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Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson Based on more than forty 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. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. |
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Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works Adam Lashinsky INSIDE APPLE reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.
If Apple is Silicon Valley's answer to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the "DRI" (Apple's practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs).
Based on numerous interviews, the book offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. Lashinsky, a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, knows the subject cold: In a 2008 cover story for the magazine entitled The Genius Behind Steve: Could Operations Whiz Tim Cook Run The Company Someday he predicted that Tim Cook, then an unknown, would eventually succeed Steve Jobs as CEO.
While Inside Apple is ostensibly a deep dive into one, unique company (and its ecosystem of suppliers, investors, employees and competitors), the lessons about Jobs, leadership, product design and marketing are universal. They should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.
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Good to Great Jim Collins Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how longterm sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don't. The findings include: - Level 5 Leadership: A surprising style, required for greatness.
- The Hedgehog Concept: Finding your three circles, to transcend the curse of competence.
- A Culture of Discipline: The alchemy of great results.
- Technology Accelerators: How good-to-great companies think differently about technology.
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Why those who do radical restructuring fail to make the leap.
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Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All Jim Collins, Morten T. Hansen The new question
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. The new study
Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness—beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years—in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these “10X companies” to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments. The new findings
The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as: - The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
- Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
- Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed.
- The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.
The authors challenge conventional wisdom with thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They include: 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs; Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom In; and the SMaC Recipe. Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck. This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncertain world, greatness happens by choice, not chance. |
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Kitchen Confidential Anthony Bourdain After 25 years of sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine, chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From dishwasher to chef, from the Rainbow Room in the Rockerfeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, his tales are as unpredictable as they are funny and shocking. |
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Up from Slavery Booker T. Washington The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Tuskegee Institute; African Americans; Educators; Biography |
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COAL & COCA-COLA: Small Town USA 1949 (Short True Story w/Photos) (Visceral History Series 1) Linda G. Shelnutt I have always admired my mother's bull dog determination as a divorced, single woman supporting herself and two kids through a business of her own as a professional baker. Against various types of odds for a woman in 1949, when my brother was around five years old, and I was two, our mother, Marge Hudnall, borrowed $6,000 from a local bank in her small town of Florence, Colorado (around 3,000 population at that time), opened a bakery, and repaid the loan in two years.
Through that venture, she accomplished more than earning a living, as I discovered when I interviewed her for this story, and she automatically began recalling events which were news to me and almost news to her. I typed furiously, in my personal shorthand, as my Mom began talking, seeming to fall into a trance of her personal and professional history. For several nonstop hours, the interview flowed on its own so freely, I didn't have to pause typing to ask more than a few questions. Within the historic ambiance which Mom described in our interview, Sloppy Joes were originated in the 50's in The Malt Shop Bakery and Bus Depot in Florence, Colorado. Margie's bakery story, “COAL & COCA-COLA” proves the origin or that juicy sandwich and more. Read it while it steams, as an upgraded KINDLE edition with a photo essay included, placing it into the present and counting of our New Millennium.
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List of Linda Shelnutt’s VISCERAL HISTORIES*
A Mining Series based around Florence, Colorado:
1. The Price of Black Diamonds
2. Coal Dust in Their Hands
3. Dark Diamond Twilight
(Upgraded from an Amazon Short into a KINDLE edition w/photos)
4. The Last Lunch Box
5. I Worked
6. This is Someone’s Loved One: An Undertaker’s View
7. We Work All Our Lives and What Do We Get?
8. Coal & Coca-Cola
(Upgraded from an Amazon Short into a KINDLE edition w/photos)
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The above 8 stories are currently available as Amazon Shorts.
Linda Shelnutt is upgrading (slowly) each of these stories for KINDLE publication. As currently planned, the Kindle editions will have newly designed covers, and photo series added (with corrections made of any typos spotted in the Shorts versions at the time of Kindle publications).
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VISCERAL HISTORY is my term for true stories told from the gut, usually featuring the perspective of the author in addition to one or a small number of individuals. Rather than attempting to give cool, detached accounts of historic events (whether panoramic public accounts or private biographical vignettes); the focus is purposely placed on emotional reactions (of the subjects, and the author’s in empathy) to what has been lived through, experienced, or observed.
The purpose is to show the subjects in a heroic light, no matter how seemingly simple their lives may be.
No life is simple.
A philosophical treatise could be written on the ways history can be recorded, from the coolest clarity and accuracy of trained historians; to the warmest skewing and heart healing dramatizations of salt of the earth men and women. Sometimes the coolest records are innocently (or purposely) politically skewed; while the warm stories, told and retold, are so gut level honest, they remain uncannily close to the truth of life.
Does anyone ever see a true picture of reality? Does a true physical reality exist beyond conscious experience of it? These questions are posed by philosophy, metaphysics, and quantum physics..., i.e., if a tree falls in the forest, does the tree actually fall if no one is there to observe it? Is the forest there?
Fortunately for me, I’m not an investigative reporter assigned and paid to dig for dirt.
I’m a literary mirror for the good and the true in the human heart.
That, I believe exists.
Respectfully Submitted,
Linda G. Shelnutt
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Glock: The Rise of America's Gun Paul M. Barrett Based on fifteen years of research, Glock is the riveting story of the weapon that has become known as American’s gun. Today the Glock pistol has been embraced by two-thirds of all U.S. police departments, glamorized in countless Hollywood movies, and featured as a ubiquitous presence on prime-time TV. It has been rhapsodized by hip-hop artists, and coveted by cops and crooks alike.
Created in 1982 by Gaston Glock, an obscure Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, and swiftly adopted by the Austrian army, the Glock pistol, with its lightweight plastic frame and large-capacity spring-action magazine, arrived in America at a fortuitous time. Law enforcement agencies had concluded that their agents and officers, armed with standard six-round revolvers, were getting "outgunned" by drug dealers with semi-automatic pistols. They needed a new gun.
When Karl Water, a firearm salesman based in the U.S. first saw a Glock in 1984, his reaction was, “Jeez, that’s ugly.” But the advantages of the pistol soon became apparent. The standard semi-automatic Glock could fire as many as 17 bullets from its magazine without reloading (one equipped with an extended thirty-three cartridge magazine was used in Tucson to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others). It was built with only 36 parts that were interchangeable with those of other models. You could drop it underwater, toss it from a helicopter, or leave it out in the snow, and it would still fire. It was reliable, accurate, lightweight, and cheaper to produce than Smith and Wesson’s revolver. Made in part of hardened plastic, it was even rumored (incorrectly) to be invisible to airport security screening.
Filled with corporate intrigue, political maneuvering, Hollywood glitz, bloody shoot-outs—and an attempt on Gaston Glock’s life by a former lieutenant—Glock is at once the inside account of how Glock the company went about marketing its pistol to police agencies and later the public, as well as a compelling chronicle of the evolution of gun culture in America. |
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Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street Michael Lewis The bestselling and hilarious book that blew the doors off Wall Street's boardrooms and introduced the world to the writing of Michael Lewis. In this shrewd and wickedly funny book, Michael Lewis describes an astonishing era and his own rake's progress through a powerful investment bank. From an unlikely beginning (art history at Princeton?) he rose in two short years from Salomon Brothers trainee to Geek (the lowest form of life on the trading floor) to Big Swinging Dick, the most dangerous beast in the jungle, a bond salesman who could turn over millions of dollars' worth of doubtful bonds with just one call. With the eye and ear of a born storyteller, Michael Lewis shows us how things really worked on Wall Street. In the Salomon training program a roomful of aspirants is stunned speechless by the vitriolic profanity of the Human Piranha; out on the trading floor, bond traders throw telephones at the heads of underlings and Salomon chairman Gutfreund challenges his chief trader to a hand of liar's poker for one million dollars; around the world in London, Tokyo, and New York, bright young men like Michael Lewis, connected by telephones and computer terminals, swap gross jokes and find retail buyers for the staggering debt of individual companies or whole countries. The bond traders, wearing greed and ambition and badges of honor, might well have swaggered straight from the pages of Bonfire of the Vanities. But for all their outrageous behavior, they were in fact presiding over enormous changes in the world economy. Lewis's job, simply described, was to transfer money, in the form of bonds, from those outside America who saved to those inside America who consumed. In doing so, he generated tens of millions of dollars for Salomon Brothers, and earned for himself a ringside seat on the greatest financial spectacle of the decade: the leveraging of America. |
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The Millionaire Next Door Thomas J. Stanley, William D. Danko The incredible national bestseller that is changing people's lives -- and increasing their net worth! CAN YOU SPOT THE MILLIONAIRE NEXT DOOR? Who are the rich in this country? What do they do? Where do they shop? What do they drive? How do they invest? Where did their ancestors come from? How did they get rich? Can I ever become one of them? Get the answers in The Millionaire Next Door, the never-before-told story about wealth in America. You'll be surprised at what you find out.... |