Business History

Digital transformation of the business landscape is well underway, and businesses are being reshaped faster than ever before. Agility and adaptability are now critical components of these businesses' survival. But building these traits requires a holistic approach with an unrelenting focus on automation. How does one go about developing that focus? Vijay Tella, Scott Brinker, and Massimo Pezzini deliver a guide to implementing automation in the real world, avoiding jargon and vague bromides in favor of concrete examples.

The digital age we live in is as transformative as the Industrial Revolution, and Joshua Cooper Ramo explains how to survive. If you find yourself longing for a disconnected world where information is not always at your fingertips, you may eventually be as useful as the carriage maker post-Henry Ford. It's practically impossible to know where the marriage of imagination and technology will take us (sorry, Betamax and Kodak), and the only certainty is that in the networked world we will only become more intertwined.

From the man who was in the very middle of this perfect economic storm, On the Brink is Paulson's fast-paced retelling of the key decisions that had to be made with lightning speed. Paulson puts the listener in the room for all the intense moments as he addressed urgent market conditions, weighed critical decisions, and debated policy and economic considerations with of all the notable players.

Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: When your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. While sweeping digital transformation holds great promise, we have reached an inflection point. The world has turned information technology into both a powerful tool and a formidable weapon.

In 2019, a Chinese entity called Tencent overtook Facebook to become the world's fifth-largest company. It was a watershed moment, a wake-up call for those in the West accustomed to regarding the global tech industry through the prism of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft. Yet to many of the two billion-plus people who live just across the Pacific Ocean, it came as no surprise at all.

Paul Newman, the Oscar-winning actor with the legendary blue eyes, achieved superstar status by playing charismatic renegades, broken heroes, and winsome antiheroes in such revered films as The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Verdict, The Color of Money, and Nobody’s Fool. But Newman was also an oddity in Hollywood: the rare box-office titan who cared about the craft of acting, the sexy leading man known for the staying power of his marriage, and the humble celebrity who made philanthropy his calling card long before it was cool.

Appalachia has played a complex and often contradictory role in the unfolding of American history. Created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress. Early 20th-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life, a reflection of simpler times that should be preserved and protected.

The most profound and important speeches ever delivered are here collected in this anthology, featuring some of the most influential figures in world history. From ancient times to the American Revolution, from the days before slaves had been emancipated (or women had the vote) to as recently as this past century, Fort Raphael Publishing has gathered some of the most important and iconic speeches ever delivered and presents them here - with a biographical background for each speaker - in this complete collection.

Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi is a powerful memoir and commentary that will be one of the most important books on China of our time, one with the potential to re-shape how Americans view China, and how the Chinese view life in America. Shan, a former hard laborer who is now one of Asia's best-known financiers, is thoughtful, observant, eloquent, and brutally honest, making him well-positioned to tell the story of a life that is a microcosm of modern China, and of how, improbably, that life became intertwined with America.

Coco Chanel created the look of the modern woman and was the high priestess of couture. She believed in simplicity, and elegance, and freed women from the tyranny of fashion. She inspired women to take off their bone corsets and cut their hair. She used ordinary jersey as couture fabric, elevated the waistline, and created bell-bottom trousers, trench coats, and turtleneck sweaters. In the 1920s, when Chanel employed more than 2,000 people in her workrooms, she had amassed a personal fortune of $15 million and went on to create an empire.

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean, that vast expanse of international waters, begins just a few miles out and spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.

While scores of books have been written about Elvis Presley, this is the first meticulously researched biography of Tom Parker written by someone who knew him personally. And for anyone truly interested in the performer many consider the greatest and most influential of the 20th century, it is impossible to understand how Elvis came to be such a phenomenon without examining the life and mind of Parker, the man who virtually controlled Elvis' every move.

The author, Stan Paregien, has had an interest in Jim Shoulders’ career for many years. He actually interviewed Shoulders at the family home in Henryetta, OK., not once but twice (late 2006 and early 2007 – just 3 months before his death from heart issues). He finally wrote a very short biography of him in 2013 (an eBook, only). This time around, he started from scratch and found out all he could about this man who won a phenomenal 16 World Champion Cowboy awards for his skill in riding rank bulls and saddle broncs and bareback broncs with attitudes. Stan also pulled together as many ...

In this timely and enlightening audiobook, Cal Newport introduces a philosophy for technology use that has already improved countless lives. Digital minimalists are all around us. They're the calm, happy people who can hold long conversations without furtive glances at their phones. They can have fun with friends and family and eat out at restaurants without the obsessive urge to document the experience...Now, Newport gives us a name for this quiet movement and makes a case for its urgency in our tech-saturated world.

One of Michiko Kakutani's (New York Times) top 10 books of 2016. A funny thing happened on the way to the digital utopia. We've begun to fall back in love with the very analog goods and ideas the tech gurus insisted that we no longer needed. Businesses that once looked outdated, from film photography to brick-and-mortar retail, are now springing with new life. Notebooks, records, and stationery have become cool again.

American monopolies dominate, control, and consume most of the energy of our entire economic system; they function the same way as cancer does in a body, and like cancer, they weaken our systems while threatening to crash the entire body economics. American monopolies have also seized massive political power and use it to maintain their obscene profits and CEO salaries while crushing small competitors.

Thirty-five-year-old Mohammed bin Salman's sudden rise stunned the world. Political and business leaders flew out to meet with the crown prince and came away convinced that his desire to reform the kingdom was sincere. He spoke passionately about bringing women into the workforce and toning down Saudi Arabia's restrictive Islamic law. He lifted the ban on women driving and explored investments in Silicon Valley. But 'MBS' began to betray an erratic interior beneath the polish laid on by scores of consultants and public relations experts like McKinsey & Company.

Tammy Duckworth takes listeners through the amazing - and amazingly true - stories from her incomparable life. In November of 2004, an Iraqi RPG blew through the cockpit of Tammy Duckworth's US Army Black Hawk helicopter. The explosion, which destroyed her legs and mangled her right arm, was a turning point in her life. But as Duckworth shows in Every Day Is a Gift, that moment was just one in a lifetime of extraordinary turns.

A candid, colorful, and comprehensive oral history that reveals the secrets of Silicon Valley - from the origins of Apple and Atari to the present day clashes of Google and Facebook, and all the start-ups and disruptions that happened along the way. Drawing on over 200 in-depth interviews, Valley of Genius takes listeners from the dawn of the personal computer and the Internet, through the heyday of the web, up to the very moment when our current technological reality was invented.

Our world today - from the phone in your pocket to the car that you drive, the allure of social media to the strategy of the Pentagon - has been shaped irrevocably by the technology of silicon transistors. Year after year, for half a century, these tiny switches have enabled ever-more startling capabilities. Their incredible proliferation has altered the course of human history as dramatically as any political or social revolution. At the heart of it all has been one quiet Californian: Gordon Moore.