Business Professional

It's an axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a small number of companies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great customer service, making great contributions to their communities, and finding great ways to lead their lives. In Small Giants, veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside 14 such remarkable companies.

Almost 10 years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon in his best seller The Everything Store. Since then, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to nearly two trillion dollars.

No family in the past two centuries has been as constantly at the center of Europe's great events, has featured such varied and spectacular personalities, has had anything close to the wealth of the Rothschilds. To this day they remain one of the most powerful and wealthy families in the world. In Frederic Morton's classic tale, the family is brought vividly to life.

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.

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.

In Morgan, noted biographer Jean Strouse creates the first complete portrait of a man who defined American commerce and banking. Contemporaries described J. Pierpoint Morgan as “the financial Moses of the New World.” She shows J.Pierpoint Morgan in the full context of his childhood and health, travels and tastes, personal affairs and business relationships. And through Nelson Runger’s thoughtful narration, this accessible biography becomes a fascinating audio production.

In his international bestseller, The Happiness Advantage, Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor described why happiness is the precursor to greater success. Before Happiness is about what comes before both. Because before we can be happy or successful, we need to first develop the ability to see that positive change is possible. Only once we learn to see the world through a more positive lens can we summon all our motivation, emotion, and intelligence to achieve our personal and professional goals.

In the streaming reality series Selling Sunset, Mary Fitzgerald Bonnet is the charismatic, calm, and level-headed agent who effortlessly lands multi-million-dollar homes while sidestepping the drama of a cutthroat business in one of the wealthiest and most glamorous places in the world. Often thought of as the “big sister” of her co-stars for her compassionate advice and uplifting attitude, Mary is admired for her unwavering kindness. But behind her sunny personality is a remarkable story of resilience, forged by a life filled with profound challenges.

I’ve written this book because selling your business is quite possibly the biggest financial transaction of your entire life, and you’ve never done it before and will likely never do it again, and you really need to be smart about this. I recently did a quick study on the likelihood that a firm in a particular, narrow vertical would have a successful exit—defined as someone else purchasing, for real money, a majority of your firm’s equity.

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.

Famously, over a four-year period, James Dyson made 5,127 prototypes of the cyclonic vacuum cleaner that would transform the way houses are cleaned around the world. In devoting all his resources to iteratively developing the technology, he risked it all, but out of many failures and setbacks came hard-fought success. In Invention: A Life, Dyson reveals how he came to set up his own company and led it to become one of the most inventive technology companies in the world. It is a compelling and dramatic tale, with many obstacles overcome.

John Harvey Kellogg was one of America's most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America's notion of health and wellness and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet.

Burn the Place is a galvanizing culinary memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan's journey from foraging on the family farm to opening her Michelin-starred restaurant. Her story is alive with startling imagery, raw like that first bite of wild onion, and told with uncommon emotional power. Regan grew up the youngest of four headstrong girls on a small farm in Indiana. Regan often felt that she "wasn't made for this world." She was a little girl who longed to be a boy, gay in an intolerant community, an alcoholic before she turned 20, a woman in an industry dominated by men.

Raising an Entrepreneur presents 76 stories from the mothers of some of the most successful entrepreneurs today. Entrepreneurs are the new rock stars - they're the ones who turn their passions into ingenious projects, because they're willing to risk failure to make their dreams come true.

In 1981, Jack Welch took over General Electric and quickly rose to fame as the first celebrity CEO. He golfed with presidents, mingled with movie stars, and was idolized for growing GE into the most valuable company in the world. But Welch’s achievements didn’t stem from some greater intelligence or business prowess. Rather, they were the result of a sustained effort to push GE’s stock price ever higher, often at the expense of workers, consumers, and innovation.

Mark H. McCormack, one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American business, is widely credited as the founder of the modern-day sports marketing industry. On a handshake with Arnold Palmer and less than a thousand dollars, he started International Management Group and, over a four-decade period, built the company into a multimillion-dollar enterprise with offices in more than forty countries. To this day, McCormack’s business classic remains a must for executives and managers at every level.

This inside story of WeWork and its CEO tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history. Veteran journalist Reeves Weideman dives deep into WeWork and its CEO's astronomical rise, from the marijuana and tequila-filled board rooms to cult-like company summer camps and consciousness-raising with Anthony Kiedis. Billion Dollar Loser is a character-driven business narrative that captures, through the fascinating psyche of a billionaire founder and his wife and co-founder, the slippery state of global capitalism. \

"Probably in the life of everyone there comes a time when he is inclined to go over again the events, great and small, which have made up the incidents of his work and pleasure, and I am tempted to become a garrulous old man, and tell some stories of men and things which have happened in an active life. In some measure I have been associated with the most interesting people our country has produced, especially in business - men who have helped largely to build up the commerce of the United States...."

For a dozen years as one of the world’s most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. The first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company - and one of the foremost strategic thinkers of our time - she transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence, and a deep sense of purpose. Now, in a rich memoir brimming with grace, grit, and good humor, My Life in Full offers a firsthand view of Nooyi’s legendary career and the sacrifices it so often demanded.

What’s it like to start a company, build it to national success, and then see it sold out of bankruptcy? This is the true story of Greg Vetter. He and his brothers started their salad dressing company based on their mother’s secret recipe. Tessemae’s All Natural went from the Vetter kitchen, to local sensation, to national distribution. But the brothers quickly found out that starting a company is easy. Keeping it going is hard.