Business Professional

Writers talk about their work in many ways: as an art, as a calling, as a lifestyle. Too often missing from these conversations is the fact that writing is also a business. The reality is, those who want to make a full- or part-time job out of writing are going to have a more positive and productive career if they understand the basic business principles underlying the industry.

Ryan Blair knows about building a business from the ground up. Like many entrepreneurs he had no formal business education. But he had great survival instincts, tenacity, and, above all, a "nothing to lose" mindset.Blair's middle-class childhood came to an abrupt end when his abusive father succumbed to drug addiction and abandoned the family. Blair and his mother moved to a bad neighborhood, and soon he was in and out of juvenile detention, joining a gang just to survive. Then his mother fell in love with a successful entrepreneur who took Ryan under his wing.

Lisa Lisson's life seemed perfect: she had married her high school sweetheart, applied her marketing degree to a position at FedEx Express Canada, and would ultimately become president of the company. One night, after putting their four children to bed, her husband, Patrick, marvelled at their lives. Just a few hours later, Patrick had a massive heart attack and was in a coma. Part leadership guide, part memoir of loss, and part personal empowerment primer on how to achieve your goals, Resilience is an inspirational story.

The Unusual Billionaires tells the story of eight, truly outstanding companies which delivered 10 percent revenue growth over the last 10 years and 15 percent return on capital employed. In simple words, these companies defeated 5000 other public listed companies to deliver high growth while maintaining profitability year-on-year for the last decade. How did these companies do it? Why couldn’t this be reciprocated by other companies? What are they doing differently?

According to The Waiter, 80 percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining 20 percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths.

Waiter Rant offers the server's unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places.

In his lively, unprecedented close-up portrait of Ferran Adrià, award-winning food writer Colman Andrews traces this groundbreaking chef’s rise from resort hotel dishwasher to culinary deity, and the evolution of El Bulli from a German-owned beach bar into the establishment voted annually by an international jury to be “the world’s best restaurant”.

Unprecedented is an extraordinary business book for extraordinary times: a collection of exclusive, first-person stories on leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic from twenty-nine chief executives at Canada’s most iconic and largest companies. These are unforgettable accounts from senior leaders at companies on the front lines during the pandemic—nursing homes, grocery stores, airlines, hotels, pharmacies, shopping malls—along with valuable lessons on crisis management. At their heart, these are stories about overcoming adversity.

In The PD Book, bestselling author Elena Aguilar and coauthor Lori Cohen offer seven habits—and a wealth of practical tools—that help you transform professional development. In this book, you'll learn how to inspire adult learners, the importance of having clear purpose, and how to navigate power dynamics in a group. You'll also learn a new way to plan PD that allows you to attend to details and be a responsive facilitator. The dozens of tips and tricks, anecdotes and research, and tools and resources will enable you to create the optimal conditions for learning.

The definitive biography of the most important economic statesman of our time, from the best-selling author of The Power Law and More Money Than God. Sebastian Mallaby's magisterial biography of Alan Greenspan, the product of over five years of research based on untrammeled access to his subject and his closest professional and personal intimates, brings into vivid focus the mysterious point where the government and the economy meet. To understand Greenspan's story is to see the economic and political landscape of our time in a whole new light.

The five Titans of Industry discussed in this series are, without a doubt, the most influential and impactful men in American history. Without any one of them, the entire landscape of the US would be different. They are the founders of the American economy.

How did a boy from small-town New York become the world’s most successful writer? How does he do it? He has always wanted to write the kind of novel that would be read and reread so many times that the binding breaks and the book literally falls apart. As he says, “I’m still working on that one.”

Stress Test is the story of Tim Geithner’s education in financial crises. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then as President Barack Obama’s secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner helped the United States navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from boom to bust to rescue to recovery.

Even amid the seeming chaos of the matrix organization - where you are constantly being asked to do things by people who aren't your boss - there is always that special person who seems indispensable, who seems to thrive on complexity, and who is able to stay focused and positive and get the right things done: This is the go-to person. In this game-changing book, Bruce Tulgan reveals the secrets of the go-to person in our new world of work. Tulgan shows how go-to people not only behave differently, but also think differently.

We've all read about the experts: the artists, the scientists, the engineers - that special group of people known as Imagineers for The Walt Disney Company. But who are they? How did they join the team? What is it like to spend a day in their shoes?

In The Accidental Entrepreneur, author Janine Allis shares the secrets and skills that took her from housewife to entrepreneur to head of a multinational corporation. As the founder of Boost Juice, Janine has journeyed from zero formal business training to leading a company with over 400 stores in 12 countries. This audiobook takes you down the long road that she travelled, including some quirky stops along the way, and gives you valuable insight into taking the alternative road to business success.

What makes a soldier? What makes a business mind? What makes a philanthropist? In this rich memoir, Canadian icon of mining finance and public service Terry Salman reflects on his remarkable life, offering inspiration and mentorship for others seeking to build their own legacies. He recounts the moments that shaped him: the brotherhood of the U.S. Marines and the lifelong duty of loyalty and community they instilled in him; the traumas he endured as a young sergeant in Vietnam; his return to Canada and the mentors who helped guide his success; and his many roles in helping others.

Hungry and tired one night, Mike wanted a pizza, but getting a pizza delivered was a pain in the neck. He didn’t want to call a million restaurants to see what was open. So, as an avid coder, he created GrubHub in his spare bedroom to figure out who delivered to his apartment. Hangry details step-by-step the grind of building an innovative business, with each chapter including sharp lessons for entrepreneurs and startups that Mike learned on the fly as he piloted GrubHub by the seat of his pants.

It only took five years for two brothers-in-law to create a billion-dollar, award-winning, take-no-prisoners cannabis company called HEXO. How did they do it? That’s the story. From early roadblocks and devastating personal and financial setbacks to explosive growth and some of the biggest cannabis deals in global history, Billion Dollar Start-Up not only recounts the HEXO story but the history of Canada’s momentous road to legalization.

In this biography, Dave Werklund tells how he grew up on a farm, left school in Grade 9, and then built a multi-billion-dollar business in Alberta to clean up oil waste and pollution. As an environmentalist working in the oil business, he argues that Alberta has among the most stringent environmental standards anywhere in the oil world. Yet like everyone in the Alberta oil business, Werklund has faced disaster and had to find a way out.

An instant New York Times best seller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes listeners inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups. For 25 years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession - until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him.