Business Memoirs

Power is changing. Private corner offices and management by decree are out, as is unquestioned trust in the government and media. These former pillars of traditional power have been replaced by networks of informed citizens who collectively wield more power over their personal lives, employers, and worlds than ever before. So how do you navigate this new landscape and come out on top? Adam Grant, Wharton organizational psychologist, went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the epicenter of power, and sat down with thought leaders from around the world, to find out.

Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart’s life—what she wore, what she ate, what she thought—was controlled by the dictates of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At 19, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she was married off to a man she barely knew. For the next 23 years, her marriage would rule her life. Eventually, when Haart’s younger daughter, Miriam, started to innocently question why she wasn’t allowed to sing in public, run in shorts, or ride a bike without being covered from neck to knee, Haart reached a breaking point.

A gripping history of banking and the booms and busts that shaped the world on both sides of the Atlantic, The House of Morgan traces the trajectory of the J. P.Morgan empire from its obscure beginnings in Victorian London to the crash of 1987. Ron Chernow paints a fascinating portrait of the private saga of the Morgans and the rarefied world of the American and British elite in which they moved. Based on extensive interviews and access to the family and business archives, The House of Morgan is an investigative masterpiece.

An entrepreneur is someone who has a great, innovative idea that identifies the need for the creation of a new business, taking on the financial risk in the hope of profit and driving that business forward in a measured way. This book draws on the stories, experiences and words of iconic business figures from around the globe and across the years - from Andrew Carnegie and Oprah Winfrey to Steve Jobs and Sunil Mittal.

This is the true story behind Wall Street legend Richard Dennis, his disciples, the Turtles, and the trading techniques that made them millionaires. What happens when ordinary people are taught a system to make extraordinary money? Richard Dennis made a fortune on Wall Street by investing according to a few simple rules.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve.

When we meet Carrie Sun, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s wasting her life. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Carrie excelled in school, graduated early from MIT, and climbed the corporate ladder, all in pursuit of the American dream. But at twenty-nine, she’s left her analyst job, dropped out of an MBA program, and is trapped in an unhappy engagement. So when she gets the rare opportunity to work at one of the most prestigious hedge funds in the world, she knows she can’t say no. Fourteen interviews later, she’s in.

The incredible true story of the card-counting mathematics professor who taught the world how to beat the dealer and, as the first of the great quantitative investors, ushered in a revolution on Wall Street.

Elon Musk fait partie de ceux qui changent les règles du jeu. Largement considéré comme le plus grand industriel du moment, il porte l'innovation à des niveaux rarement atteints au point d'avoir servi de modèle pour Tony Stark, alias Iron Man. À 44 ans, il a monté en quelques années une entreprise, Tesla, qui révolutionne l'industrie automobile, une autre, SpaceX, qui concurrence Arianespace. Il a auparavant bouleversé le marché des paiements avec PayPal. Son objectif ultime : coloniser Mars.

She was a successful ad sales rep in Manhattan. He was a homeless 11-year-old panhandler on the street. He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But then something stopped her in her tracks, and she went back. And she continued to go back, again and again. They met up nearly every week for years and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.

The title “Bullfrog” is given to the Navy SEAL who has served the longest on active duty. Admiral McRaven was honored to receive this honor in 2011 when he took charge of the United States Special Operations Command. When McRaven retired in 2014, he had 37 years as a Navy SEAL under his belt, leading men and women at every level of the special operations community. During those four decades, Admiral McRaven dealt with every conceivable leadership challenge. The Wisdom of The Bullfrog draws on these and countless other experiences from Admiral McRaven’s incredible life.

Dr. Jeffrey Gurian shares in his book Healing Your Heart, By Changing Your Mind - A Spiritual and Humorous Approach to Achieving Happiness how he has learned through his own personal experience and years of study to overcome all the above and more. Burdened with a severe stutter until he was in his 20's and beyond, seemingly unable to be helped by therapy, and combined with the confusion of A.D.D. and a bit of O.C.D. thrown in, he was faced with having to deal with that for the rest of his life.

Alexandra Posadzki’s ground-breaking coverage in the Globe and Mail exposed one of the most spectacular boardroom and family dramas in Canadian corporate history—one that has pitted the company’s extraordinarily powerful chairman and controlling shareholder, Edward Rogers, against not only his own management team but also the wishes of his mother and two of his sisters. Posadzki takes us inside a company that touches the lives of millions of Canadians, challenging what we thought we knew about corporate governance and who really holds the power.

Bringing his audacious and persuasive thesis to life, Gartner offers case histories of some famous Americans who represent this phenomenon of hypomania. These are the real stories you never learned in school about some of those men who made America: Columbus, who discovered the continent, thought he was the messiah. John Winthrop, who settled and defined it, believed Americans were God's new chosen people. Alexander Hamilton, the indispensable founder who envisioned America's economic future, self-destructed because of pride and impulsive behavior.

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.

What happens when a young Wall Street investment banker spends a small fortune to have lunch with Warren Buffett? He becomes a real value investor. In this fascinating inside story, Guy Spier details his career from Harvard MBA to hedge fund manager. But the path was not so straightforward. Spier reveals his transformation from a Gordon Gekko wannabe, driven by greed, to a sophisticated investor who enjoys success without selling his soul to the highest bidder.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in 'the void,'" she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe." Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

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.

It's true that Maria Konnikova had never actually played poker before and didn't even know the rules when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. But she knew her man: a famously thoughtful and broad-minded player, he was intrigued by her pitch that she wasn't interested in making money so much as learning about life.

Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven 21st-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.