Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Business

Larry Ellison started the high-flying tech company Oracle with $1,200 in 1977 and turned it into a billion-dollar Silicon Valley giant. If Bill Gates is the tech world's nerd king, Ellison is its Warren Beatty: racing yachts, buying jets, and romancing beautiful women. His rise to fame and fortune is a tale of entrepreneurial brilliance, ruthless tactics, and a constant stream of half-truths and outright fabrications for which the man and his company are notorious.

Investigative reporter Mike Wilson, with access to Ellison himself and more than 125 of his friends, enemies, and former...

Mr. China tells the rollicking story of a young man who goes to China with the misguided notion that he will help bring the Chinese into the modern world, only to be schooled by the most resourceful and creative operators he would ever meet. Part memoir, part parable, Mr. China is one man's coming-of-age story where he learns to respect and admire the nation he sought to conquer.

A portrait of a great American dynasty and its legacy in business, technology, the arts, and philanthropy

Meyer Guggenheim, a Swiss immigrant, founded a great American business dynasty. At their peak in the early twentieth century, the Guggenheims were reckoned among America's wealthiest, and the richest Jewish family in the world after the Rothschilds. They belonged to Our Crowd, that tight social circle of New York Jewish plutocrats, but unlike the others -- primarily merchants and financiers -- they made their money by extracting and refining copper, silver, lead, tin, and...

Like other kids in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Ejovi Nuwere grew up among thugs and drug dealers. When he was eleven, he helped form a gang; at twelve, he attempted suicide. In his large, extended family, one uncle was a career criminal, one a graduate student with his own computer. By the time Ejovi was fourteen, he was spending as much time on the computer as his uncle was. Within a year he was well on his way to a hacking career that would lead him to one of the most audacious and potentially dangerous computer break-ins of all time, secret until now.

Before...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Chasing Daylight is the honest, touching, and ultimately inspirational memoir of former KPMG CEO Eugene O'Kelley, completed in the three-and-a-half months between his diagnosis with brain cancer and his death in September 2005. Its haunting yet extraordinarily hopeful voice reminds us to embrace the fragile, fleeting moments of our lives-the brief time we have with our family, our friends, and even ourselves. This paperback edition features a new foreword by his wife, Corinne O'Kelley and a readers' group guide and questions.

Invisible Giants is the Horatio Alger-esque tale of a pair of reclusive Cleveland brothers, Oris Paxton and Mantis James Van Sweringen, who rose from poverty to become two of the most powerful men in America. They controlled the country's largest railroad system--a network of track reaching from the Atlantic to Salt Lake City and from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico. On the eve of the Great Depression they were close to controlling the country's first coast-to-coast rail system--a goal that still eludes us. They created the model upper-class suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, with its unique...

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) was the first efficiency expert, the original time-and-motion man -- the father of scientific management, the inventor of a system that became known, inevitably enough, as Taylorism. "In the past the man has been first. In the future the System will be first," he predicted boldly, and accurately. Taylor bequeathed to us, writes Robert Kanigel in this definitive biography, a clockwork world of tasks timed to the hundredth of a minute. Taylor helped instill in us the obsession with time, order, productivity, and efficiency that marks our age. His...

Published in 1964, My Years with General Motors was an immediate best-seller and today is considered one of the few classic books on management. The book is the ghostwritten memoir of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (1875-1966), whose business and management strategies enabled General Motors to overtake Ford as the dominant American automobile manufacturer in the 1920s and 1930s.

What has been largely unknown until now is that My Years with General Motors was almost not published. Although it was written with the permission of General Motors -- and slated for publication in...

Twentieth-century artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) -- legendary and self-mythologizing, enigmatic and controversial -- remains an important influence on artists today. Beuys embraced radically democratic artistic and political ideas, proclaiming "Everyone is an artist," and advocating direct democracy through referenda. He famously worked with such nontraditional materials as felt, fat, and plants and animals both alive and dead. Beuys and his work -- performance art, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation -- received perhaps the most contentious reception of any postwar artist. This...

From the distinguished Charles Handy to the classic Philip Kotler to the outspoken Paul Krugman, and including such visionary leaders as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, "The Thinkers 50," based on an international survey of business academics, practitioners, consultants, and journalists, reinforces the powerful influences business and popular culture have on each other. Following surveys that were conducted in 2001 and 2003 (asking the single question: Who is the most important living management thinker?), the 2005 survey is the first to be released with a companion book, applying such criteria...

Sweet and Low is the bittersweet, hilarious story of Ben Eisenstadt, who invented sugar packets and Sweet'N Low, and amassed the great fortune that would later destroy his family. It is a story of immigrants, Jewish gangsters, and Brooklyn; of sugar, saccharine, obesity, and diet crazes; of jealousy, betrayal, and ambition. Disinherited along with his mother and siblings, Rich Cohen has written a rancorous, colorful history of his extraordinary family and their pursuit of the American dream.