Karen Southwick’s unauthorized account provides the full story of Larry Ellison’s brilliant, controversial career. Ellison’s drive and fierce ambition created Oracle out of the dust and built it into one of America’s great technology companies, but his unpredictable management style keeps it constantly on the edge of both success and disaster. The hostile bid for PeopleSoft is just the most recent example. With one clever strategic move, Larry Ellison threw much of the business software field into play. The saying “It’s not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail” has been so often used by or associated with Ellison that most people think it originated with him. It’s actually attributed to Genghis Khan, but it’s a dead-on way to describe not only the way Ellison thinks about competitors but the way he runs Oracle. His weapons are not marauding hordes, but Oracle’s possession of database technology that is crucial for keeping mission-critical information flows working at thousands of organizations, corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. Inside Oracle, Ellison has time and again systematically purged key operating, sales, and marketing people who got too powerful for his comfort. Most notable was Ray Lane, Oracle’s president for nine years, who was widely credited with bringing order out of the chaos that was Oracle in the early nineties and growing it into a ten billion dollar company. Ellison got rid of the one key person who was building confidence with Wall Street, business partners, and customers that Oracle was no longer flying by the seat of its pants and had its act together. Ellison’s mania for absolute control and his inability to coexist with the very lieutenants who bring much-needed stability to the company have brought Oracle to the brink of collapse before, and may well do it again. Ellison is a throwback to an earlier, much more freewheeling version of capitalism, the kind practiced by the nineteenth-century robber barons who ran their companies as private fiefdoms. Larry Ellison is one of the most intriguing and dominant leaders of a major twenty-first-century corporation, and Everyone Else Must Fail raises the question of whether Oracle’s products and the reliance placed in them by so many are too important to be subject to the whims of one man. While giving credit to Ellison’s brilliance and devotion, the book sounds a warning about an ingenious man’s tendency to be his own company’s worst enemy.

'There is an honesty and a clarity in Joe Moran's book If You Should Fail that normalises and softens the usual blows of life that enables us to accept and live with them rather than be diminished/wounded by them' Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass 'Full of wise insight and honesty. Moran manages to be funny, erudite and kindly: a rare - and compelling - combination. This is the essential antidote to a culture obsessed with success. Read it' Madeleine Bunting Failure is the small print in life's terms and conditions. Covering everything from examination dreams to fourth-placed Olympians, If You Should Fail is about how modern life, in a world of self-advertised success, makes us feel like failures, frauds and imposters. Widely acclaimed observer of daily life Joe Moran is here not to tell you that everything will be all right in the end, but to reassure you that failure is an occupational hazard of being human. As Moran shows, even the supremely gifted Leonardo da Vinci could be seen as a failure. Most artists, writers, sports stars and business people face failure. We all will, and can learn how to live with it. To echo Virginia Woolf, beauty "is only got by the failure to get it . . . by facing what must be humiliation - the things one can't do." Combining philosophy, psychology, history and literature, Moran's ultimately upbeat reflections on being human, and his critique of how we live now, offers comfort, hope - and solace. For we need to see that not every failure can be made into a success - and that's OK.

In a business where great risks, huge fortunes, and even bigger egos are common, Larry Ellison stands out as one of the most outspoken, driven, and daring leaders of the software industry. The company he cofounded and runs, Oracle, is the number one business software company: perhaps even more than Microsoft's, Oracle's products are essential to today's networked world. But Oracle is as controversial as it is influential, as feared as it is revered, thanks in large part to Larry Ellison. Though Oracle is one of the world's most valuable and profitable companies, Ellison is not afraid to suddenly change course and reinvent Oracle in the pursuit of new and ever more ambitious goals. Softwar examines the results of these shifts in strategy and the forces that drive Ellison relentlessly on. In Softwar, journalist Matthew Symonds gives readers an exclusive and intimate insight into both Oracle and the man who made it and runs it. As well as relating the story of Oracle's often bumpy path to industry dominance, Symonds deals with the private side of Ellison's life. From Ellison's troubled upbringing by adoptive parents and his lifelong search for emotional security to the challenges and opportunities that have come with unimaginable wealth, Softwar gets inside the skin of a fascinating and complicated human being. With unlimited insider access granted by Ellison himself, Symonds captures the intensity and, some would say, the recklessness that have made Ellison a legend. The result of more than a hundred hours of interviews and many months spent with Ellison, Softwar is the most complete portrait undertaken of the man and his empire -- a unique and gripping account of both the way the computing industry really works and an extraordinary life. Despite his closeness to Ellison, Matthew Symonds is a candid and at times highly critical observer. And in perhaps the book's most unusual feature, Ellison responds to Symonds's portrayal in the form of a running footnoted commentary. The result is one of the most fascinating business stories of all time.

Despite the introduction of the U.S. - EC merger review co-operation initiative in the early nineties, transatlantic mergers remain a minefield for all those involved. For the parties there is the lack of legal certainty and its attendant costs and reputation; for the regulators there is the political toll of reconciling conflicting competition policies. Charles Smitherman reviews merger regulation frameworks on both sides of the Atlantic. The author identifies areas of substantive and procedural differences as they exist today and explores the viability of convergence to aid the efficiency of the merger process through bilateral and domestic enhancements. Throughout the work the emphasis is placed on pragmatic solutions rather than those of academic and oft-unobtainable nature. The backbone of the work is made up of the analysis of eight of the biggest U.S. - EC merger cases between 2000 and 2004.

Do you ever wonder whether you are living life to your potential? Do you sometimes feel as though you are standing on a busy street corner while the rest of the world is engaged in meaningful activities? Do you feel like you are being carried or sometimes even dragged along by lifes trials and challenges? Now you can get motivated and take action toward accomplishing your goals. Empower Your Life: Finding Greater Motivation Within provides real-world solutions and creative tools to help empower your life and motivate you to action. Author Bradley D. Castle offers unique insights and guidelines that can help you accomplish your goals and overcome challenges. In this helpful guidebook, you will discover the following: Motivational activities designed to drive you toward achieving your goals Creative methods that discipline your mind to overcome negativity and build positive thought patterns that push you toward accomplishment Techniques to help you increase your driving force and view obstacles as stepping stones to your dreams Step-by-step advice on how to be a powerful influence to motivate and inspire others Effective and powerful strategies that can help you to create an environment where you can be successful Empower Your Life: Finding Greater Motivation Within provides valuable guidance to help you maximize your skills, gifts, and talents to empower your life.

The economist Albert O. Hirschman famously argued that citizens of democracies have only three possible responses to injustice or wrongdoing by their government: we may leave, complain, or comply. But in When All Else Fails, Jason Brennan argues that there is fourth option. When governments violate our rights, we may resist. We may even have a moral duty to do so. For centuries, almost everyone has believed that we must allow the government and its representatives to act without interference, no matter how they behave. We may complain, protest, sue, or vote officials out, but we can't fight back. But Brennan makes the case that we have no duty to allow the state or its agents to commit injustice. We have every right to react with acts of "uncivil disobedience." We may resist arrest for violation of unjust laws. We may disobey orders, sabotage government property, or reveal classified information. We may deceive ignorant, irrational, or malicious voters. We may even use force in self-defense or to defend others. The result is a provocative challenge to long-held beliefs about how citizens may respond when government officials behave unjustly or abuse their power

How to Survive and Rise in the Modern Corporation Talented, hard-working and intelligent people don’t always get to the very top of their chosen careers, even when they deserve to. What they may lack is something that seems to come naturally to some people but not to others: Corporate Intelligence. Many successful professionals with good leadership skills fail to maximise their career potential because of a number of instinctive good habits – things that make them highly effective executives, well-liked and respected by their colleagues, but which are not best designed to progress their careers to the next level. Taking its inspiration from Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous chronicler of the sometimes deadly political struggles between the leaders of Renaissance Italy’s rival city states, the book exposes the hidden realities of corporate politics with wit and humour and explores the career strategies that lead successful executives to the very top of the corporate world. Corporate Intelligence explores the little-discussed though tacitly acknowledged fact that modern corporations are not rational and meritocratic operations in which hard work and talent will inevitably be rewarded, but complex social and political systems which must be skilfully navigated to obtain power and influence. Talent Is Not Enough. You Need Corporate Intelligence Mark Powell is a partner at A.T. Kearney consultancy and Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. Jonathan Gifford is a business author whose writing focuses on the human aspects of business, management and leadership.