Showing titles in Business

The colorful story of Condé Nast at its zenith and the profound way it influenced how Americans aspired to look, eat, decorate, date, marry, and even think, has never been examined deeply. Empire of the Elite is the first book-length history of an empire whose publications refashioned American notions of prestige, whose editors became celebrities themselves, and whose diminution offers a cautionary tale of class, hubris, and technological change, even as its aesthetic and ethos remain influential to this day.

The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the "Henry Ford of Agriculture." His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called "the biggest vegetable factory on earth." But the carefully cultivated facade—glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends—hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. A compelling tale of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge three decades in the making, The Spinach King explores the author's complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

Writing in his own singular voice, Barry Diller delivers both an astute and entertaining business memoir and a surprisingly frank coming-of-age story. After starting his career in the mailroom of the William Morris Agency, Diller went on to have one of the most extraordinary ascents in show business history, inventing the TV Movie of the Week for ABC at age twenty-seven, becoming CEO of Paramount Pictures at age thirty-two, and launching the Fox TV network at age forty-four.

Even if you’re an inveterate landlubber, you’ll appreciate his water-borne humility as he absorbs lessons about what not to do before embarking on his own entrepreneurial adventure. Part memoir, part business primer, part hero’s journey, Boat Boy will have you alternately shaking your head, laughing, and taking notes.

The Law of Success in 16 Lessons was initially published in 1928 as a multi-volume correspondence course. According to Hill, the work was commissioned at the request of Andrew Carnegie, at the conclusion of a multi-day interview with Hill. It was allegedly based upon interviews with over 100 American millionaires, including self-made industrial giants such as: Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, over 500 of the most successful people of the planet across nearly 20 years.

When we look at billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg today, it’s easy to assume they were always destined for greatness. But that’s just not true. The myth of the “overnight success” is exactly that—a myth. Every one of these individuals struggled in the beginning. They faced rejection, made mistakes, worked through setbacks, and doubted themselves more than once. What separated them from the crowd wasn’t that they never failed—it’s that they kept going after they did.

When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father’s small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal.

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.

The 38 letters written by Rockefeller to his son imparting his perspectives, ideology, and wisdom to his son.

Here is Trump in action—how he runs his organization and how he runs his life—as he meets the people he needs to meet, chats with family and friends, clashes with enemies, and challenges conventional thinking. But even a maverick plays by rules, and Trump has formulated time-tested guidelines for success. He isolates the common elements in his greatest accomplishments; he shatters myths; he names names, spells out the zeros, and fully reveals the deal-maker's art. And throughout, Trump talks—really talks—about how he does it.

The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders knew: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of his time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens—the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses—and brings to light a bonanza of vital information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.

"Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up," Charles T. Munger advises in Poor Charlie’s Almanack. Originally published in 2005, this compendium of 11 talks, delivered by the legendary Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman between 1986 and 2007, has become a touchstone for a generation of investors and entrepreneurs seeking to absorb the enduring wit and wisdom of one of the great minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Everyone is programmed a little differently, and Bill Gates' unique insight led to business triumphs that are now widely known: the twenty-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a software company that became an industry giant and changed the way the world works and lives; the billionaire many times over who turned his attention to philanthropic pursuits to address climate change, global health, and U.S. education.

Nvidia is the darling of the age of artificial intelligence: the company’s chips are powering the generative-AI revolution, and demand is insatiable. For all the current interest and attention, however, Nvidia is not of our time. Founded more than three decades ago in a Denny’s in East San Jose, for years it was known primarily in the then-niche world of computer gaming. In fact, the company’s leather-jacketed leader, Jensen Huang, is the longest-serving CEO in an industry marked by near constant turmoil and failure.

Surviving Wall Street portrays the dramatic transformation of the investment banking business in recent decades through the tumultuous saga of one firm (Greenhill & Co., a specialist in mergers and acquisitions) and one man (Scott Bok, the longtime CEO of that firm). Written in the style of an adventure tale, this book is also a "coming of age" story for a naive young man who came to Wall Street and managed to grab a front-row seat for a period of epic change.

Written by descendant Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children traces the dramatic and amazingly colorful history of this great American family, from the rise of industrialist and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt to the fall of his progeny - wild spendthrifts whose profligacy bankrupted a vast inheritance.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic.

On the coast of southern China, an eccentric entrepreneur spent three decades steadily building an obscure telecom company into one of the world’s most powerful technological empires with hardly anyone noticing. This all changed in December 2018, when the detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ female scion, sparked an international hostage standoff, poured fuel on the US-China trade war, and suddenly thrust the mysterious company into the global spotlight.