Corporate History

Orlando Whitfield and Inigo Philbrick met in 2006 at London’s Goldsmiths University where they became best friends. By 2007 they had started I&O Fine Art. Orlando would eventually set up his own gallery and watch as Inigo quickly immersed himself in a world of private jets and multimillion-dollar deals for major clients. Inigo seemed brilliant, but underneath the extravagant façade, his complicated financial schemes were unraveling. With debt, lawsuits, and court summonses piling up, Inigo went into a tailspin of lies and subterfuge.

While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story. Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam has continued unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone - with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it.

When the federal government catches hotshot financial adviser Louis Martin “Marty” Blazer defrauding his NFL-player clients, it’s time to come clean. He has no reasonable defense. What he has is a bigger story to spill to the feds—that of a multibillion-dollar conspiracy that exploits the most talented college athletes and implicates one of the most popular entertainment industries in the nation. The DOJ is listening, and the truth could literally set Marty free. All he has to do is prove that the NCAA is a vast ongoing scam.

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell. For the first 50 years of her life, nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to her. She was a spinster watchmaker living contentedly with her sister and their elderly father in the tiny house over their shop in Haarlem. Their uneventful days, as regulated as their own watches, revolved around their abiding love for one another. But with the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland, everything changed....

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development.

Maxwell Motor was one of the leading automobile producers in the United States during the first quarter of the 20th century, and its cars offered several innovations to buyers of the time. Maxwell's was the first popular car with its engine in front instead of under the body, the first to be designed with three-point suspension and shaft drive, and one of the earliest cars to feature thermo-syphon cooling. Anthony J. Yanik examines the machines, the process, and the men behind Maxwell.

In one lifetime GDP, or gross domestic product, has ballooned from a narrow economic tool into a global article of faith. It is our universal yardstick of progress. As The Little Big Number demonstrates, this spells trouble. While economies and cultures measure their performance by it, GDP ignores central facts such as quality, costs, and purpose.

In this perennial best seller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy, now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool.

Over the past few years, Brianna Wiest has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see your life. Some of these pieces have never been seen; others have been read by millions of people around the world. Regardless, each will leave you thinking: This idea changed my life.

Much has been written about the arrival of artificial intelligence, but according to political philosopher David Runciman, we've been living with AI for 300 years—because states and corporations are robots, too. In this mind-bending work, Runciman explains the modern world through the history of the "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations. The Handover will forever change how we understand the history of the modern world as well as the immense challenges on the horizon.

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how the biggest private company in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

The first-ever popular history of the RAND Corporation, written with full access to its archives, Soldiers of Reason is a page-turning chronicle of the rise of the secretive think tank that has been the driving force behind American government for 60 years

By the mid 1980s, the criminal underworld in the United States had become an ethnic polyglot; one of the most powerful illicit organizations was none other than the Cuban mob. Known on both sides of the law as "the Corporation", the Cuban mob's power stemmed from a criminal culture embedded in south Florida's exile community - those who had been chased from the island by Castro's revolution and planned to overthrow the Marxist dictator and reclaim their nation.

New York Times best-selling author and world-class satirist Stanley Bing trains his savvy eye on the world’s first and most famous multinational corporation in this humorous and insightful volume. Here, he chronicles the great city of Rome from its humble beginnings to its monumental collapse due to greed, in-fighting, and general mismanagement. Rome, Inc. then becomes a powerful lesson for business leaders, documenting the many dos and don’ts of a successful corporation.

When we hear of Jamaica or the Caribbean, we think of beautiful islands of paradise with sun, sea and sand, reggae music, cannabis, and "irie" people like Usain Bolt - people who are living out their best dreams, desires, and lives. But this book analyzes this motif, given the historical and current economic and political situation in Jamaica, the Caribbean, and the "Global South". In an attempt to escape the adverse realities of poverty, inequality, and injustice, the people of the Global South find themselves in north metropolises with very little agency.

In The Company, the largely unknown history of the joint-stock company is presented by the editors of Economist. One of history's greatest catalysts, the joint-stock company has dramatically changed the way human beings live, work, and conduct business. With companies now affecting the world on a global scale, it is more pressing than ever before to understand this driving force.

Sometimes, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don't. Such is the position in which Associate Supreme Court Justice Katherine Helena Ross, the first black female on the U.S. Supreme Court, finds herself in The Fifth Letter, the new political thriller by author Vivian Carpenter. Rooted in the historical treatment of Blacks in the United States, Justice Katherine Ross struggles to do what is right as her mother’s 1940s memoir influences her actions and emotions. Once on the Court, Katherine gains the power to ignite an involuntary retirement process to remove conservative Justice ...

The untold story of how efforts to hold big business accountable changed American capitalism.

Gerard Lee Bevan was the black sheep of one of London's most respectable banking families. A high-living womanizer and upper-class shyster of almost pantomime proportions, he exploited a glittering range of social connections. After a long run of success in City dealings he perpetrated a massive fraud which ruined both the City Equitable Fire Insurance Company and his stockbroking firm, Ellis & Co. He fled the country and was eventually arrested, tried, and jailed.

The book covers Walter P. Chrysler's life and automotive career before 1925, when he founded the Chrysler Corporation, to 1998, when it merged with Daimler-Benz. Chrysler made a late entrance into the industry in 1925, when it emerged from Chalmers and Maxwell, and further grew when it absorbed Dodge Brothers and American Motors Corporation.