Business & Culture

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.

The classic bestseller, now updated and presented as a truly immersive multimedia reading experience. New features include:

• Video clips from Pausch’s lecture throughout the book, providing readers with the complete reading and viewing experience
• A new foreword by Pausch’s widow, Jai Pausch
• The book’s audio introduction read by Randy Pausch
• Brand-new photos
  • Never-before-seen video with the book's coauthor, Jeffrey Zaslow
• Memorable clips from the ABC News special with Diane Sawyer
• Pausch’s commencement speech to the Carnegie Mellon Class of 2008
• An excerpt from Zaslow’s convocation speech to the Carnegie Mellon Class of 2014
• A new "Your Last Lecture" section with questions that help readers put the book’s message into action in their own lives

A lot of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture.” Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?

When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave—“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”—wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have . . . and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.

In this book, Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration, and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. And in this enhanced e-book Legacy Edition, readers will be able to experience, firsthand, the energy and love of life that made Randy Pausch so inspiring. They will also be encouraged to think more deeply about how they can apply its messages in their own lives.

While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow (until Google’s IPO nobody other than Google management had any idea how lucrative the company’s ad business was), Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more.

The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire.

But has Google lost its innovative edge? It stumbled badly in China—Levy discloses what went wrong and how Brin disagreed with his peers on the China strategy—and now with its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete?

No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.

“An exciting story [that] shines light on the inner workings of the fledgling Google and on the personalities of its founders.”—The Daily Beast

In its infancy, Google embraced extremes—endless days fueled by unlimited free food, nonstop data-based debates, and blood-letting hockey games. The company’s fresh-from-grad-school leaders sought more than old notions of success; they wanted to make all the information in the world available to everyone—instantly. Google, like the Big Bang, was a singularity—an explosive release of raw intelligence and unequaled creative energy—and while others have described what Google accomplished, no one has explained how it felt to be a part of it. Until now.

As employee number 59, Douglas Edwards was a key part of Google’s earliest days. Experience the unnerving mix of camaraderie and competition as Larry Page and Sergey Brin create a famously nonhierarchical structure, fight against conventional wisdom, and race to implement myriad new features while coolly burying broken ideas. I’m Feeling Lucky captures the self-created culture of the world’s most transformative corporation and offers unique access to the emotions experienced by those who virtually overnight built one of the world’s best-known brands.

“Edwards does an excellent job of telling his story with a fun, outsider-insider voice. The writing is sharp.”—Boston Globe

“An affectionate, compulsively readable recounting of the early years of Google.”—Publishers Weekly

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER!

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