought companies at a premium to sky-high stockmarket prices will suffer significant mark-downs. Fund managers and investors accustomed to stable, market-beating returns must accept the true underlying volatility of their investments. Only the smartest fund managers, who have kept their discipline and sought bargains outside frothy sectors, need not fear the accountant’s scythe.Public markets are a useful window on the future of private-equity returns. The view is not a pleasant one. One index, which maps private-equity portfolios to their public stockmarket equivalents, is down by 37% this year. Another proxy is the share-price performance of investment trusts, a type of publicly traded investment vehicle, which invest in private equity. Usually, these trusts trade close to their underlying asset values, which are based on “fair value” assessments provided by the private-equity funds. These spreads have widened, sometimes cavernously. HgCapital Trust, a technology-focused private-equity investor, currently trades at a 25% discount to its most recent net-asset value; the trust’s largest investments are held at 27 times ebitda.Private-equity bosses often claim it is their skills as business-operators, rather than financial engineers, which generate returns (and handsome fees). Their investors should hope this is true. But these masters of the universe will find that they are not immune from the difficulties of managing a business during a period of stagflation; growth and margin worries keep bosses of private companies up at night, too. According to one study, expanding margins accounted for only 6% of private-equity value-creation during the past five years; as pricing-power becomes the focus of all firms, defending profitability will take priority over growth. The penalties for failing to adapt will be harsh. Hefty debt piles (average leverage in large American buy-outs is now more than seven times ebitda, the highest since 2007) make getting this right critical to avoiding the bankruptcy courts. The fate of the $1.3trn waiting to be invested by private-equity firms, known as “dry powder”, is also uncertain. Volatile valuations are one immediate obstacle to spending it. A widening gap in price expectations between buyers and sellers of companies is proving fatal to would-be deals. On 28th June Walgreens Boots Alliance, the American parent company of Boots, a British pharmacist-cum-retailer, called it quits on the sale of the well-known British brand after lengthy talks with potential private-equity suitors failed. A dramatic adjustment in valuations is needed to push buy-outs over the line: on June 24th Zendesk, an American software firm, announced it had agreed to a $10.2bn buy-out by Hellman & Friedman and Permira, two private-equity firms. Only four months earlier, Zendesk had rejected a $17bn proposal from the same funds.Interest rates will prove a more enduring challenge to the buy-out playbook. Cheap debt is a red rag to private-equity bulls: around half a typical buy-out is paid for using debt, magnifying the returns to investors’ capital. It has played a critical role in each buy-out boom period; the present one can trace its genealogy directly to rate cuts by central banks during the global financial crisis.As these policies are unwound in response to rising inflation, buy-out debt has become significantly more expensive. That is not going to change soon. Investors not fleeing these risky assets are demanding far higher returns than before, and American junk-bond yields have reached 9%. The availability of leveraged loans, critical for executing buy-out transactions, has collapsed; in June, loan issuance was down by 41% compared with the same month last year. Investment bankers, who typically underwrite these loans, are bracing for significant losses as the ground shifts beneath their feet and they struggle to offload the debt to investors.A heady mix of stockmarket mania and historically low interest rates has sustained the fourth buy-out boom; it has been scaled-up by immense pools of capital increasing their exposure to private markets. Private equity is coming back down to earth. It will be returning to an unfamiliar planet. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

After an astonishingly robust More

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, runs the aphorism. It also projectile vomits employees who don’t fit in. In a survey conducted earlier this year by Flexjobs, an employment site, culture was the most common reason people gave for quitting. And it matters more than high wages. A study published last year by Jason Sockin of the University of Pennsylvania found that workers rated things like respectfulness, work-life balance and morale as more important to job satisfaction than pay. The problem is that culture can be very hard to fathom from the outside. It resides in quotidian interactions between colleagues and in the hidden threads that bind decisions on everything from promotions to product development. You need to be inside an organisation to really understand it. But more sunlight is getting in. Firms are doing more to signal what they stand for. Jobseekers have new ways to peer inside firms. So do investors, who share their interest in evaluating corporate culture.Offices are places where culture can be transmitted osmotically. Now that more workers are remote, firms increasingly write down their values. Qualtrics, a software firm, may not believe in grammar but it does believe in Transparent, All in, Customer obsessed, One team and Scrappy. Justworks, an hr technology firm, subscribes to Camaraderie, Openness, Grit, Integrity and Simplicity. Lists like these can turn blandness into an art form, and are overly determined by what will create an acronym. They may not reflect what actually happens inside the company. Plenty of firms are characterised by Cluelessness, Rancour, Amateurism, Skiving and Stupidity, but you won’t find that on the website. But companies that codify their values are at least thinking about them. And their choices can offer meaningful clues. Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, sets out its beliefs in ten “Tentaclemandments”. You need to see only that one word to know whether this is the workplace for you or whether you would rather be hurled into an active volcano. Updates can also be instructive. In “ReCulturing”, a new book, Melissa Daimler lays out some of the changes that Dara Khosrowshahi made when he became ceo of Uber in 2017. The values of the previous regime, which included “Superpumped” and “Always be Hustlin’”, were overhauled for something a little less hormonal. The change from “Meritocracy and toe-stepping” to “We value ideas over hierarchy” told people something useful about the aspirations of the new leadership team. Culture is increasingly readable in other ways, too. Since the pandemic, firms’ policies on remote working have given outsiders greater clarity on how employers view issues like work-life balance. Under increasing pressure from employees to take stances, companies are likelier to offer opinions on political and social issues. Others go the other way: Coinbase, another crypto firm, has made it clear that it won’t tolerate employee activism on subjects unrelated to its core mission. That’s information, too.Windows on cultural norms are being opened by regulators, who are pushing for greater disclosure about firms’ workforces. Candidates seem to value this kind of information: a working paper published earlier this year by Jung Ho Choi of Stanford Graduate School of Business and his co-authors found that clickthrough rates for job postings rose for firms with higher diversity scores. The behaviour of ceos used to be directly visible only to a limited number of people. Now bosses are everywhere, tweeting, posting and making stilted videos. In a recent survey by Brunswick Group, a pr firm, 82% of respondents said they would research the boss’s social-media accounts if they were considering joining a new firm. Even earnings calls offer insights. Academics at Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School have found that managers who invite colleagues to respond to analysts’ questions on these calls are more likely to work in firms that have more cohesive leadership teams. Employee-review sites like Glassdoor are another source of insight. These sites can be distorted by embittered ex-workers. But, says Kevin Oakes of the Institute for Corporate Productivity, a research outfit, they are also likely to contain “slivers of truth”. And all these slivers add up. There is no substitute for being at a firm day in, day out, if you want to understand what it is really like. But the outlines of corporate culture are more discernible than ever. That ought to lead to fewer cases of indigestion.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

“None of my friends stayed in tech.” Fred Plais, the boss of Platform.sh, a cloud-computing company based in Paris, still remembers vividly what happened in Europe in 2001. The firm he ran back then, an online-search engine, closed down after the dotcom bubble burst—along with most of the other startups he knew. The story was much the same in 2008 as a result of the global financial crisis. European technology firms again suffered more than their American counterparts. Fears that the looming downturn and plummeting tech valuations will once more be hit harder in Europe than across the Atlantic were stoked on July 1st, when the Wall Street Journal reported that Klarna, a Swedish buy-now-pay-later darling, was trying to raise fresh capital at less than a fifth of its peak valuation of $46bn.Such stories notwithstanding, both Europe’s startups and its venture capitalists look much sturdier than in the past, and much less reliant on foreign know-how and capital. They may even weather the storm better than America’s this time around. To understand why, start by considering the boom. Last year was a smasher in Europe even by frenetic global standards. For the first time, venture-capital (vc) investments on the old continent exceeded €100bn ($118bn) in a single year, reports PitchBook, a data provider. Startup valuations rocketed accordingly, pushing the number of European “unicorns”, private firms worth more than $1bn, to nearly 150 today, about 13% of the world’s total. Although Europe’s tech ecosystem is still only about a third as big as America’s in terms of vc investments, it has more than doubled in size since 2020.Some of this growth is a mechanical consequence of excess capital flooding into Europe, where startup valuations had lagged behind those in America and Asia. In 2021 American vc firms invested in European deals worth $83bn, a three-fold increase on the previous year, according to PitchBook. Non-traditional investors, both American and from elsewhere, such as hedge funds and big companies’ vc arms, discovered Europe, too, participating in nearly $100bn-worth of deals, an increase of 150% from 2020.As Klarna’s attempt to raise funds implies, this surfeit of capital is poised to end this year in Europe as elsewhere. Happily for European tech, that isn’t the whole story. “The European flywheel has taken off,” says Sarah Guemouri of Atomico, a vc firm in London, referring to the idea that success in tech breeds further success. Flywheels spin at the level of the individual firm, when more users translate into better services, which draws in more users, and so on. They can also rev up the whole industry. European venture capitalism indeed looks capable of powering itself. A critical resource is talent. Last year Dealroom, another data provider, analysed the careers of 38,000 startup executives. Almost two-fifths had already worked for both small startups and established firms, signalling a growing collective experience. Similarly, when Mosaic Ventures, another European vc firm, recently looked at nearly 200 founders of unicorns, it discovered that two in three were repeat entrepreneurs. “It is the second or third time that produces a unicorn,” says Simon Levene, one of the firm’s partners.As they become more experienced, European entrepreneurs are not only becoming more ambitious, but better at telling a convincing story about what they want to achieve. Nadine Hachach-Haram, founder of Proximie, a health-care startup which uses augmented reality to allow doctors to remotely watch a surgery, is on a mission to create the “borderless operating room”. Avi Meir, who runs TravelPerk, a site to manage business travel based in Barcelona, wants it to become the place to facilitate “human connections between remote workers”, for instance by offering tools to organise real-life team meetings. Nicolas Brusson, the boss of BlaBlaCar, which started as a Parisian service to arrange shared car rides between cities, aims to turn it into a “multimodal platform” that also aggregates demand for buses and perhaps even trains globally. To some this may sound like marketing guff but it is precisely the sort of thing investors and prospective staff still want to hear. Capital is being accumulated and fed back into the industry, too. According to PitchBook, nearly €100bn in vc was raised by European funds over the past five years. Almost half of that has yet to be deployed, leaving Europe’s venture capitalists with plenty of “dry powder” to tide over startups even if the crisis drags on. European investors also tend to plough a lot of cash into early-stage startups. In 2021 European vc firms accounted for a third of all investments globally under $5m, estimates Dealroom—almost as much as their American counterparts.The number of “angels”, successful entrepreneurs who funnel some of their tech wealth back into other startups, is also growing. Some create their own vc firms. On June 28th Taavet Hinrikus, co-founder of Wise, an international-payments service, and three other European entrepreneurs, launched Plural, a €250m fund. Executives lower down the food chain have also started to invest, in part because more and more European tech workers are compensated in part with their employer’s stock. A few years ago only about 10% of shares were allocated to employees, says Dominic Jacquesson of Index Ventures, a Silicon Valley vc stalwart. Thanks to legal changes, and a growing cultural acceptance of stock options, the figure is about 17%, not far off the 20% or so common in America.The structure of the tech ecosystem is also more robust now rather than a disparate collection of unlikely success stories, such as Skype, a video-conferencing service now owned by Microsoft, or Spotify, a music-streaming app. In a recent report on European unicorns Richard Kersley of Credit Suisse, a bank, and his colleagues split them into “enablers”, for example payment services like Klarna and Checkout.com, and “disrupters” (such as Getir, a Turkish delivery app) which thrive by piggybacking on such infrastructure.On top of more home-grown experience and capital, as well as a hardier structure, European firms boast certain comparative advantages that will come in handy in a leaner, post-pandemic era. One is their relative thriftiness. Although private companies are not required to disclose such numbers, indications are that their “burn rate”, the speed at which they spend money they have raised, is lower, at least at younger startups. Hiring software developers in Barcelona or Berlin costs on average only half of what it does in San Francisco or Seattle. Mature startups in Europe, meanwhile, are less geographically concentrated than their counterparts in America, both in terms of their markets and their vc support. Because Europe’s domestic markets and talent pools are limited, firms quickly expand abroad. Veriff, an Estonian online-identification service, recently opened another site in Barcelona because it could not hire enough engineers in Tallinn. As a result, about 80% of European tech companies have an international presence, compared with 61% of firms based in Silicon Valley, according to Atomico. Just one in five European firms has an office in its home territory alone and just over half are present in more than three countries. In Silicon Valley the ratio is reversed. In a crisis, such diversification is a boon.Europe’s thematic unicorn mix may also help. According to the classification used by Credit Suisse, recession-prone businesses such as consumer services are less prevalent than in America. A third of European unicorns operate in fintech, often providing payment services to other firms, thanks to the eu’s more open financial regulations. Nearly a quarter of unicorns, the bank estimates, could be put in the bucket labelled “sustainability”—a business that is likely to benefit as the world gets more serious about fighting climate change.All this helps explain why the number of unicorns has risen in Europe this year. PitchBook counted another 42 in the first six months, compared with 37 created in the same period in 2021. The coming quarters are certain to be tougher. But so is Europe’s tech. Platform.sh has just managed to raise $140m (the valuation was not disclosed, but is approaching unicorn territory). Mr Plais, its boss, is unlikely to have to go job-hunting again soon. ■ More

Summer is in the air. People in the northern hemisphere are starting to discuss holiday plans and making some bold wardrobe choices. Recommendations for beach reads are coming out left, right and centre. The oddest of such lists are those aimed at the relaxed executive. Each summer JPMorgan Chase’s wealth managers release a reading list. Their recommendations for 2022 include a book by a bunch of McKinsey consultants on ceo excellence and a comprehensive guide to non-fungible tokens. You can almost smell the sun-tan lotion. This year’s reading list is also available to explore in the metaverse, because nothing says the azure waters of the Mediterranean like choosing an avatar.In its pick of summer business books, the Financial Times has chosen titles that range from hybrid work to the pitfalls of strategy. hr Exchange Network, a news site, encourages its readers to lounge on the beach with a copy of the “Essential hr Handbook”—and appears not to be joking. It is only a matter of time before The Economist does something similar.People should read whatever they want. The books on the list may well be useful: no mosquito would survive contact with the “Essential hr Handbook”. But anything that contains the words “blockchain” or “McKinsey” is missing the point. Plenty of people spend the majority of their waking hours either working or thinking about work. The idea of a summer read is that it should provide an escape from the office, not yet another way to think about it. In an ideal world people would pack several P.G. Wodehouses and switch off entirely. But publishers could also do their bit and release titles that really are meant to be beach reads on business. These books would be aimed at the off-duty person behind the Zoom screen. They would contain precisely no tips on productivity gains and extol inactivity over frenzy. Instead of showing you “how you too can model yourself on the very best”, as the book on successful chief executives allegedly will, summer titles should give you permission to fall asleep in a pool of your own dribble. Here, then, are a few suggestions to get the industry thinking.In 2005 two insead professors, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, wrote a book called “Blue Ocean Strategy”, which divided marketplaces into uncontested areas (the “blue ocean”) and those infested by predatory competitors (the “red ocean”). But what if you don’t really fancy getting in the water at all? “Yellow Sand Strategy” makes the case that sometimes the best thing to do is remain entirely inactive and hope that nothing bad happens. (“Yellow Ocean Strategy” is a different book entirely, for executives who do things so incompetently that no one gives them any extra work.) The United States Marine Corps has a practice of having senior officers serve up meals to junior members of the unit as a way of cementing bonds. That habit lay behind the title of a management bestseller published by Simon Sinek called “Leaders Eat Last”. On holiday, though, you don’t have to build morale or worry about your team. Read “Leaders Eat Three Club Sandwiches In a Row and Need to Have a Short Lie-Down”, and feel better about yourself. In “The Innovator’s Dilemma” Clayton Christensen describes how leaders of established firms often fail to take advantage of new technologies and risk letting scrappy startups turn into formidable rivals as a result. But the summer break is no time to be thinking about disruption of any kind. Instead, turn your mind to more prosaic problems. “The Procrastinator’s Dilemma” looks at the difficult choice people face between letting work pile up until it really has to be done or letting work pile up until it really, really has to be done. The closer you look, the more you realise that underachievers and rank amateurs are badly served by business publishers. There is a market for laziness: the success of “The 4-Hour Work Week”, by Tim Ferriss, was no accident. With just a few tweaks here and there, many entries in the back catalogue of business bestsellers become ripe for the beach. From “Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective People” to “Start with Why Should I” and “What Colour is Your Sun Lounger?”, the possibilities are endless.These are not the sort of titles anyone wants to be seen reading at work or posting about on LinkedIn. There are no bragging rights associated with them. But the beach is a place to unwind. If ever there is a time for reading lists to indulge the unmotivated and celebrate indolence, the summer is it. Read more from Bartleby, our columnist on management and work:Why managers deserve more understanding (Jul 25th)Work, the wasted years (Jun 16th)Corporate jets: emblem of greed or a boon to business? (Jun 9th)For exclusive insight and reading recommendations from our correspondents in America, sign up to Checks and Balance, our weekly newsletter. More