Authors: Ida M. Tarbell.
Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Dover Publications
Publication Date: 2003-02-10


Reviews :

    This muckraking classic, which eventually led to effective regulation of the Standard Oil Company, was the inaugural work for crusading journalists whose mission was to expose corruption in politics and the abuses of big business during the early twentieth century. The history combined descriptions of John D. Rockefeller's business practices with his personal characteristics, creating an image of a cunning and ruthless person--a picture that not even decades of Rockefeller philanthropy were able to dispel. This "briefer version" of the two-volume original edition (published in 1904) makes the book more accessible to students and teachers of American business history and to anyone interested in the days of unregulated commerce.
...

Authors: Mimi Swartz. Sherron Watkins.
Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Broadway Books
Publication Date: 2004-03-09


Reviews :

    “They’re still trying to hide the weenie,” thought Sherron Watkins as she read a newspaper clipping about Enron two weeks before Christmas, 2001. . . It quoted [CFO] Jeff McMahon addressing the company’s creditors and cautioning them against a rash judgment. “Don’t assume that there is a smoking gun.”
Sherron knew Enron well enough to know that the company was in extreme spin mode…

Power Failure is the electrifying behind-the-scenes story of the collapse of Enron, the high-flying gas and energy company touted as the poster child of the New Economy that, in its hubris, had aspired to be “The World’s Leading Company,” and had briefly been the seventh largest corporation in America.

Written by prizewinning journalist Mimi Swartz, and substantially based on the never-before-published revelations of former Enron vice-president Sherron Watkins, as well as hundreds of other interviews, Power Failure shows the human face beyond the greed, arrogance, and raw ambition that fueled the company’s meteoric rise in the late 1990s. At the dawn of the new century, Ken Lay’s and Jeff Skilling's faces graced the covers of business magazines, and Enron’s money oiled the political machinery behind George W. Bush’s election campaign. But as Wall Street analysts sang Enron’s praises, and its stock spiraled dizzyingly into the stratosphere, the company’s leaders were madly scrambling to manufacture illusory profits, hide its ballooning debt, and bully Wall Street into buying its fictional accounting and off-balance-sheet investment vehicles. The story of Enron’s fall is a morality tale writ large, performed on a stage with an unforgettable array of props and side plots, from parking lots overflowing with Boxsters and BMWs to hot-house office affairs and executive tantrums.

Among the cast of characters Mimi Swartz and Sherron Watkins observe with shrewd Texas eyes and an insider’s perspective are: CEO Ken Lay, Enron’s “outside face,” who was more interested in playing diplomat and paving the road to a political career than in managing Enron’s high-testosterone, anything-goes culture; Jeff Skilling, the mastermind behind Enron’s mercenary trading culture, who transformed himself from a nerdy executive into the personification of millennial cool; Rebecca Mark, the savvy and seductive head of Enron’s international division, who was Skilling’s sole rival to take over the company; and Andy Fastow, whose childish pranks early in his career gave way to something far more destructive. Desperate to be a player in Enron’s deal-making, trader-oriented culture, Fastow transformed Enron’s finance department into a “profit center,” creating a honeycomb of financial entities to bolster Enron’s “profits,” while diverting tens of millions of dollars into his own pockets

An unprecedented chronicle of Enron’s shocking collapse, Power Failure should take its place alongside the classics of previous decades – Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker – as one of the cautionary tales of our times.


From the Hardcover edition....

    Something strange happened to the Enron Corporation in the early 1990s: It went from a company that traded in tangible goods to one that dealt in pure abstractions, with shoddy accounting practices, astonishing compensation packages, and smoke and mirrors to obfuscate this new reality.

Company auditors, Sherron Watkins among them, warned top Enron execs from CEO Kenneth Lay on down that the company’s increasing reliance on cooked books and phony reports "will implode in a wave of accounting scandals." As anyone who played the stock market or watched Enron suits do the perp walk on the evening news a couple of years ago will remember, that’s exactly what happened. Texas Monthly editor Swarz and Watkins team up to offer this account, rich in anecdote and numbers alike, of what went wrong and who made it so. Though even-handed throughout, they serve up plenty of righteous scorn for the corporate leaders who enriched themselves as the company disintegrated, and for the name-brand politicians who abetted them.

Though Osama bin Laden’s pawns barely dented the U.S. economy, observes Alex Berenson in The Number, Lay and his lieutenants brought it to its knees. Swartz’s and Watkins’s eye-opening account will rekindle new indignation over unpunished crimes and well-rewarded hubris, and it ought to be required reading in business schools henceforth. --Gregory McNamee...

Authors: Roy G. Jinks. Sandra C. Krein.
Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Publication Date: 2006-09-01


Reviews :

    Horace Smith and Daniel Baird Wesson shared a dream of manufacturing a firearm that could fire repeatedly, using a new and self-contained cartridge. In 1852, the dream became a reality with the founding of Smith & Wesson Firearms Company. Over the next 154 years, the company grew to be one of the most innovative and respected firearms manufacturers in the world. The story of Smith & Wesson is not only about two knowledgeable and enterprising men but also the story of generations of creative and dedicated men and women. The spirit of innovation generated by the partners has long outlived them. Today Smith & Wesson is synonymous with quality, performance, and durability. Smith & Wesson explores the company history, its people, and significant products from the partners' first venture in 1852 to the sale of the Wesson family business in 1965. This book features rarely seen historical photographs, advertisements, and company documents culled from the company archives, museums collections, and the private collections of Smith & Wesson collectors....

Authors: Noel M. Tichy. Stratford Sherman.
Paperback, 720 pages
Publisher: Collins Business
Publication Date: 2005-04-01


Reviews :

   

Acknowledged as the outstanding business leader of the late twentieth century, Jack Welch made General Electric one of the world's most competitive companies. This dynamic CEO defined the standard for organizational change, creating more than $400 billion in shareholder value by transforming a bureaucratic behemoth into a nimble, scrappy winner in the global marketplace.

Here, Tichy and Sherman extract the enduring leadership lessons from the revolution Welch wrought at GE. Of these, the most essential is the limitless power of learning. Leadership has its mysteries, but it is a skill that anyone can acquire and enhance. Above all, great leaders select great people and lure them into an endless process of learning and adaptation.

Jack Welch's Six Rules

1. Control your destiny or someone else will.
2. Face reality as it is, not as it was, or as you wish it were.
3. Be candid with everyone.
4. Don't manage, lead.
5. Change before you have to.
6. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.

...

Authors: Stefan Kanfer.
Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date: 1995-04-30


Reviews :

    With a scholar's precision and a novelist's eye, Stefan Kanfer tells the inside story of De Beers Consolidated Mines - from the nineteenth century diamond rush that transformed Johannes De Beer's humble South African farm into an exotic klondike, to the Oppenheimers' shadow empire that has achieved umatched global reach.
...

Authors: Jay Pridmore.
Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: MBI
Publication Date: 2001-12-24


Reviews :

    ...

Authors: Matthew Symonds.
Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication Date: 2004-08-31


Reviews :

    In a business where great risks, huge fortunes, and even bigger egos are common, Larry Ellison stands out as one of the most outspoken, driven, and daring leaders of the software industry. The company he cofounded and runs, Oracle, is the number one business software company. Perhaps even more than Microsoft's, Oracle's products are essential to today's networked world.

In Softwar, journalist Matthew Symonds gives readers exclusive and intimate insight into both Oracle and the man who made it and runs it. As well as relating the story of Oracle's often bumpy path to industry dominance, Symonds deals with the private side of Ellison's life. With unlimited insider access granted by Ellison himself, Symonds captures the intensity and, some would say, the recklessness that have made Ellison a legend.

With a new and expanded epilogue for the paperback edition that tells the story behind Oracle's epic struggle to win control of PeopleSoft, Softwar is the most complete portrait undertaken of the man and his empire -- a unique and gripping account of both the way the computing industry really works and an extraordinary life.

...

    Softwar is a biography of Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle. As such, it's simultaneously a portrait of a clever and driven man, a case study of a successful software development company, and a tableau of the commercial software industry from its beginnings, through the dot-com craze, and into the present era. Matthew Symonds, who began this project while working as the editor of the excellent technology section of the Economist, has done a great job with all three elements of his project, thanks in no small part to the tremendous access he was given and to his close collaboration with Ellison.

Collaboration is very nearly the right word, as Ellison reviewed Symonds' manuscript before publication and, while he did not alter it, he did make a large number of comments, which appear in the book as footnotes. As Symonds is a good journalist who attributes most of his material, Ellison is able to take issue immediately with statements other people make about him and his company. The overall effect is hypertextual, and represents an important new biographical technique that other writers should imitate. Softwar succeeds because Ellison has a fantastically interesting life, tremendous experience, and carefully considered opinions, and because Symonds communicates them with clarity and style. --David Wall

Topics covered: The life, times, acquaintances, tastes, toys, and opinions of Larry Ellison, the database entrepreneur and CEO of Oracle Corporation....

Authors: Joe Cabadas.
Hardcover, 192 pages
Publisher: Motorbooks
Publication Date: 2004-10-15


Reviews :

    In 1914, Henry Ford ordered the construction of a small plant at the confluence of the River Rouge and Detroit River in what was then the rural community of Dearborn, just outside of Detroit. Eventually, that small pilot plant grew into the gigantic 1,100-acre River Rouge Complex, the most famous auto factory of the twentieth century, renowned as the home of Ford’s "vertical integration." In 1999, Ford’s great-grandson and Ford Chairman Bill Ford III announced that the company would reinvent the complex as the auto factory of the new century, scheduled for completion in 2004. Like "the Rouge" itself, this illustrated 90-year chronological history of the complex will provide a sprawling view of the evolution of automaking and industrial technologies, as well as the exciting new concepts the company is incorporating into the current redesign. Central to vertical integration was self-sufficiency: raw materials went in one end and finished cars came out the other. In fact, iron ore and coal became completed engine blocks in less than 24 hours!

"Joseph Cabadas tells the story of the Rouge in a detailed, handsomely designed new coffee table book. River Rouge zeroes in on the most famous auto factory in history and myth, a symbol to the world of what the phrase Motor City really means. A former reporter for the News Herald Newspapers and auto reporter for U.S. Auto Scene and Used Car News, Cabadas has drawn on his knowledge of the industry and the resources of the Ford Motor Co. and Henry Ford Museum to tell a story that is as complex and rambling as the factory it celebrates. The suburb design by Chris Fayers and the scores of photographs, dating back to the beginnings of the Ford Motor Co., present a handsome setting for Cabadas’ story." - Observer and Eccentric, Hugh Gallagher...

Authors: Rich Teerlink. Lee Ozley.
Hardcover, 278 pages
Publisher: Harvard Business School Press
Publication Date: 2000-08


Reviews :

    The Story behind the Story of One of America's Most Beloved Brands
Harley-Davidson's Unlikely People-Based Transformation

While the business press was celebrating Harley-Davidson's remarkable financial turnaround in the late 1980s, the company's leader, Rich Teerlink, was deeply concerned. He knew that the storied motorcycle maker-flush from having beaten back an assault by skilled and determined Japanese competitors-now faced a new and even more formidable challenge: maintaining and improving upon its success in the absence of an external crisis. Partnering with longtime organizational consultant Lee Ozley, Teerlink did something extraordinary: he moved beyond the top-down strategies that had just saved the company from extinction and began building a different Harley. The new Harley would be driven not by its top executives, but by its employees at every level. What happened over the next twelve years is the stuff of turnaround legend.

More Than a Motorcycle is the story behind the story of the purposeful transformation of an American icon-as told by the two individuals who were most deeply involved in that process. While marketers and the media alike have long celebrated Harley, this candid inside account goes behind the headlines to reveal the highlights and lowlights, the victories and setbacks, and the breakthroughs and dead ends experienced by Teerlink, Ozley, and others as the company engaged in this transformational change effort. Part corporate biography and part memoir of a rare CEO/consultant partnership, the book chronicles Harley's difficult journey from a traditional "command-and-control" culture to an open, participative organization in which employees no longer went along for the ride, but took new levels of responsibility for charting their course.

Teerlink and Ozley deliver three fundamental messages: that people are a company's only sustainable competitive advantage; that there is no "quick fix" to effect lasting and beneficial organizational change; and that leadership is not a person, but a process, to which every employee must contribute. They advocate for a new concept of leadership, which entails not demanding compliance, but earning commitment. They provide practical, reality-based prescriptions for developing employee alignment and effectiveness; lifelong learning opportunities; structures that support participation; and effective approaches to rewards, recognition, and meaningful communication. The authors also distill lessons from the Harley experience-such as living one's values and cultivating an environment within which all kinds of people can thrive-that may apply broadly to any business.

An inspiring, against-the-odds story of a business road less traveled, More Than a Motorcycle encourages today's organizational leaders to look around the next bend-and to give everyone within the organization a view of the road from the driver's seat....

Authors: Charles K. Hyde.
Hardcover, 251 pages
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Publication Date: 2005-04-30


Reviews :

    The first comprehensive biography of John and Horace Dodge and the history of their company, Dodge Brothers....