Business Memoirs

WeWork would be worth $10 trillion, more than any other company in the world. It wasn’t just an office space provider. It was a tech company - an AI startup, even. Its WeGrow schools and WeLive residences would revolutionize education and housing. One day, mused founder Adam Neumann, a Middle East peace accord would be signed in a WeWork. The company might help colonize Mars. And Neumann would become the world’s first trillionaire.

In this engaging, witty, and inspirational memoir, Chrishell Stause shares her story of living an unconventional childhood in small-town Kentucky marked by periods of homelessness, family addiction struggles, and dreams of one day being on a daytime soap, all while managing the local Dairy Queen. Through resilience and grit, she overcame obstacles and pushed past every barrier in her path to become one of the most envied luxury realtors in Los Angeles and buzzworthy cast members in reality TV.

It’s estimated that each year between eighty and ninety million children around the globe are given a box of LEGO, while up to ten million adults buy sets for themselves. Yet LEGO is much more than a dizzying number of plastic bricks that can be put together and combined in countless ways. LEGO is also a vision of the significance of what play can mean for humanity.

After completely and independently conquering a debilitating eating disorder, Kathryn Hansen wrote Brain over Binge to share her struggle with those still trapped in the compulsive binge-purge cycle. Since the book’s initial release in 2011, it has endured as an essential road map for using the power of the brain to erase harmful habits and create lasting change. The second edition is fully revised and updated with new information, compelling insights, and uplifting success stories that will inspire listeners to break free from their own self-defeating behaviors.

An innovative entrepreneur, outspoken nonconformist, and groundbreaking philanthropist, Ted Turner is truly a living legend, and now, for the first time, he reveals his personal story. From his difficult childhood to the successful launch of his media empire to the catastrophic AOL/Time Warner deal, Turner spares no details or feelings and takes the reader along on a wild and sometimes bumpy ride.

Ponzinomics by Robert L. FitzPatrick, author of False Profits, is the first comprehensive account of how "multi-level marketing" was created in America, escaped criminal and civil prosecution, and spread all over the world. It is the first book to fully explain how the legitimate business of "direct selling" was turned into pyramid recruiting. Ponzinomics reveals how multi-level marketing helped to lay a foundation on Main Street of pervasive deception, financial self-destruction, authoritarian leader-worship, and economic make-believe.

Steven A. Cohen changed Wall Street. He and his fellow pioneers of the hedge fund industry didn’t lay railroads, build factories, or invent new technologies. Rather, they made their billions through financial speculation, by placing bets in the market that turned out to be right more often than not.

In The Rule, legendary trader and hedge fund pioneer Larry Hite recounts his working-class upbringing in Brooklyn as a dyslexic, partially blind kid who was anything but a model student - and how he went on to found and run Mint Investment Management Company, one of the most profitable and largest quantitative hedge funds in the world.

A remarkable debut by one of America's premier young reporters on financial corruption, American Kleptocracy offers the first explosive investigation into how the United States of America built the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known.

The death of Steve Jobs left a gaping void at one of the most innovative companies of all time. Jobs wasn't merely Apple's iconic founder and CEO; he was the living embodiment of a global megabrand. It was hard to imagine that anyone could fill his shoes - especially not Tim Cook, the intensely private executive who many thought of as Apple's "operations drone". But seven years later, as journalist Leander Kahney reveals in this definitive audiobook, things at Apple couldn't be better.

Ron Shaich is a business visionary who has been part of building three iconic restaurant brands: Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread, and now Cava. Along the way, he developed "fast casual," a $100 billion-plus segment of the industry. Now he reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself. He illustrates these lessons with his experiences turning a small cookie store into 2,400 restaurants with $5 billion in revenue, delivering annual investor returns of 25% over two decades, and outperforming both Starbucks and Chipotle.

Before COVID, both Qantas and its CEO Alan Joyce were flying high, the darlings of customers, staff and investors. After Covid hit, only money mattered—in particular, the company’s share price and extraordinary executive bonuses. Illegally redundant workers, unethical flight credits, abysmal customer service, antique aircraft: these became Qantas’ new brand. How did things go so badly wrong? For the first time, The Chairman’s Lounge tells the full story of how one company banked the nation’s loyalty and then cashed in on it.

In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily-white business world, he married a White woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally he set his White contemporaries' teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them.

In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J. Mazzeo brings to life for the first time the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin. A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole defied convention by assuming---after her husband's death---the reins of the fledgling wine business they had nurtured.

A few years ago, lifestyle celebrity and TV pioneer Debbie Travis realized that she was no longer challenged by her wildly successful TV career, and she was so busy she was missing out on the people and things that made her happy. She dared to dream about a whole new direction in life - a plan to turn a 13th-century farmhouse in Tuscany into a unique hotel and retreat for people who need a change as much as she did. And now, after a crazy amount of work, she is not only living that dream but sharing it with others....

A book of being, entitled The Ultimate Coach. Who would I need to be to be a more loving person? Who would I need to be to be a more effective parent? Who would I need to be to create a level of confidence that is remarkable? I promise you that if you listen to this book with the intention of expanding your state of being, you will do exactly that. Your experience will be remarkable. Who you are being is everything. Loving you. Be blessed. Be you.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything takes the listener behind the scenes of these firms: their famous billionaire founders, the overlapping stories of their creation and evolution, and the outsized ambitions that led a group of clever bankers from small shops operating in a corner of Wall Street into powerhouse titans of capital. This is the story of the money and the men who handle it.

Henry Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders—Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher—through the distinctive strategies of statecraft that he believes they embodied. To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and, because he knew each of the subjects and participated in many of the events he describes, personal knowledge.

What does it mean to be smart? To be human? What do we really want from life and the intelligence we have, or might create? With deep and exclusive reporting, across hundreds of interviews, New York Times Silicon Valley journalist Cade Metz brings you into the rooms where these questions are being answered. Where an extraordinarily powerful new artificial intelligence has been built into our biggest companies, our social discourse, and our daily lives, with few of us even noticing.

Robert Evans' The Kid Stays in the Picture is universally recognized as the greatest, most outrageous, and most unforgettable show business memoir ever written. The basis of an award-winning documentary film, it remains the gold standard of Hollywood storytelling. An extraordinary raconteur, Evans spares no one, least of all himself. The Kid Stays in the Picture is sharp, witty, self-aggrandizing, and self-lacerating in equal measure.