Finance Biography

After failing at 22 other jobs, Barbara Corcoran borrowed $1,000 from her boyfriend, quit her job as a diner waitress, and started a tiny real estate office in New York City. Using 24 unconventional lessons learned from her mom, Barbara built that tiny company into a $4 billion business, and today she's richer than her wildest childhood dreams.

As president of the World Bank for a decade, James Wolfensohn tackled world poverty with a passion and energy that made him a uniquely important figure in a fundamental arena of change. Using a lifetime of experience in the banking sector, he carved a distinct path in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe for the institution that serves as the major lender to the world's poor.

In 2015, Inc. magazine recognized Noonday Collection as one of the fastest-growing companies in America. Years earlier, as Jessica Honegger stood at a pawn-shop counter in Austin, Texas, and handed over her grandmother's gold jewelry, her goal was personal: to fund the adoption of her Rwandan son by selling artisan-made jewelry. This first step launched an unexpected side-hustle that would grow into Noonday Collection. She teamed up with her first artisan partner, Jalia, a Ugandan jewelry maker and saw the meaningful impact Noonday brought to Jalia's community.

Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York's divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city's underground economy. Based on Venkatesh's interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city's true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity - revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.

There is the Bitcoin story of the headlines, but there is a more important one behind them: tangled plots sprawling like roots deep underground, entire worlds in which we are just passersby. In Once a Bitcoin Miner, journalist and author Ethan Lou takes listeners on a richly told first-person narrative through the proverbial cryptocurrency Wild West.

There is only one CEO in recent times who has faced ¿ and succeeded at ¿ the extraordinary challenges of leading three major companies ¿ Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft ¿ into prosperous futures by doing what matters on the fundamentals. That CEO is Jim Kilts. In this vivid first-person account he reveals his system for success that is both cutting-edge and back-to-basics.

In The Secret History of the American Empire, Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world and, drawing on interviews with other hit men, jackals, reporters, and activists, examines the current geopolitical crisis. Instability is the norm; it's clear that the world we've created is dangerous and no longer sustainable. How did we get here? Who's responsible? What good have we done and at what cost? And what can we do to change things for the next generations?

By 2050, $50 trillion will change hands in North America in the largest generational wealth transfer ever. It will remake the world and be the biggest money-making opportunity in history. "Business as usual", founded on exploitation and environmental ruin, is over. Climate catastrophe, reactionary politics, and widening inequity have put the world on edge. Meanwhile innovations are shifting the economic ground, and an entire generation is pounding the table for real change.

Kip Tindell, the founder and CEO of The Container Store, reveals the seven secrets to keeping both customers and employees happy and all fully engaged. In Uncontainable, Tindell reveals his approach for building a business where everyone associated with it thrives through embodying the tenets of conscious capitalism. Tindell's seven foundation principles are the road map that drives everyone at The Container Store to achieve the goals of the company.

As cryptocurrency rose in popularity during the pandemic, new converts bought into the idea that crypto would not only make them rich, but would usher in imminent revolutions across art, finance, politics, and gaming. Cryptocurrency caught the zeitgeist through figures like FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who only two years later would be convicted of one of the most calamitous acts of financial fraud in US history. Now, Cryptomania unfolds the tumultuous twenty months inside this male-dominated, overhyped industry that led to its downfall.

Through his own story of hardship and triumph, Chuck Whittall shares the principles he used to overcome obstacles that can derail a business. In Perseverance: Broke to Billions, Whittall details what he's learned - from making key decisions and raising capital, to overcoming financial deficits and evaluating prospective opportunities.

Entrepreneur and e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos is a success story of the business world. The executive chairman of Amazon and founder of Blue Origin, he became the first centibillionaire on the Forbes wealth index and one of the world's most recognizable names in modern history. This book explores his empire of achievement and how his vision and hands-on efforts have led him from a start-up in his garage to his legacy today.

The first inside account of life within a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, eBoys is the fascinating true story of the six tall men who backed eBay, Webvan, and other billion-dollar start-ups that are transforming the Internet and setting a new pace for the economy - an audible.com audio exclusive!

A landmark work from one of the preeminent historians of our time: the first published biography of Andrew W. Mellon, the American colossus who bestrode the worlds of industry, government, and philanthropy, leaving his transformative stamp on each. Following a boyhood in 19th-century Pittsburgh, during which he learned from his Scotch-Irish immigrant father the lessons of self-sufficiency and wealth accumulation, Andrew Mellon overcame painful shyness to become one of America's greatest financiers.

The Unusual Billionaires tells the story of eight, truly outstanding companies which delivered 10 percent revenue growth over the last 10 years and 15 percent return on capital employed. In simple words, these companies defeated 5000 other public listed companies to deliver high growth while maintaining profitability year-on-year for the last decade. How did these companies do it? Why couldn’t this be reciprocated by other companies? What are they doing differently?

How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax doges or break the law to get richer and more powerful - and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top one percent.

Join David Denby, New Yorker critic and otherwise sensible man, on a whirlwind ride through an exuberant stock market, investment feeding frenzy, and the cataclysmic result of greed and illusion.

Ryan Blair knows about building a business from the ground up. Like many entrepreneurs he had no formal business education. But he had great survival instincts, tenacity, and, above all, a "nothing to lose" mindset.Blair's middle-class childhood came to an abrupt end when his abusive father succumbed to drug addiction and abandoned the family. Blair and his mother moved to a bad neighborhood, and soon he was in and out of juvenile detention, joining a gang just to survive. Then his mother fell in love with a successful entrepreneur who took Ryan under his wing.

In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.

Rarely does a week go by without a well-known executive being indicted for engaging in a white-collar crime. Perplexed as to what drives successful, wealthy people to risk it all, Harvard Business School professor Eugene Soltes spent seven years in the company of the men behind the largest corporate crimes in history - from the financial fraudsters of Enron, to the embezzlers at Tyco, to the Ponzi schemers Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford.