Book picks similar to
Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars that Upended an Auto Empire by Hans Greimel
business
non-fiction
biography
business-economics
What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence
Stephen A. Schwarzman - 2019
Schwarzman, a long-awaited book that uses impactful episodes from Schwarzman's life to show readers how to build, transform, and lead thriving organizations. Whether you are a student, entrepreneur, philanthropist, executive, or simply someone looking for ways to maximize your potential, the same lessons apply.People know who Stephen Schwarzman is—at least they think they do. He’s the man who took $400,000 and co-founded Blackstone, the investment firm that manages over $500 billion (as of January 2019). He’s the CEO whose views are sought by heads of state. He’s the billionaire philanthropist who founded Schwarzman Scholars, this century’s version of the Rhodes Scholarship, in China. But behind these achievements is a man who has spent his life learning and reflecting on what it takes to achieve excellence, make an impact, and live a life of consequence. Folding handkerchiefs in his father’s linen shop, Schwarzman dreamed of a larger life, filled with purpose and adventure. His grades and athleticism got him into Yale. After starting his career in finance with a short stint at a financial firm called DLJ, Schwarzman began working at Lehman Brothers where he ascended to run the mergers and acquisitions practice. He eventually partnered with his mentor and friend Pete Peterson to found Blackstone, vowing to create a new and different kind of financial institution. Building Blackstone into the leading global financial institution it is today didn’t come easy. Schwarzman focused intensely on culture, hiring great talent, and establishing processes that allow the firm to systematically analyze and evaluate risk. Schwarzman’s simple mantra “don’t lose money” has helped Blackstone become a leading private equity and real estate investor, and manager of alternative assets for institutional investors globally. Both he and the firm are known for the rigor of their investment process, their innovative approach to deal making, the diversification of their business lines, and a conviction to be the best at everything they do. Schwarzman is also an active philanthropist, having given away more than a billion dollars. In philanthropy, as in business, he is drawn to situations where his capital and energy can be applied to drive transformative solutions and change paradigms, notably in education. He uses the skills learned over a lifetime in finance to design, establish, and support impactful and innovative organizations and initiatives. His gifts have ranged from creating a new College of Computing at MIT for the study of artificial intelligence, to establishing a first-of-its-kind student and performing arts center at Yale, to enabling the renovation of the iconic New York Public Library, to founding the Schwarzman Scholars fellowship program at Tsinghua University in Beijing—the single largest philanthropic effort in China’s history from international donors. Schwarzman’s story is an empowering, entertaining, and informative guide for anyone striving for greater personal impact. From deal making to investing, leadership to entrepreneurship, philanthropy to diplomacy, Schwarzman has lessons for how to think about ambition and scale, risk and opportunities, and how to achieve success through the relentless pursuit of excellence. Schwarzman not only offers readers a thoughtful reflection on all his own experiences, but in doing so provides a practical blueprint for success.
Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
Gabriel Weinberg - 2019
If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form. You've got to have models in your head."- Charlie Munger, investor, vice chairman of Berkshire HathawayThe world's greatest problem-solvers, forecasters, and decision-makers all rely on a set of frameworks and shortcuts that help them cut through complexity and separate good ideas from bad ones. They're called mental models, and you can find them in dense textbooks on psychology, physics, economics, and more.Or, you can just read Super Thinking, a fun, illustrated guide to every mental model you could possibly need. How can mental models help you? Well, here are just a few examples... • If you've ever been overwhelmed by a to-do list that's grown too long, maybe you need the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to help you prioritize. • Use the 5 Whys model to better understand people's motivations or get to the root cause of a problem. • Before concluding that your colleague who messes up your projects is out to sabotage you, consider Hanlon's Razor for an alternative explanation. • Ever sat through a bad movie just because you paid a lot for the ticket? You might be falling prey to Sunk Cost Fallacy. • Set up Forcing Functions, like standing meeting or deadlines, to help grease the wheels for changes you want to occur.So, the next time you find yourself faced with a difficult decision or just trying to understand a complex situation, let Super Thinking upgrade your brain with mental models.Note: in the US the subtitle is The Big Book of Mental Models and outside it is Upgrade Your Reasoning and Make Better Decisions with Mental Models.
Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success
Mike Schultz - 2009
A necessary addition to your reading." --David Maister, author of Managing the Professional Service Firm"Professional Services Marketing will certainly become the bible of the field in short order! Without a doubt, the most useful compendium of marketing insight for the practicing professional services firm executive...BRAVO!" --Leonard A. Schlesinger, President, Babson College, and coauthor of The Service Profit Chain"It's no longer sufficient to be a good 'expert for hire'--you need a brand and a powerful marketing engine behind you. Professional Services Marketing is a gold mine of research based strategies, best practices, and specific techniques that will help you consistently win in the client marketplace and outshine your competition. It's thoughtful, funny, and filled with the how-to so often missing in business books." --Andrew Sobel, coauthor of Clients for Life"Schultz and Doerr offer tactics and information in an easy-to-read, concise, and enjoyable format. Professional Services Marketing should be a required resource in every professional marketer's tool box!" --R. Granville Loar, Executive Director, Association for Accounting Marketing"This book is an excellent resource for anyone involved in professional services. It is especially timely in our current challenging economic conditions, and the ideas and guidance are relevant for the better times to come as well." --Josh Lee, Partner, Monitor Group"Smart. Practical. Comprehensive. This is the one book that won't collect dust on my shelf." --Kevin McMurdo, Chief Marketing Officer, Perkins Coie"Professional Services Marketing is the first book to directly address the challenges of the professional services marketer. This book is filled with practical wisdom and research on best practices and processes specifically for this industry. A must-read for anyone in a professional services firm!" --Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing, BearingPoint
Lost and Founder: The Mostly Awful, Sometimes Awesome Truth about Building a Tech Startup
Rand Fishkin - 2018
His company, Moz, makers of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt.Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached.Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.
Waffle Street: The Confession and Rehabilitation of a Financier
James Adams - 2010
Wearied by eight years in the bond market and disillusioned by the financial services profession, he decides to get an “honest job” for a change. Before he knows what hit him, Jimmy finds himself waiting on tables of barflies at his local Waffle House.Amidst the glorious chaos of the night shift, the 24-hour diner affords a bevy of comedic experiences as the author struggles to ingratiate himself with a motley crew of waiters and cooks.Unexpectedly, the restaurant also becomes a font of insight into financial markets and the human condition.In a uniquely hilarious and thought-provoking narrative, Waffle Street unravels the enigmas of money, banking, economics, and grits once and for all. As they laugh heartily at the author’sexpense, readers will develop a profound appreciation for the first principle of economics: there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
Yamamoto Tsunetomo - 1716
It is not a book of philosophy as most would understand the word: it is a collection of thoughts and sayings recorded over a period of seven years, and as such covers a wide variety of subjects, often in no particular sequence. The work represents an attitude far removed from our modern pragmatism and materialism, and possesses an intuitive rather than rational appeal in its assertion that Bushido is a Way of Dying, and that only a samurai retainer prepared and willing to die at any moment can be totally true to his lord. While Hagakure was for many years a secret text known only to the warrior vassals of the Hizen fief to which the author belonged, it later came to be recognized as a classic exposition of samurai thought and came to influence many subsequent generations, including Yukio Mishima. This translation offers 300 selections that constitute the core texts of the 1,300 present in the original. Hagakure was featured prominently in the film Ghost Dog, by Jim Jarmusch.
India: A Short History
Andrew Robinson - 2014
To Alexander the Great, the country was a place of clever naked philosophers and massive armies mounted on elephants – which eventually forced his army to retreat. To ancient Rome, it was a source of luxuries, mainly spices and textiles, paid for in gold—hence the enormous numbers of Roman gold coins excavated in India. At the height of the Mughal empire in 1700, India boasted 24 percent of the world economy—a share virtually equal to Europe’s 25 percent. But then its economy declined. Colonial India was known for its extremes of wealth and poverty, epitomized by the Taj Mahal and famines, maharajas and untouchables, and also for its spirituality: many-armed Hindu gods and Buddhist philosophy, Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.India: A Short History places as much emphasis on individuals, ideas and cultures as on the rise and fall of kingdoms, political parties and economies. Anyone curious about a great civilization, and its future, will find this an ideal introduction, at times controversial, written by an author who has been strongly engaged with India for more than three decades.
The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes
Zachary D. Carter - 2020
Writing a full two years before Keynes would revolutionize the economics world with the publication of The General Theory, Woolf nevertheless found herself unable to condense her friend's already-extraordinary life into anything less than twenty-five themes, which she jotted down at the opening of her homage: "Politics. Art. Dancing. Letters. Economics. Youth. The Future. Glands. Genealogies. Atlantis. Mortality. Religion. Cambridge. Eton. The Drama. Society. Truth. Pigs. Sussex. The History of England. America. Optimism. Stammer. Old Books. Hume."Keynes was not only an economist, as he is remembered today, but the preeminent anti-authoritarian thinker of the twentieth century, a man who devoted his life to the belief that art and ideas could conquer war and deprivation. A moral philosopher, political theorist, and statesman, Keynes immersed himself in a creative milieu filled with ballerinas and literary icons as he developed his own innovative and at times radical thought, reinventing Enlightenment liberalism for the harrowing crises of his day--which included two world wars and an economic collapse that challenged the legitimacy of democratic government itself. The Price of Peace follows Keynes from intimate turn-of-the-century parties in London's riotous Bloomsbury art scene to the fevered negotiations in Paris that shaped the Treaty of Versailles, through stock market crashes and currency crises to diplomatic breakthroughs in the mountains of New Hampshire and wartime ballet openings at Covent Garden.In this riveting biography, veteran journalist Zachary D. Carter unearths the lost legacy of one of history's most important minds. John Maynard Keynes's vibrant, deeply human vision of democracy, art, and the good life has been obscured by technical debates, but in The Price of Peace, Carter revives a forgotten set of ideas with the power to reinvent national government and reframe the principles of international diplomacy in our own time.
In the Shadow of the Mountain: A Memoir of Courage
Silvia Vasquez-Lavado - 2022
Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her page-turning, pulse-raising memoir following her journey to Mount Everest.A Latina hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. Deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she’d suffered as a child, she started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent― the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains and death’s close proximity―woke her up. She then took her biggest pain as a survivor to the biggest mountain: Everest.“The Mother of the World,” as it’s known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn’t go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her. It was never easy. At times hair-raising, nerve-racking, and always challenging, Silvia remembers the acute anxiety of leading a group of novice climbers to Everest’s base, all the while coping with her own nerves of summiting. But, there were also moments of peace, joy, and healing with the strength of her fellow survivors and community propelling her forward.In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, an appetite for risk, and faith in our own resilience.
How I Almost Blew It
Sidharth Rao - 2019
The market is flush with capital, and the internet and emerging technologies have lowered costs and nearly levelled the playing field. The Indian digital ecosystem is ready to explode. The romance of the start-up story fills media column inches.But, for every new venture that made it, there are numerous others that didn’t. The untold story of the successes is that every one of them almost didn’t make it. Each one had a near-death experience, almost shut down, almost sold itself too short—in short, almost ‘blew it’. How I Almost Blew It talks to some of India’s biggest entrepreneurs—Sanjeev Bikhchandani (Info Edge and Naukri.com), Deep Kalra (MakeMyTrip), Deepinder Goyal (Zomato), Ashish Hemrajani (BookMyShow), Sahil Barua (Delhivery) and Girish Mathrubootham (Freshworks) and others—to tell stories that shock, reveal and inspire. Quick-thinking, astute decision-making and—occasionally—sheer dumb luck is what stood between them and the abyss. These heart-stopping stories of near-fiascos are industry wisdom, yes, but also critical life lessons. In the book, Sidharth Rao narrates the tales of the start-up industry titans. The industry leaders covered in the book include: SANJEEV BIKHCHANDANI (Info Edge India - Naukri.com) KUNAL SHAH (FreeCharge) MURUGAVEL JANAKIRAMAN (Bharat Matrimony) AJIT BALAKRISHNAN (Rediff.com) ANUPAM MITTAL (People Group) ASHISH HEMRAJANI (BookMyShow) BRIJESH AGARWAL (IndiaMART) JITENDRA GUPTA (Citrus Pay) DEEPINDER GOYAL (Zomato) DEEP KALRA (MakeMyTrip) PRADEEP KAR (Microland) SATYAN GAJWANI (Times Internet) RAJESH JAIN (IndiaWorld) SAHIL BARUA (Delhivery) ALOK MITTAL (JobsAhead.com) R. RAMARAJ (Sify) GIRISH MATHRUBOOTHAM (Freshworks)
The Ultimate Marketing Plan: Find Your Hook. Communicate Your Message. Make Your Mark.
Dan S. Kennedy - 1991
The Ultimate Marketing Plan, 3rd Edition shows you how to put together the most promotable message possible for any product or service. Filled with practical, no-nonsense ideas that help you position your product, build buzz and make money, this updated edition includes expanded coverage on Internet marketing.
21 Letters on Life and Its Challenges
Charles B. Handy - 2019
His books on management – including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management – have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends – such as Beyond Certainty and The Second Curve – has changed the way we view society.In his new book, Handy builds on a life's work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities the next generation faces. How will people cope with change in a world where the old certainties no longer apply? What goals will and should they set themselves? How will they find purpose and fulfilment in their lives? Clear-eyed and optimistic by turns, he sets out the questions that everyone needs to ask themselves, and points us in the direction of the answers.
The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask about Your Organization: An Inspiring Tool for Organizations and the People Who Lead Them
Peter F. Drucker - 1993
A tool for self-assessment and transformation, answering these five questions will fundamentally change the way you work, helping you lead your organization to an exceptional level of performance. Peter Drucker's five questions are:What is our Mission? with Jim CollinsWho is our Customer? with Phil KotlerWhat does the Customer Value? with Jim KouzesWhat are our Results? with Judith RodinWhat is our Plan? with V. Kasturi RanganThese essential questions, grounded in Peter Drucker's theories of management, will take readers on a exploration of organizational and personal self-discovery, giving them a means to assess how to be--how to develop quality, character, mind-set, values and courage. The questions lead to action. By asking these questions, readers can focus on why they are doing what they are doing in their work, and how to do it better. Designed for today's busy professionals, this brief, clear and accessible book will challenge readers to ask these provocative questions and it will stimulate spirited discussions and action within any organization, inspiring positive change and new levels of excellence, helping all to envision the future of theirs' or any organization.
Maestro: Greenspan's Fed and the American Boom
Bob Woodward - 2000
In Maestro, Bob Woodward uses his proven interviewing and research techniques to take you inside the Fed and Greenspan's thinking. Woodward presents the Greenspan years as a gripping narrative, a remarkable portrait of a man who has become the symbol of American economic preeminence.
Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger
Charles T. Munger - 2005
Edited by Peter D. Kaufman. Brand New.