A brilliant analysis of 30 inventors who changed the world. Discover the story behind: the telephone, sewing machine, dynamite, safety razor and more.

A brilliant and humorous analysis of thirty inventors who changed the world.

Why do some inventors succeed and others fail? A private equity pioneer explores personal traits and processes that worked for thirty innovators—or didn’t. Jeremy Coller, a pioneer in the world of private equity, argues that there are three basic personality types in the arena of invention. The Principal, Broker, and Consultant each display certain traits that dictate the potential for success, but few people have the full package. Failure results when an individual who excels in one area of competence attempts to become all things. Thus, even accomplished geniuses can end up penniless. In Splendidly Unreasonable Inventors, Coller focuses on the individual rather than the invention—and explores the ways in which he or she did or did not succeed in bringing their vision to fruition. On one level, the book is a collection of fascinating stories packed with quirky, often humorous nuggets of information. On another level, these stories provide an unconventional look at the processes and personalities that created products that changed the world, including: Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine King Gillette and the safety razor Alfred Nobel and dynamite Sam Colt and the revolver Rudolph Diesel and the diesel engine, and more

A compelling account of how incorporating play into work can help us overcome the uncertainty and turbulence that surrounds work How can we learn to deal with uncertainty at work? The answer, as Dodgson and Gann eloquently portray in this pathfinding book, is to learn from the adaptive behaviors of entrepreneurs. Play, the authors show, is a crucial component of this. It encourages exploration, experimentation, and curiosity while it also challenges established practices and orthodoxies. It facilitates change in people and organizations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators, this book explains why we should incorporate play into work, what play looks like, and how to encourage playfulness in individuals and organizations. Dodgson and Gann identify four key behaviors that endorse, encourage, and guide play: grace, craft, fortitude, and ambition, and provide a blueprint for an alternative way of working that fosters resilience and encourages innovation and growth in difficult times.

The easy money that flowed through the banking system prior to 2008 fueled a boom in buy-outs. Now it is gone, how will the private equity industry reinvent itself? A series of interviews with some of the most respected and innovative firms, give rare insights to the strategies that will drive this secretive sector over the next economic cycle.

Elegant, suggestive, and clarifying, Lewis Thomas's profoundly humane vision explores the world around us and examines the complex interdependence of all things. Extending beyond the usual limitations of biological science and into a vast and wondrous world of hidden relationships, this provocative book explores in personal, poetic essays to topics such as computers, germs, language, music, death, insects, and medicine. Lewis Thomas writes, "Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us."