Knowledge = Power

“Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read.” —Bill Gates, The Wall Street Journal What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the  Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable  scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each  is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular  moment of fame or notoriety; these notable and fascinating accounts are  as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as  they were when the events happened. Stories about Wall Street  are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and  volatile nature of the world of finance. Longtime New Yorker contributor  John Brooks’s insightful reportage is so full of personality and  critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market  crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold  attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the  sense that history repeats itself. Five additional stories on  equally fascinating subjects round out this wonderful collection that  will both entertain and inform readers . . . Business Adventures is truly financial journalism at its liveliest and best.

 In 2007 and 2008, Time named Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, one of the hundred most  influential people in the world. Since he made his fortune, his impact  has been felt in science, technology, business, medicine, sports, music,  and philanthropy. His passion, curiosity, and intellectual  rigor-combined with the resources to launch and support new  initiatives-have literally changed the world. In 2009 Allen  discovered that he had lymphoma, lending urgency to his desire to share  his story for the first time. In this long-awaited memoir, Allen  explains how he has solved problems, what he's learned from his many  endeavors-both the triumphs and the failures-and his compelling vision  for the future. He reflects candidly on an extraordinary life.  The book also features previously untold stories about everything from  the true origins of Microsoft to Allen's role in the dawn of private  space travel (with SpaceShipOne) and in discoveries at the frontiers of  brain science. With honesty, humor, and insight, Allen tells the story  of a life of ideas made real.

Eswar Prasad explains the world of finance is at the threshold of  major disruption that will affect corporations, bankers, states, and  indeed all of us. The transformation of money will fundamentally rewrite  how ordinary people live. Above all, Prasad foresees the end of  physical cash. The driving force won't be phones or credit cards but  rather central banks, spurred by the emergence of cryptocurrencies to  develop their own, more stable digital currencies. Meanwhile,  cryptocurrencies themselves will evolve unpredictably as global  corporations like Facebook and Amazon join the game. The changes will be  accompanied by snowballing innovations that are reshaping finance and  have already begun to revolutionize how we invest, trade, insure, and  manage risk. Prasad shows how these and other changes will  redefine the very concept of money, unbundling its traditional functions  as a unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value. The  promise lies in greater efficiency and flexibility, increased  sensitivity to the needs of diverse consumers, and improved market  access for the unbanked. The risk is instability, lack of  accountability, and erosion of privacy. A lucid, visionary work, The  Future of Money shows how to maximize the best and guard against the  worst of what is to come.

Built to Last, the defining management study of the '90s,  showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained  performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the  very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with  great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad  companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert  long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what  are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from  good to great? Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team  have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some  companies make the leap and others don't. The findings include: Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do frequent restructuring fail to make the leap

There may be no hotter company on the planet than Xiaomi. In less  than a decade, the company has gone from being a Chinese start-up to a  global player in the smartphone market. Driven by the philosophy of  "Innovation for all", Xiaomi has a cult fan following; after all, it  offers high-end features at relatively low prices. Besides, it  does not only sell phones. It also sells earphones, Bluetooth speakers,  televisions, fitness bands, weighing scales, power banks, and air  purifiers, among other products. Each one of them offering the best  possible value for money. How did a small Chinese start-up  become so big in a matter of years? How has it managed a cult following  in such a short time period when a company like Apple took decades?  What's the secret behind Xiaomi's success? Such are the answers this  book will provide at length.

An engrossing insider's account of how a teacher built one of the  world's most valuable companies - rivaling Walmart and Amazon - and  forever reshaped the global economy. In just a decade and a  half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an  English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's  largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of  Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the  largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs  and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming  private sector and the gatekeeper to hundreds of millions of  middle-class consumers. Duncan Clark first met Jack in 1999 in  the small apartment where Jack founded Alibaba. Granted unprecedented  access to a wealth of new material including exclusive interviews, Clark  draws on his own experience as an early advisor to Alibaba and two  decades in China chronicling the Internet's impact on the country to  create an authoritative, compelling narrative account of Alibaba's rise. How did Jack overcome his humble origins and early failures to  achieve massive success with Alibaba? How did he outsmart rival  entrepreneurs from China and Silicon Valley? Can Alibaba maintain its 80  percent market share? As it forges ahead into finance and  entertainment, are there limits to Alibaba's ambitions? How does the  Chinese government view its rise? Will Alibaba expand further overseas,  including in the US? Clark tells Alibaba's tale in the context  of China's momentous economic and social changes, illuminating an  unlikely corporate titan as never before.

"I hope everyone reads this book. It has become such a crucial thing for all of us to understand." —Erin Burnett, CNN "An  ideal tour guide for your journey into the depths of the rabbit hole  that is QAnon. It even shows you a glimmer of light at the exit." —Cullen Hoback, director of HBO's Q: Into the Storm Its  messaging can seem cryptic, even nonsensical, yet for tens of thousands  of people, it explains everything:  What is QAnon, where did it come  from, and is the Capitol insurgency a sign of where it’s going next? On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the  State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt  like “the calm before the storm”—then refused to elaborate as puzzled  journalists asked him to explain.  But on the infamous message boards of  4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed  to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own. In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump's remarks  began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while  satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America.  But did any of what Q  predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every  word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider  and wider? No. Why not? Who were these rapt listeners? How do  they reconcile their worldview with the America they see around them?  Why do their numbers keep growing? Mike Rothschild, a journalist  specializing in conspiracy theories, has been collecting their stories  for years, and through interviews with QAnon converts, apostates, and  victims, as well as psychologists, sociologists, and academics, he is  uniquely equipped to explain the movement and its followers. In The Storm Is Upon Us,  he takes readers from the background conspiracies and cults that fed  the Q phenomenon, to its embrace by right-wing media and Donald Trump,  through the rending of families as loved ones became addicted to Q’s  increasingly violent rhetoric, to the storming of the Capitol, and on. And as the phenomenon shows no sign of calming despite Trump’s loss of  the presidency—with everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennial moms  proving susceptible to its messaging—and politicians starting to openly  espouse its ideology, Rothschild makes a compelling case that mocking  the seeming madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Rather, his  impassioned reportage makes clear it's time to figure out what QAnon  really is — because QAnon and its relentlessly dark theory of everything  isn’t done yet.

An award-winning historian plumbs the depths of Hitler and Stalin's  vicious regimes, and shows the extent to which they brutalized the world  around them. Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all  the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they  changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II,  Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in  sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen,  affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern  Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives  sacrificed. Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct  experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian.  Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative  portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism,  and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a  jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and  doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious  magnetism of their leadership.

Communism has decisively shaped the modern world. After the Second   World War, Marxist regimes ruled over one-third of the population of the  globe.  Even today, after the fall of the Soviet Union, communist ideas  continue to steer  current events in Eastern Europe and East Asia. According  to award-winning historian Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius  of the  University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to understand the inner dynamics of   communist thought and rule (and the reasons they linger in places like  Cuba,  North Korea, and China), you have to go back to the crucial  beginnings of  communism. How did it become such a pervasive economic  and political philosophy?  Why, of all places, did it first take root in  early 20th-century  Russia? These and other questions all get  addressed as part of a  fascinating story that stretches from the  intellectual partnership between Karl  Marx and Friedrich Engels in the  late 19th century to the Russian  Revolution of 1917 to the death of  Vladimir Lenin in 1924. It's a story whose  drama, Professor Liulevicius  notes, “has few equals in terms of sheer scale,  scope, or suffering.”

This second edition of McLellan's comprehensive selection of Marx's writings  includes carefully selected extracts from the whole range of Marx's  political, philosophical, and economic thought. Each section of the book  deals with a different period of Marx's life, allowing readers to trace  the development of his thought from his early years as a student and  political journalist in Germany up through the final letters he wrote in  the early 1880s. A fully updated editorial introduction and  bibliography has been included for each extract in this new edition. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.