Book picks similar to
American Steel by Richard Preston


business
history
non-fiction
100-best-business-books

Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built


Richard S. Tedlow - 2001
    Tedlow, examines seven great CEOs who successfully managed cutting-edge technology and formed enduring corporate empires.With the depth and clarity of a master, Tedlow illuminates the minds, lives and strategies behind the legendary successes of our times:. George Eastman and his invention of the Kodak camera;. Thomas Watson of IBM;. Henry Ford and his automobile;. Charles Revson and his use of television advertising to drive massive sales for Revlon;. Robert N. Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of Intel;. Andrew Carnegie and his steel empire;. Sam Walton and his unprecedented retail machine, Wal-Mart.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America


George Packer - 2013
    Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet's significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.One of the iTunes Bookstore's "Ten Books You Must Read This Summer"

The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King


Rich Cohen - 2012
    When he died in the grandest house in New Orleans sixty-nine years later, he was among the richest, most powerful men in the world. In between, he worked as a fruit peddler, a banana hauler, a dockside hustler, and a plantation owner. He battled and conquered the United Fruit Company, becoming a symbol of the best and worst of the United States: proof that America is the land of opportunity, but also a classic example of the corporate pirate who treats foreign nations as the backdrop for his adventures. In Latin America, when people shouted “Yankee, go home!” it was men like Zemurray they had in mind.            Rich Cohen’s brilliant historical profile The Fish That Ate the Whale unveils Zemurray as a hidden kingmaker and capitalist revolutionary, driven by an indomitable will to succeed. Known as El Amigo, the Gringo, or simply Z, the Banana Man lived one of the great untold stories of the last hundred years. Starting with nothing but a cart of freckled bananas, he built a sprawling empire of banana cowboys, mercenary soldiers, Honduran peasants, CIA agents, and American statesmen. From hustling on the docks of New Orleans to overthrowing Central American governments, from feuding with Huey Long to working with the Dulles brothers, Zemurray emerges as an unforgettable figure, connected to the birth of modern American diplomacy, public relations, business, and war—a monumental life that reads like a parable of the American dream.

Conspiracy of Fools


Kurt Eichenwald - 2005
    . .

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber


Mike Isaac - 2019
    Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World. . .and Then Nearly Lost It All


Monica Langley - 2003
    As chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup, Sanford "Sandy" Weill has become an American legend, a banking visionary whose innovativeness, opportunism, and even fear drove him from the lowliest jobs on Wall Street to its most commanding heights. In this unprecedented biography, acclaimed Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley provides a compelling account of Weill's rise to power. What emerges is a portrait of a man who is as vital and as volatile as the market itself. Tearing Down the Walls tells the riveting inside story of how a Jewish boy from Brooklyn's back alleys overcame incredible odds and deep-seated prejudices to transform the financial-services industry as we know it today. Using nearly five hundred firsthand interviews with key players in Weill's life and career -- including Weill himself -- Langley brilliantly chronicles not only his success and scandals but also the shadows of his hidden self: his father's abandonment and his loving marriage; his tyrannical rages as well as his tearful regrets; his fierce sense of loyalty and his ruthless elimination of potential rivals. By highlighting in new and startling detail one man's life in a narrative as richly textured and compelling as a novel, Tearing Down the Walls provides the historical context of the dramatic changes not only in business but also in American society in the last half century.

The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less


Richard Koch - 1997
    Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today's business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies.The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives.

Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built


Duncan Clark - 2016
    Alibaba’s $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and Presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China’s booming private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of middle class consumers.Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two decades in China chronicling the Internet’s impact on the country to create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba’s rise.How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80% market share? As it forges ahead into finance and entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba’s ambitions?  How does the Chinese government view its rise?  Will Alibaba expand further overseas, including in the U.S.?Clark tells Alibaba’s tale in the context of China’s momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an unlikely corporate titan as never before.

TITAN: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand


Vinay Kamath - 2018
    The brand they created – at first against tremendous odds and restrictive norms – injected freshness into the market and in retail spaces through its cutting-edge marketing strategy and empathetic advertising. Not only did the new watchmakers on the block transform watches from being utilitarian objects to fashion statements, but it also systematically ventured into areas untapped by corporate entities with its brands Titan, Tanishq, Titan Eyeplus, Skinn and Taneira, and established itself as a winner across multiple verticals. Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand takes readers from boardrooms to back rooms to reveal how a quintessential Indian brand from the house of the Tatas, not known till then for its success in the consumer goods market, reached such remarkable heights. It is a tale of innovation and fortitude, of thinking outside the box and staying the course, of obsession with detail and the courage to acknowledge failure. A story that will inspire every reader, here is the inside account of what continues to make Titan tick.

The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett And I Built Our Company


David Packard - 1995
    After graduation, Hewlett and Packard decided to throw their lots in together. They tossed a coin to decide whose name should go first on the notice of incorporation, then cast about in search of products to sell. Today, the one-car garage in Palo Alto that housed their first workshop is a California historic landmark: the birthplace of Silicon Valley. And Hewlett-Packard has produced thousands of innovative products for millions of customers throughout the world. Their little company employs 98,400 people and boasts constantly increasing sales that reached $25 billion in 1994.While there are many successful companies, there is only one Hewlett-Packard, because from the very beginning, Hewlett and Packard had a way of doing things that was contrary to the prevailing management strategies. In defining the objectives for their company, Packard and Hewlett wanted more than profits, revenue growth and a constant stream of new, happy customers.Hewlett-Packard' s success owes a great deal to many factors, including openness to change, an unrelenting will to win, the virtue of sustained hard work and a company-wide commitment to community involvement. As a result, HP now is universally acclaimed as the world' s most admired technology company; its wildly successful approach to business has been immortalized as "The HP Way."In this book, David Packard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his life' s work and of the truly exceptional company that he and Bill Hewlett started in a garage 55 years ago.

What the CEO Wants You to Know: Using Business Acumen to Understand How Your Company Really Works


Ram Charan - 2001
    . . no matter whether you are selling fruit from a stand or running a Fortune 500 company.Have you ever noticed that the business savvy of the world's best CEOs seems like a kind of street smarts? They sense where the opportunities are and how to take advantage of them. And their companies make money consistently, year after year.How different is it to run a big company than to sell fruit from a cart or run a small shop in a village? In essence, not very, according to Ram Charan. From his childhood in India, where he worked in his family's shoe shop, to his education at Harvard Business School and his daily work advising many of the world's best CEOs, Ram understands business as few can.The best CEOs have a knack for bringing the most complex business down to the fundamentals -- the same fundamentals of the family shoe shop. They have business acumen -- the ability to focus on the basics and make money for the company. What the CEO Wants You to Know captures these insights and explains in clear, simple language how to do what great CEOs do instinctively and persistently: * Understand the basic building blocks of a business and use them to figure out how your company makes money and operates as a total business.* Decide what to do, despite the clutter of day-to-day business and the complexity of the real world. Many people spend more than a hundred thousand dollars on an MBA without learning to pull these pieces of the puzzle together. Many others lack a formal business education and feel shut out from the executive suite. What the CEO Wants You to Know takes the mystery out of business and shows the secrets of success used by business legends like Jack Welch of GE.

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World


Stanley McChrystal - 2015
    But when he took the helm in 2004, America was losing that war badly: despite vastly inferior resources and technology, Al Qaeda was outmaneuvering America’s most elite warriors. McChrystal came to realize that today’s faster, more interdependent world had overwhelmed the conventional, top-down hierarchy of the US military. Al Qaeda had seen the future: a decentralized network that could move quickly and strike ruthlessly. To defeat such an enemy, JSOC would have to discard a century of management wisdom, and pivot from a pursuit of mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. Under McChrystal’s leadership, JSOC remade itself, in the midst of a grueling war, into something entirely new: a network that combined robust centralized communication with decentralized managerial authority. As a result, they beat back Al Qaeda. In this book, McChrystal shows not only how the military made that transition, but also how similar shifts are possible in all organizations, from large companies to startups to charities to governments. In a turbulent world, the best organizations think and act like a team of teams, embracing small groups that combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share what they’ve learned. Drawing on a wealth of evidence from his military career, the private sector, and sources as diverse as hospital emergency rooms and NASA’s space program, McChrystal frames the existential challenge facing today’s organizations, and presents a compelling, effective solution.

The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership


Bill Walsh - 2009
    There is no guarantee, no ultimate formula for success. It all comes down to intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing. When you do that, the score will take care of itself." (Bill Walsh) Bill Walsh is a towering figure in the history of the NFL. His advanced leadership transformed the San Francisco 49ers from the worst franchise in sports to a legendary dynasty that won three Super Bowls. In the process, he changed the way football is played-pushing it into the twenty-first century. Walsh is famous for his strategic brilliance and innovations, such as the West Coast Offense, but his enlightened philosophy of leadership was just as crucial, if not more so, to the unprecedented success of his teams. And that philosophy of leadership is just as powerful and productive in business or any other endeavor as it was for him on the football field. Prior to his death, Walsh granted exclusive interviews to bestselling author Steve Jamison. They became his ultimate lecture on leadership-illustrated by dramatic and apt anecdotes from throughout Walsh's career. A small sample of what you'll learn from one of America's greatest coaches: * Believe in People: Push them hard to be their very best. No one will ever come back later and thank you for expecting too little of them. * Professionalism Matters: There was no showboating allowed after touchdowns, no taunting of opponents, no demonstration to attract attention to oneself: "Champions act like champions before they're champions." * Keep a Short Enemies List: One enemy can do more damage than the good done by a hundred friends. * Protect Your Blind Side: Prompt yourself to aggressively analyze not only your organization's strengths, but also its unseen vulnerabilities. * Sometimes You Can't Have he Last Word. A leader cannot escape harsh criticism. Ignore the undeserving; learn from the deserving. Lick your wounds and move on. Your bruised ego will get over it. Additional insights and perspective are provided by his son Craig Walsh, by legendary quarterback Joe Montana, and by other important figures who knew Bill well. Bill Walsh taught that the requirements of successful leadership are the same whether you run an NFL franchise, a Fortune 500 company, or a hardware store with twelve employees. His final words of wisdom will inspire and enlighten readers in all walks of life.

The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer


Jeffrey K. Liker - 2003
    Less inventory. The highest quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer. In factories around the globe, Toyota consistently raises the bar for manufacturing, product development, and process excellence. The result is an amazing business success story: steadily taking market share from price-cutting competitors, earning far more profit than any other automaker, and winning the praise of business leaders worldwide.The Toyota Way reveals the management principles behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability. Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a renowned authority on Toyota's Lean methods, explains how you can adopt these principles--known as the "Toyota Production System" or "Lean Production"--to improve the speed of your business processes, improve product and service quality, and cut costs, no matter what your industry.Drawing on his extensive research on Toyota, Dr. Liker shares his insights into the foundational principles at work in the Toyota culture. He explains how the Toyota Production System evolved as a new paradigm of manufacturing excellence, transforming businesses across industries. You'll learn how Toyota fosters employee involvement at all levels, discover the difference between traditional process improvement and Toyota's Lean improvement, and learn why companies often think they are Lean--but aren't.

The CEO Factory: Management Lessons from Hindustan Unilever


Sudhir Sitapati - 2019
    No other Corporation in the world has done so well for so long. Its brands sit in most Indian homes (nine out of ten Indians use an HUL product every month), its financial indicators are among the best in Dalal street and it is famously a factory for CEOs. For the first time comes a book that decodes how this great business works – from a director of the company who has spent his whole career there. Why are there so many CEOs across industries in India who are ex-unilever people? What is the company’s secret management training sauce? Why is marketing at the heart of every business? Why is it easier to create a new market than to grab a slice of an existing one? How is it actually smarter to stock your product in smaller quantities in a store than to aggressively push orders? And why you should never, ever believe that pricing down your product will get you more customers. Sharp, insightful and entertaining, the CEO factory is an MBA course in a single book.