Business History

Minimalism is the art of knowing how much is just enough. Digital minimalism applies this idea to our personal technology. It's the key to living a focused life in an increasingly noisy world. In this timely and enlightening book, the best-selling author of Deep Work introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives.

The prize-winning and best-selling author of Say Nothing presents a grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling.

Based on news reports, you might think there's a major cybersecurity threat every four to five months. In reality, there's a cybersecurity attack happening every minute of every day. In Cyber Crisis, Eric Cole gives listeners a clear-eyed picture of the information war raging in cyberspace. Drawing on 30 years of experience, Cole offers practical, actionable advice that even those with little technical background can implement, including steps to take on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to protect their businesses and themselves.

John Kay's incisive overhaul of our ideas about business redefines our understanding of successful commercial activity and the corporation—and describes how we have come to 'love the product' as we 'hate the producer.' This is a brilliant and original work from one of the greatest working economists.

At the dawn of World War I, a young academic named John Maynard Keynes hastily folded his long legs into the sidecar of his brother-in-law’s motorcycle for an odd, frantic journey that would change the course of history. Swept away from his placid home at Cambridge University by the currents of the conflict, Keynes found himself thrust into the halls of European treasuries to arrange emergency loans and packed off to America to negotiate the terms of economic combat.

In Prince of Darkness, a groundbreaking and vivid account, eminent historian Shane White reveals the larger-than-life story of a man who defied every convention of his time. He wheeled and dealed in the lily-white business world, he married a White woman, he bought a mansion in rural New Jersey, he owned railroad stock on trains he was not legally allowed to ride, and generally he set his White contemporaries' teeth on edge when he wasn't just plain outsmarting them.

Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans - predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth - and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

The first in-depth look at Lance Armstrong's doping scandal, the phenomenal business success built on the back of fraud, and the greatest conspiracy in the history of sports. Lance Armstrong won a record-smashing seven Tours de France after staring down cancer, and in the process became an international symbol of resilience and courage. In a sport constantly dogged by blood-doping scandals, he seemed above the fray. Then, in January 2013, the legend imploded. He admitted doping during the Tours and, in an interview with Oprah, described his "mythic, perfect story" as "one big lie."

Life is getting better at an accelerating rate. Food availability, income, and life span are up; disease, child mortality, and violence are down all across the globe. Though the world is far from perfect, necessities and luxuries alike are getting cheaper; population growth is slowing; Africa is following Asia out of poverty; the Internet, the mobile phone, and container shipping are enriching people's lives as never before.

This volume explores the variety of business enterprise in the United States and analyzes its presence in the country's economy, its evolution over time, and its meaning in society.

One of the country's most eminent practitioners of the art and science of negotiation offers practical advice for the most challenging conflicts - when you are facing an adversary you don't trust, who may harm you, or who you may even feel is evil. The head of Harvard's famed Program on Negotiation, Robert Mnookin provides tools for confronting devils of all kinds - in business, politics, and family life.

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue”—an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.

For years, consumers have been promised a simple, carefree digital future. We could live, work, learn, and play from the comforts of our homes, and have whatever we desire brought to our door with the flick of a finger. Instant communication would bring us together. Technological convenience would give us more time to focus on what really mattered. When the pandemic hit, that future transformed into the present, almost overnight. And the reviews aren't great.

Utilizing his incomparable career and inspired collaborations with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and many others, David Byrne taps deeply into his lifetime of knowledge to explore the panoptic elements of music, how it shapes the human experience, and reveals the impetus behind how we create, consume, distribute, and enjoy the songs, symphonies, and rhythms that provide the backbeat of life. Byrne’s magnum opus uncovers thrilling realizations about the redemptive liberation that music brings us all.

In When McKinsey Comes to Town, two prizewinning investigative journalists have written a portrait of the company sharply at odds with its public image. Bogdanich and Forsythe have penetrated the veil of secrecy surrounding McKinsey by conducting hundreds of interviews, obtaining tens of thousands of revelatory documents, and following rule #1 of investigative reporting: Follow the money. When McKinsey Comes to Town is a a devastating portrait of a firm whose work has often made the world more unequal, more corrupt, and more dangerous.

A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.

DisneyWar is an enthralling tale of one of America's most powerful media and entertainment companies, the people who control it, and those trying to overthrow them. It tells a story that - in its sudden twists, vivid, larger-than-life characters, and thrilling climax - might itself have been the subject of a Disney classic - except that it's all true.

Since 1844, the Globe and Mail and its predecessor, George Brown’s Globe, have chronicled Canada: as a colony, a dominion, and a nation. To mark the paper’s 180th anniversary, Globe writers explored thirty issues and events in which the national newspaper has influenced the course of the country: Confederation, settler migrations, regional tensions, tussles over language, religion, and race. The essays reveal a tapestry of progress, conflict, and still-incomplete reconciliation.

Bold is a radical, how-to guide for using exponential technologies, moonshot thinking, and crowd-powered tools to create extraordinary wealth while also positively impacting the lives of billions.