Business Memoirs

Founder of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and a key catalyst of the American craft beer revolution, Jim Koch offers his unique perspective when it comes to business, beer, and turning your passion into a successful company or career.

Veteran Hollywood writer David Rensin travels behind the scenes and through 65 years of show business history to tell the real stories of the marvelous careers that began - and in some cases ended - in the mailroom. Based on more than 200 interviews, Rensin unfolds the never-before-told history of an American institution - in the voices of the people who lived it. Through seven decades of glamour and humiliation, you'll go where the trainees go, do what they must do to get ahead, and hear the best insider stories from the Hollywood everyone knows about but no one really knows.

Samantha Wills started her self-titled jewellery company on the kitchen table of her share house in the eastern suburbs of Sydney when she was just 21 years old. While her rise to the global stage looked meteoric to many, Samantha has said 'It took me 12 years to become an overnight success.' Following Samantha's journey, from being named a breakout star by The New York Times to barely being able to breathe on a hotel room floor, Of Gold and Dust is so much more than a business memoir.

An ex-Wall Street trader improved on Moneyball’s famed sabermetrics to place bets that would beat the Vegas odds on Major League Baseball games - with a 41 percent return in his first year. Trading Bases explains how he did it. After the fall of Lehman Brothers, Joe Peta was out of a job. He found a new one but lost that, too, when an ambulance mowed him down. In search of a way to cheer himself up while he recuperated, Peta started watching baseball again. That’s when inspiration hit: Why not apply his outstanding risk-analysis skills to improve on sabermetrics, the method made famous by Moneyball?

Inside one of the world's most dangerous jobs with the star of History's top-rated reality show, Ice Road Truckers. The highest-rated reality show ever to hit the History channel, Ice Road Truckers follows the heart-pounding adventures of the tough-as-nails truckers who risk peril every day to deliver goods and supplies in Alaska and across Canada's frozen north. Alex Debogorski here shares tales of his adventures - and misadventures.

Raised in a turbulent home, Brittany Williams learned to use food as a coping mechanism to manage her feelings at a young age. When she was 14, a family member’s comment “no man will want you with a pudgy figure like that” forever changed the way she viewed her body and opened a door, new and alluring, into the world of self-loathing, self-punishment, and dieting. Told with Brittany’s unflagging honesty and trademark vulnerability, Dear Body describes the tensions of growing up in a body that often felt more like a traitor than a friend.

The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn’t fashion - it was a stolen book. She spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and dumpster diving. By twenty-two, she had resigned herself to employment, but was still broke, directionless, and working a mediocre day job she’d taken for the health insurance. It was there that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay. Eight years later, she is the founder, CEO, and creative director of Nasty Gal, a $100 million plus online fashion retailer with more than 350 employees.

From John Mack, former CEO of Morgan Stanley, an intimate personal memoir and riveting business story, recounting how he helped grow the company from 300 to 50,000 employees over four decades, transformed a notoriously competitive culture into a successful and collaborative one, and lead the company through the 2008 financial crisis. With humor and honesty, Mack shares advice on both business and life: how to create a culture of team players, how to keep perspective during crises, how to make difficult decisions when all eyes are on you, and more.

Hugh van Cuylenburg was a primary school teacher volunteering in northern India when he had a life-changing realisation: despite the underprivileged community the children were from, they were remarkably positive. By contrast, back in Australia Hugh knew that all too many children struggled with depression, social anxieties and mental illness. His own little sister had been ravaged by anorexia nervosa. How was it that young people he knew at home, who had food, shelter, friends and a loving family, struggled with their mental health, while these kids seemed so contented and resilient?

Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional. Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three 30-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. became one of the hottest enterprise software companies, rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined.

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.

The Fastest Tortoise is about not just weathering the unknown but embracing it and thriving. Structuring his story around “Ken-isms” that define his personal and professional philosophies—such as “yellow lights don’t turn green,” “be uncomfortable,” and “feed the ducks while they’re quacking”—Ken demonstrates how to approach a volatile world.

This autobiography collection contains My Life and Work: The Autobiography of Henry Ford, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Most people don't need to be experts in their field. Yes, the successful know more than the average person about a particular topic, and they often possess a better-than-average ability with a particular skill set; but not everyone who is successful is an expert, he makes clear. And yet we continue to deeply value the expertise ideal. In Master of None, Hudson turns expertise on its head and shows that by embracing variety and becoming more versatile, anyone can succeed and become more open to different opportunities in life.

Like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, the Kochs are one of the most influential dynasties of the modern age, but they have never been the subject of a major biography... until now. Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter the family patriarch had written to his sons. "You will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money," Fred Koch cautioned. "It may either be a blessing or a curse."

Erik Weihenmayer is the first and only blind person to summit Mount Everest, the highest point on Earth. Descending carefully, he and his team picked their way across deep crevasses and through the deadly Khumbu Icefall; when the mountain was finally behind him, Erik knew he was going to live. His expedition leader slapped him on the back and said something that would affect the course of Erik’s life: “Don’t make Everest the greatest thing you ever do.” No Barriers is Erik’s response to that challenge.

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.

In Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White, world-renowned and revolutionary soccer coach Arsène Wenger finally tells his own story for the very first time. Wenger opens up about his life, sharing principles for success on and off the field with lessons on leadership, personal development, and management.

The much-anticipated and inspiring memoir by Indra Nooyi, the trailblazing former CEO of PepsiCo, offering clear-eyed insight and a call to action for how our society can really blend work and family - and advance women - in the 21st century. For more than a dozen years as one of the world's most admired CEOs, Indra Nooyi redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader. The first woman, person of colour and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company, Nooyi transformed PepsiCo with a unique vision, a vigorous pursuit of excellence and a deep sense of purpose.

Dan Rooney was one of the most influential sports executives of his generation—the man who transformed the Pittsburgh Steelers into one of the National Football League's greatest dynasties and premiere franchises. Some of Dan Rooney’s most important achievements, however, took place off the playing field as he sought to bring about equity in the league's hiring practices and peace in his ancestral homeland of Ireland. In A Different Way to Win, Jim Rooney takes listeners behind the scenes and share stories of Dan Rooney’s life and achievements.