Pivotal180’s Holiday Readings

The holiday readings to close out 2023  

A good book is the perfect match for the holiday travels, a cabin, or a winter storm! We’ll wrap up the year with the best business books awards – and to get you into the PF holiday spirit, include a couple of recommendations for mining, materials & valuation. If for some reason you’re looking for a special PF-themed holiday gift, we also have you covered!   

Best business books 

• FT: Right Kind of Wrong (Amy Edmondson). We also highly recommend sorting through the shortlist and longlist for this award, including the Elon Musk biography and “Billionaires’ Row”.  
• Economist: How Big Things Get Done (Bent Flyvbjerg & Dan Gardner) 
• SABEW: Built from the Fire, the tale of Tulsa’s Black Wall Street (Victor Luckerson)  

Mining & materials 

• Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization (Ed Conway). Read more about how sand, salt, iron, copper, oil & lithium impact past and future consumption.    
• Deep Down Dark (Héctor Tobar). Takes you deep inside the mining operations, and the traumatic story of the 33 workers trapped in a Chilean mine for 69 days.  
• The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization (Vince Beiser). Sand features again as a recommended book, maybe we are just longing for a beach holiday?  

Valuation 

• Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business (Aswath Damodaran). A more narrative-focused book, if you are interested in the deep dive, see Damodaran on Valuation: Security Analysis for Investment and Corporate Finance.  
• Thinking, fast and slow (Daniel Kahneman). Valuation, bias and assumptions go hand-in-hand!   
• Financial Shenanigans: How to Detect Accounting Gimmicks & Fraud in Financial Reports (Howard Schilit)  

What we are looking forward to:  

• Solar Power Finance Without the Jargon, second edition (Jenny Chase). To be published December 28!  
• One day access to a comprehensive volume of all the IRS guidance related to IRA. For those feeling nostalgic, maybe a guide for all rulings and notices up until 2017? See Renewable Power Financing: Tax Credit Reference Guide 

PF-themed holiday gifts,

• We will steer clear of the standard recommendations for keyboards, monitors and our courses! Instead, consider the following:  
  • Excel add-ins  
  • A spot at the next Excel World Championship 
  • For the person who has everything: A tour of the global megaprojects of the world. Consider adding the Three Gorges Dam, Hornsea or Bhadla Solar Park.   

Please use the links below to find out about Pivotal180 and our financial modelling courses  and services. Experience the Pivotal180 difference.

• Financial Modeling and Support 
• Project finance and infrastructure financial modeling
• Renewable energy project finance modeling
• Tax equity modeling
• Introduction to Battery Storage