Biography & Autobiography : Business

Boy meets dot-com, boy falls for dot-com, boy flees dot-com in horror. So goes one of the most perversely hilarious love stories you will ever read, one that blends tech culture, hero worship, cat litter, Albanian economics, venture capitalism, and free bagels into a surreal cocktail of delusion. 21 Dog Years is an epic story of greed, self-deception, and heartbreak, a wickedly funny anthem to an era of bounteous stock options and boundless insanity. more...

Price: $11.99

Every era has its merger; every era has its story. For the New Media age it was an even bigger disaster: the AOL–Time Warner deal. At the time AOL and Time Warner were considered a matchless combination of old media content and new media distribution. But very soon after the deal was announced things started to go bad – and then from bad to worse. Less than four years after the deal was announced, every significant figure in the deal –save the politically astute Richard Parsons – has left the company, along with scores of others. Nearly a $100 billion was written off and a stock that once traded at $100 now trades near $10. What happened? Where did it all go wrong? In this deeply sourced and deftly written book, Nina Munk gives us a window into the minds of two of the oddest men to ever run billion–dollar empires. Steve Case, the boy wonder who built AOL one free floppy disk at a time, was searching for a way out of the New Economy. Meanwhile Jerry Levin, who'd made his reputation as a visionary when he put HBO on satellite distribution, was searching for a monumental deal. These two men, more interested in their place in history than their personal fortunes, each thought they were out–smarting the other. more...

Price: $11.95

A riveting expose of international corruption—and what we can do about it, from the author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. In his stunning memoir, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins detailed his former role as an “economic hit man” in the international corporate skullduggery of a de facto American Empire. This riveting, behind-the-scenes expose unfolded like a cinematic blockbuster told through the eyes of a man who once helped shape that empire. Now, in The Secret History of the American Empire, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is the norm: It’s clear that the world we’ve created is dangerous and no longer sustainable. How did we get here? Who’s responsible? What good have we done and at what cost? And what can we do to change things for the next generations? Addressing these questions and more, Perkins reveals the secret history behind the events that have created the American Empire, including:. • The current Latin-American revolution and its lessons for democracy. • How the “defeats” in Vietnam and Iraq benefited big business. • The role of Israel as “Fortress America” in the Middle East. • Tragic repercussions of the IMF’s “Asian Economic Collapse”. • U.S. blunders in Tibet, Congo, Lebanon, and Venezuela. • Jackal (CIA operatives) forays to assassinate democratic presidents. From the U.S. military in Iraq to infrastructure development in Indonesia, from Peace Corps volunteers in Africa to jackals in Venezuela, Perkins exposes a conspiracy of corruption that has fueled instability and anti-Americanism around the globe. Alarming yet hopeful, this book provides a compassionate plan to reimagine our world. more...

Price: $25.95

Power . . . Personality . . . Paradox When Alan Greenspan talks, Wall Street listens – as do bankers, investors, politicians, and economists throughout the world. He is the number one arbiter of U.S. monetary policy – credited, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, with having simultaneously held inflation down and kept the economy growing throughout the longest and largest economic expansion in U.S. history. more...

Price: $27.95

Any short list of the world’s most admired business people would include Andy Grove, the chairman and CEO of Intel during its years of explosive growth. During Grove’s career, Intel became the model for Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley became the model for the world. And Grove became Time’s Man of the Year—an icon of the promise of the American life. Born in Hungary in 1936, Grove survived the Holocaust only to face the Soviet invasion. He escaped to New York, penniless, at age twenty, and embraced America, putting himself through college and graduate school. He joined Intel at its founding in 1968, rose to CEO in 1987, then led the company into the stratosphere, with compound annual profit growth at 34 percent for the next eleven years. Despite decades of media scrutiny and six of Grove’s own books, there remains a powerful element of mystery about him. This definitive biography, by a Harvard Business School professor with unprecedented access, finally cracks the code of who Andy Grove really is, how his mind works, how he attacks impossible problems, and how he leads others to exceed their own expectations of themselves. more...

Price: $18.00