Business Biography

Bloomberg journalist Kurt Wagner takes you inside Twitter’s everchanging headquarters, charting its rise from flippant 140-character posts to one of the world’s most consequential tech companies. From Jack Dorsey’s triumphant return as CEO in 2015 to the rise and fall of @RealDonaldTrump to the contentious $44 billion sale to Elon Musk, Battle for the Bird exposes the messy reality and relentless challenges that come with building a global social network.

In 2006, hedge fund manager John Paulson realized something few others suspected - that the housing market and the value of subprime mortgages were grossly inflated and headed for a major fall. Paulson's background was in mergers and acquisitions, however, and he knew little about real estate or how to wager against housing. He had spent a career as an also-ran on Wall Street. But Paulson was convinced this was his chance to make his mark. He just wasn't sure how to do it. Colleagues at investment banks scoffed at him and investors dismissed him.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards, and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen?

Jack Welch’s innovative leadership strategies revived a lagging GE, transforming it into a powerhouse with a staggering $300 billion-plus market capitalization. In writing Jack Welch and the GE Way, author Robert Slater was given unprecedented access to Welch and other prominent GE insiders. What emerged is a brilliant portrait that tells you what makes Jack Welch tick. Learn how to work the Welch magic on your own company.

A visionary carpenter shares meditations on work, creativity, and design, revealing powerful lessons on building a meaningful life through his experience constructing some of New York’s most iconic spaces.

Trump Revealed offers the most thorough and wide-ranging examination of Donald Trump's public and private lives to date, from his upbringing in Queens and formative years at the New York Military Academy to his turbulent careers in real estate and entertainment to his astonishing rise as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. The book is based on the investigative reporting of more than two dozen Washington Post reporters and researchers.

Jacob Tomsky has worked in hotels for more than a decade, doing everything from valet parking to manning the front desk. He's checked you in, checked you out, separated your white panties from the white bed sheets, parked your car, tasted your room service, cleaned your toilet, denied you a late check out, given you a wake-up call, eaten M&Ms out of your mini-bar, laughed at your jokes, and taken your money. And in Heads in Beds, he pulls back the curtain on the hospitality business.

Francis has mastered the "risk game." Now, with Rebecca Paley’s gripping prose, he takes us behind the scenes in Risk Game and reveals firsthand how he has become a self-made force in the competitive world of New York real estate—and a champion for nonprofit organizations in the fields of art, education, and, most recently, social and criminal justice.

United Airlines, the iconic brand that invented the “Friendly Skies” and built modern aviation, found itself amid rough turbulence and was anything but united in 2015. With its reputation in freefall, operations and profits cratering, customer and employee trust fraying—and competitors pushing into coveted routes—United needed a new captain to turn things around, fast.

離婚して名前まで変えて挑んだ潜入ルポの傑作！週刊文春連載時から話題沸騰、前代未聞の潜入ルポ。ユニクロ愛用者必読の“危険本”がついに文庫化！

The National Football League's current dominance has obscured how professional football got its start. In The League, John Eisenberg reveals that Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell took an immense risk by investing in the professional game. At that time, the sport barely registered on the national scene. The five owners succeeded only because at critical junctures in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the League.

The first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company looks back at her life and her career at Xerox, sharing unique insights on American business and corporate life, the workers she has always valued, racial and economic justice, how greed is threatening democracy, and the obstacles she’s conquered being Black and a woman.

Born out of simple frustration with complex design tools, Canva has grown into a wild success, with a massive, devoted user community of more than 200 million people, in 190 countries and using 100 languages. But this isn’t a traditional startup story of guys in a garage following a Silicon Valley playbook. Instead, from their base in Perth, Australia (the most remote big city on earth), animated by a drive to empower normal people to use design to make their own dreams a reality, Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht created something truly original.

Jennifer Romolini started her career as an awkward 27-year-old misfit, navigated her way through New York media, and became a boss - an editor in chief, an editorial director, and a vice president - all within little more than a decade. Her book, Weird in a World That's Not, asserts that being outside the norm and achieving real, high-level success are not mutually exclusive, even if the perception of the business world often seems otherwise, even if it seems like only office-politicking extroverts are set up for reward.

Azim Premji: The Man Beyond the Billions, the fi­rst authoritative biography of the icon, shows how Premji is a philanthropist at heart and a businessman by choice - a man who wanted to give away his billions, but realized early enough that he would ­first have to earn them. It peels the layers off Premji's life while chronicling his professional and charitable work in the context of his many strengths and shortcomings.

As a teen, Daymond John immersed himself in the burgeoning rap scene and quickly started to recognize that the people in the hip-hop community were being ignored and even looked down upon by major players in the fashion industry. Frustrated with this disconnect and passionate about the hip-hop community and culture, John and three of his best childhood friends started the iconic fashion label FUBU (For Us By Us) in John’s mother’s home in Queens.

At age ninety-one, Soros still looms large on the global stage, and yet the man himself is surprisingly little understood. Biographers have attempted to tell the story of George Soros, but no single account of his life can capture his extraordinary, multifaceted character. Now, in this ambitious and revealing new book, Soros's longtime publisher, Peter L. W. Osnos, has assembled an intriguing set of contributors from a variety of different perspectives—public intellectuals, journalists, scholars, and nonprofit leaders—to paint a full picture of the man beyond the media portrayals.

From the small country town of Abbotsford to the skyscrapers of New York, this book shares the hard-learned lessons and captivating story of the start-up of Naked Boxer Briefs, a Nasdaq publicly-traded company that had A-list celebrity endorsements, raised over 17 million dollars, and sold its product in department stores around the world, including Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.

Adam Bierman wasn’t planning on selling weed—or developing a network of cannabis stores, or safeguarding his money in shoeboxes, or facing off with gangs in dark corners of parking lots, or taking on the public markets and justice system itself. But, of course, not everything goes according to plan.

Die ganz persönliche Geschichte eines Jahrhundertcharakters. Die geschäftlichen Erfolge von Bill Gates sind weithin bekannt: der 20-Jährige, der sein Studium in Harvard abbrach, um ein Softwareunternehmen zu gründen, das zu einem Branchenriesen wurde und die Art und Weise, wie die Welt arbeitet und lebt, veränderte; der mehrfache Milliardär, der sich philanthropischen Aufgaben zuwandte, um den Klimawandel, die globale Gesundheit und die Bildung anzugehen. In Source Code geht es nicht um Microsoft, die Gates Stiftung oder die Zukunft der Technologie.