Business Biography

Josh Harris had been New York's first net millionaire. He founded the city's first dotcom, Pseudo.com, and paved the way for a cadre of net-savvy 20-somethings to follow, riding a wave of tech euphoria to unimagined wealth and fame for five years, before losing it all in the great dotcom crash of 2000. Long before then, however, Harris's view of where the web would take us had darkened, and he began a series of lurid social experiments aimed at illustrating his worst fear: that the internet would soon alter the very fabric of society - cognitive, social, political, and otherwise.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

My Years with General Motors became an instant best seller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used as a manual for managers, offering personal glimpses into the practice of the "discipline of management" by the man who perfected it. This is the story no other businessman could tell - a distillation of half a century of intimate leadership experience with a giant industry and an inside look at dramatic events and creative business management.

Dick Van Dyke, indisputably one of the greats of the golden age of television, is admired and beloved by audiences the world over for his beaming smile, his physical dexterity, his impeccable comic timing, his ridiculous stunts, and his unforgettable screen roles.

Tia Toomey, the world’s fittest woman, has won the CrossFit Games an incredible six years in a row and is undeniably a true warrior. She has also trained for the Winter Olympics in bobsledding, competed in the Summer Olympics in weightlifting, and was a Commonwealth Games gold medalist. She is, in short, one of the most accomplished and dominant athletes in human history. But for Tia physical fitness is only a small part of overall strength. More important is building mental toughness.

In this illuminating memoir, McChrystal frankly explores the major episodes and controversies of his eventful career. He delves candidly into the intersection of history, leadership, and his own experience to produce a book of enduring value. Joining the troubled post-Vietnam army as a young officer, McChrystal witnessed and participated in some of our military’s most difficult struggles. He describes the many outstanding leaders he served with and the handful of bad leaders he learned not to emulate.

During the upheavals of 2007-9, the chairman of the Federal Reserve had the name of a Victorian icon on the tip of his tongue: Walter Bagehot. Banker, man of letters, inventor of the Treasury bill, and author of Lombard Street, the still-canonical guide to stopping a run on the banks, Bagehot prescribed the doctrines that - decades later - inspired the radical responses to the world's worst financial crises.

When Carol Loomis first mentioned a little-known Omaha hedge-fund manager in a 1966 Fortune article, she didn’t dream that Warren Buffett would one day be considered the world’s greatest investor - nor that she and Buffett would become close personal friends. Now Loomis has collected and updated the best Buffett articles Fortune published between 1966 and 2012, including thirteen cover stories and a dozen pieces authored by Buffett himself. Loomis has provided commentary about each major arti­cle that supplies context and her own informed point of view.

No one knew it when their experiment began, but without any particular genius or acumen, the motley cast of billionaires and hucksters behind the modern Premier League struck gold. Pretty soon, everyone wanted to try their luck, from Russian oligarchs to Emirati sheikhs, American tycoons, and Asian Tiger titans. Some succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Some lost everything. Today, players are sold for tens of millions, clubs are valued in the billions, and games are beamed out to nearly 200 countries, all while the league struggles to preserve its English soul.

Once the poster girl for doing it all, after she had her first child, Tiffany Dufu struggled to accomplish everything she thought she needed to in order to succeed. Like so many driven and talented women who have been brought up to believe that to have it all, they must do it all, Dufu began to feel that achieving her career and personal goals was an impossibility. Eventually, she discovered the solution: letting go. In Drop the Ball, Dufu recounts how she learned to reevaluate expectations, shrink her to-do list, and meaningfully engage the assistance of others.

A wonderfully candid memoir from one of the most recognizable faces of a generation, actor, writer, Youtuber, and television superstar, Josh Peck. In his warm and inspiring book, Josh reflects on the many stumbles and silver linings of his life and traces a zigzagging path to redemption. Written with such impressive detail and aching honesty, Happy People are Annoying is full of surprising life lessons for anyone seeking to accept their past and make peace with the complicated face in the mirror.

During his 34-year tenure at Chick-fil-A, Steve Robinson was integrally involved in the company’s growth - from 184 stores and $100 million in annual sales in 1981 to over 2,100 stores and over $6.8 billion in annual sales in 2015 - and was a firsthand witness to its evolution as an indelible global brand. In Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A, Robinson shares behind-the-scenes accounts of key moments.

If you are bored and unfulfilled by dry and overly worthy self-help manuals, then this is the audiobook for you! Listen to this and take a very different look at yourself! Former SAS hero Andy McNab and eminent psychologist Professor Kevin Dutton are unlikely partners. As Oxford academic and bestselling author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Kevin Dutton has plenty of experience of psychopaths, but he'd never met anyone quite like Andy McNab, decorated war hero and special forces warrior.

Daily observation of classroom teaching can significantly impact the quality of teaching and learning. Organized into 21 chapters designed to be read over a period of 21 school days, Now We're Talking! presents a results-driven approach that far surpasses traditional walkthrough models of feedback for teachers. School leaders will complete two cycles of teacher evaluations while reading the book and establish the necessary foundation for subsequent visits.

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly 60 years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the 19th century with a 21st-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades.

Paul Van Doren is the founder of Vans - the shoe company beloved by skateboarders, creatives, and fans everywhere for its laid-back, colorful SoCal vibe, and famous for its people-oriented company culture. How did Van Doren establish a family shoe business that evolved into a globally recognized brand with annual revenue of more than four billion dollars? A blue-collar kid with no higher education and zero retail experience, Van Doren leveraged a knack for numbers, a genius for efficiency, and the know-how to make a great canvas tennis shoe into an all-American success story.

When six-year-old Reginald Lewis overheard his grandparents discussing employment discrimination against African Americans, he asked, “Why should white guys have all the fun?" This self-assured child would grow up to become the CEO of Beatrice International and one of the most successful entrepreneurs ever. At the time of his death in 1993, his personal fortune was estimated in excess of $400 million and his vast commercial empire spanned four continents.

In 2012, Hakeem al-Araibi was a promising young player on Bahrain's national football team when he was arrested for attacking a police station during the Arab Spring, despite television footage showing him playing soccer at the time of the alleged attack. After three months of torture and wrongful imprisonment, Hakeem was released. He fled the country and made his way to Australia, where he was granted refugee status. Hakeem made a life here and was playing for the suburban Pascoe Vale Football Club, in Melbourne. He thought he was safe.

Part instruction manual, part someone else's diary, My Morning Routine features interviews with 64 of today's most successful people - including three-time Olympic gold medalist Rebecca Soni, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, and General Stanley McChrystal - and offers advice on creating a routine of your own. Some routines are all about early morning exercise and spartan living; others are more leisurely and self-indulgent. What they have in common is they don't feel like a chore. Once you land on the right routine, you'll look forward to waking up.