Business Biography

In this astounding account, Wall Street's notorious bad boy - and original million-dollar-a-month stock chopper - leads us through a drama worthy of The Sopranos, from his early rise to power to the FBI raid on his estate to the endless indictments at his arrest, to his deal with a bloodthirsty prosecutor to rat on his oldest friends and colleagues - while they were doing the same.

In February 2011 John Galliano, the lauded head of Christian Dior, imploded with a drunken, anti-Semitic public tirade. Exactly a year earlier, celebrated designer Alexander McQueen took his own life three weeks before his women's wear show. Both were casualties of the war between art and commerce that has raged within fashion for the last two decades.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

Joe Coulombe founded what would become Trader Joe’s in the late 1960s and helped shape it into the beloved, quirky food chain it is today. Realizing early on that he could not compete and win by playing the same game his bigger competitors were playing, he decided to build a store for educated people of somewhat modest means. In this way, Joe laid down a blueprint for other business owners to follow to build their own unique shopping experience that customers love, and a work environment that employees love being a part of.

After the Civil War ended, Edmund McIlhenny, an ambitious and tenacious Louisiana businessman, found himself with few prospects. The South's economy in ruins and his millions of dollars in Confederacy currency worthless, he had no choice but to return with his wife, Mary, to her family home in Avery Island, a former sugar plantation destroyed by Union soldiers. To McIlhenny's surprise, however, the hot peppers he had planted before being forced off the island had flourished.

Based on more than 40 interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven 21st-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.

Born to a family of modest means in Kentucky, Jim Glidewell overcame insurmountable odds to create a business of staggering success. In January of 1970, he opened Glidewell Laboratories - one of the largest and most successful dental laboratories in the world with multiple locations worldwide. Jim Glidewell’s story is one of the great American success stories of our times and offers valuable wisdom on topics ranging from relationships to investing and ways to navigate insurmountable obstacles in a changing world.

With Cutler Dawson at the helm for the last 14 years, Navy Federal Credit Union, the world's largest credit union, has quadrupled the size of the organization and made it an industry leader in customer service. It is now one of the most fiercely trusted and smoothly run financial institutions in the world ranked by Fortune magazine as a Best Place to Work for eight years. This book reveals an honest and straightforward look at Dawson's leadership philosophy and guiding principles.

In Universal Man noted biographer and historian Richard Davenport-Hines revives our understanding of John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), the 20th century's most charismatic and revolutionary economist.

World-famous competitive skydiver and coach Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld presents proven tools and techniques for success and explains how they can be used in everyday life. Dan survived a plane crash from which 16 of the 22 people on board were killed. He was left critically injured and woke up from a six-week-long coma with a broken neck, broken skull, severe head trauma, a collapsed lung, and other serious internal injuries. Against all odds, Dan recovered and went on to become one of the greatest competitive skydiver in the world.

Beating the Odds is the improbable, inspiring autobiography of financial guru Eddie C. Brown, one of the nation's top stock pickers and money managers. It details how Brown skillfully kept Brown Capital Management afloat through the dot-com bust, 9/11, and the Great Recession. Born to a 13-year-old unwed mother in the rural South, this African-American investment whiz created a Baltimore-based financial firm that amassed more than $6 billion under management.

The author of the classic best seller Lincoln on Leadership answers the question: How would President Lincoln handle the pressing crises of our modern world? Abraham Lincoln is recognized as one of history's finest leaders, a great president when the United States was under tremendous strain. But suppose he were alive today. How would Lincoln deal with today's high-pressure issues, from politics to business?

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

In The Deal Maker, he sheds light on a man whose tireless optimism led to the formation of the first super-corporation. A charismatic salesman in the late 19th century, William Durant started a cart-building business after accepting an especially comfortable ride one day. By the time he turned 40, he was a millionaire wondering what to do with the rest of his life.

All around the world, the words "Wall Street" conjure up a powerful image. For some, it is the center of America's capitalist system and the engine of its economic growth. For others, it is the home of rapacious bankers and reckless traders whose greed would lead to a global financial crisis. For an Indian-born blackjack player, Wall Street represented something else entirely—a chance for him to play in the largest casino in the world.

Whole Foods Market cofounder John Mackey and professor and Conscious Capitalism, Inc. cofounder Raj Sisodia argue for the inherent good of both business and capitalism. Featuring some of today's best-known and most-successful companies, they illustrate how these two forces can - and do - work most powerfully to create value for all stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment.

In 1948 American polls rated Bing Crosby "the most admired man alive", and it's no surprise given how popular he was across every major form of entertainment during the decade. With a string of major hits, Crosby was the most popular singer in the country during that era. Of all the show business icons in American history, one of the most beloved was Bob Hope, whose career spanned over six decades across film, television, vaudeville, comedy, and touring and earned him uncountable accolades.

Called the "greatest stock picker of the century" by Money magazine, legendary fund manager Sir John Templeton is remembered as one of the world's foremost investors, known for his pioneering insights and phenomenal investment performance over a professional career which spanned more than half a century. Templeton's Way with Money provides a unique, professional 21st century appraisal of what made this formidable investor the success he was and why his methods remain as valid today as they were during his long and successful lifetime.

In her eye-opening memoir, Georganne Chapin exposes the business of medical circumcision. This unnecessary and most common pediatric surgery in the United States permanently reduces the size and alters the function of a boy’s penis for the rest of his life. Every year, nearly 1.5 million baby boys are assaulted in American hospitals and doctors’ offices, subjecting them to pain, functional and psychological damage, and a forever-altered sexual experience.