How to Tame Your Vampire Squid

Why Capitalism Has Gone Rogue – and What To Do About It
Insightful, irreverent and grounded in decades of real-world experience, How to Tame Your Vampire Squid is an engaging and accessible exploration of what has gone wrong with our economic system – and how we can retrain it to work better for us all.

For fans of Doughnut Economics, The Trading Game and The Big Short, How to Tame Your Vampire Squid is an insightful and irreverent account of how our economic system got here, why it isn't working as it should – and how we could tame it.

Meet the vampire squid: a powerful, ingenious creature with one unfortunate habit – it never knows when it has enough.

For the past forty years, one idea has come to dominate the way we do business: maximize profit. The result is a system – our insatiable squid – programmed to keep extracting, expanding and chasing ever greater returns, even when the consequences work against the people it was meant to serve.

But what if capitalism itself isn’t the problem? What if the problem is what we’ve trained it to do?

Drawing on a lifetime in business – from witnessing the transformation of Cadbury in the 1990s to building the much-loved food brand COOK and navigating the chaos of the 2008 financial crisis – James Perry tells the story of modern capitalism from the inside, combining colourful characters and eye-opening encounters to reveal how the pursuit of short-term financial gains came to dominate the way we do business.

Along the way, he makes sense of the forces shaping our everyday lives, such as banking, private equity, inequality and the changing role of business. And he introduces us to the people already proving there is another way to do things.

This isn’t an argument for tearing capitalism down. Enterprise remains one of humanity’s most powerful tools. The vampire squid is simply doing what we've taught it to do – which means we can teach it something different.

Contributor: Michael Aylwin (Contributions by)

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