A vigorous call for rethinking the field of business history. Business history needs a shake-up, Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson argue, as many businesses go global and cultural contexts become critical. Reimagining Business History prods practitioners to take new approaches to entrepreneurial intentions, company scale, corporate strategies, local infrastructure, employee well-being, use of resources, and long-term environmental consequences. During the past half century, the history of American business became an unusually active and rewarding field of scholarship, partly because of the primacy of postwar American capital, at home and abroad, and the rise of a consumer culture but also because of the theoretical originality of Alfred D. Chandler. In a field long given over to banal company histories and biographies of tycoons, Chandler took the subject seriously enough to ask about the large patterns and causes of corporate success. Chandler and his students found the richest material for theorizing about the course of business history in large companies and their institutional structures and cultures. Meantime, Scranton and others found smaller firms, those specializing in batch work as opposed to mass-produced goods, far closer to the norm and more telling. Scranton and Fridenson believe that the time has come for a sweeping rethinking of the field, its materials, and the kinds of questions its practitioners should be asking. How can this field develop in an age of global markets, growing information technology, and diminishing resources? A transnational collaboration between two senior scholars, Reimagining Business History offers direction in forty-four short, pithy essays.

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Prize 2008 The Snowball is the first and will be the only biography of the world's richest man, Warren Buffett, written with his full cooperation and collaboration. Combining a unique blend of "The Sage of Omaha's" business savvy, life story and philosophy, The Snowball is essential reading for anyone wishing to discover and replicate the secrets of his business and life success. Warren Buffett is arguably the world's greatest investor. Even as a child he was fascinated by the concept of risk and probability, setting up his first business at the age of six. In 1964 he bought struggling Massachusetts textile firm Berkshire Hathaway and grew it to be the 12th largest corporation in the US purely through the exercise of sound investing principles - a feat never equalled in the annals of business. Despite an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion, Buffett leads an intriguingly frugal life taking home a salary of only £50,000 a year. His only indulgence is a private jet, an extravagance he wryly acknowledges by calling it "The Indefensible". In 2006, he made the largest charitable donation on record, with most of it going to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Snowball provides a comprehensive, richly detailed insight one of the world's most extraordinary and much loved public figures.

'If Martin Scorsese's film The Wolf of Wall Street is about the finance industry's greediest adults, Kevin Roose's Young Money is a look at those wolves as cubs' Amazon.com 'Best Book of the Month' Every year, thousands of eager graduates are hired by the world's financial giants, where they're taught the secrets of making obscene amounts of money -- as well as how to dress, talk, date, drink, and schmooze like real financiers. Young Money is the exclusive, inside story of this well-guarded world. Investigative reporter Kevin Roose shadows eight rookies as they are exposed to the exhausting workloads, huge bonuses, and recreational drugs that have always characterized Wall Street life. But they experience something new, too: an industry forever changed by the massive financial collapse of 2008. And as they get their Wall Street educations, they face hard questions about morality, prestige, and the value of their work. 'A great new read that doubles as a post-crash update to Michael Lewis' Liar's Poker - Mother Jones 'A fun fast read that will make you laugh out loud' Fortune Magazine

The authoritative account of the rise of Amazon and its intensely driven founder, Jeff Bezos, praised by the Seattle Times as "the definitive account of how a tech icon came to life." Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing. The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.

An indispensable volume that shows how to succeed in business by using the Bible and its lessons as a source of inspiration and guidance n 1990, David L. Steward founded his company, Worldwide Technology, Inc., on a shoestring budget and borrowed money, well aware of the high-risk nature of the venture he was undertaking. Despite the fact that he was a novice entrepreneur, he was certain he would succeed. Steward believed intensely that God wouldn't let him down. Doing Business by the Good Book shares the inspiring lessons culled straight from the Bible, that Steward used to build his privately held billion-dollar company into a global information technology enterprise.

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Now available in paperback—with a new preface and interview with Jessica Livingston about Y Combinator! Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover? Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done. But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.