A sharp and illuminating history of one of capitalism's longest running tensions-the conflicts of interest among public company directors, managers, and shareholders-told through entertaining case studies and original letters from some of our most legendary and controversial investors and activists. Recent disputes between shareholders and major corporations, including Apple and DuPont, have made headlines. But the struggle between management and those who own stock has been going on for nearly a century. Mixing never-before-published and rare, original letters from Wall Street icons-including Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Ross Perot, Carl Icahn, and Daniel Loeb-with masterful scholarship and professional insight, Dear Chairman traces the rise in shareholder activism from the 1920s to today, and provides an invaluable and unprecedented perspective on what it means to be a public company, including how they work and who is really in control. Jeff Gramm analyzes different eras and pivotal boardroom battles from the last century to understand the factors that have caused shareholders and management to collide. Throughout, he uses the letters to show how investors interact with directors and managers, how they think about their target companies, and how they plan to profit. Each is a fascinating example of capitalism at work told through the voices of its most colorful, influential participants. A hedge fund manager and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, Gramm has spent as much time evaluating CEOs and directors as he has trying to understand and value businesses. He has seen public companies that are poorly run, and some that willfully disenfranchise their shareholders. While he pays tribute to the ingenuity of public company investors, Gramm also exposes examples of shareholder activism at its very worst, when hedge funds engineer stealthy land-grabs at the expense of a company's long term prospects. Ultimately, he provides a thorough, much-needed understanding of the public company/shareholder relationship for investors, managers, and everyone concerned with the future of capitalism.

Mit welchen Ablaufen sind Kooperationen zu planen und zu verhandeln? Wer soll fur diese Aufgaben verantwortlich gemacht werden? Wie kann eine Kooperation effizient in die normale Organisationsstruktur eines Unternehmens eingefugt werden? In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird dargestellt, wie deutsche Grossunternehmen diese Probleme loesen. Umfangreiche Interviews mit Praktikern aus M & A und Beteiligungsmanagement bilden die empirische Basis der Studie. Sie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass Unternehmenskooperationen keinen organisatorischen Ausnahmezustand begrunden mussen. Trotzdem werden Kooperationen nach einiger Zeit wieder aufgeloest. Dies jedoch nicht wegen unzureichenden Erfolgs, sondern gerade weil sie ihren Zweck erfullt haben.

This highly readable book from Lou Richard, a 50 year veteran of International Corporate buisness and founder of Newport Capital, provides a practical explanation of key technical and tactical aspects of mergers and acquisitions, and also provides insightful real-life descriptions - "digressions" - of transactions as they happened, proving that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

This little book tells the truthful story of how the Bank of England actually came into being. It is a story of pirates, treasure, random good fortune and sheer determination. This is an institution founded on risk, daring and imagination. The tale is entangled with that of the early novel, in particular the fortunes of one Moll Flanders, an entrepreneur of sexual relations in the growing London market for capital in the early eighteenth century. These accounts are woven together with the life-stories of Daniel Defoe and William Paterson, founders of two of the key institutions of our modern age, the novel and the corporation. This reveals connections which are nowadays forgotten, and which the fractured specialisms of 'Literature', 'History' and 'Business' can rarely see. These tales are set against the backdrop of the long eighteenth century - fervent years of inventiveness, high risk gambling, and political revolution. The authors show that the dark arts of deceit, and the credibility of fictions, are requirements for any creative enterprise, and that all organizations are fictions.

As an increasing number of large corporations branch out into many fields of industry, public concern over the lateral extension of their power is aroused. Arguing that entry by large firms into concentrated industries may instead stimulate competition, Charles H. Berry analyzes the effect that such diversification has on corporate growth and on the structure and functioning of industrial markets. To identify a relationship between the growth of large corporations and the pattern of their diversifying activities, Professor Berry examines 460 of the largest U.S. industrial corporations. In tracing the effects of their entry into some 200 manufacturing industries, he develops new and striking evidence of the protected position of leading firms in concentrated industries, a position that can be effectively undermined by the diversification of more powerful corporations into these industries. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 2009, social media impresario and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk wrote the international bestseller CRUSH IT! It encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to use internet marketing to turn their passions, hobbies, and expertise into real businesses. Almost a decade later, Gary returns to the topic with fresh insights and a range of lessons and case studies that recount how dozens of entrepreneurs from around the world have, indeed, CRUSHING IT. Using Gary's proven, multifaceted methods for personal branding, social media marketing, and entrepreneurship, CRUSHING IT is every businessperson's user manual for managing their careers and creating successful businesses in the digital age. Both inspiring and highly practical, CRUSHING IT is a state-of-the-art guide to building your own path to professional and financial success at a time when the rules are being rewritten every day.

Research into the history of Christian missions in the context of colonialism has focused primarily on missions as institutions and on the ways in which people were integrated into the economic, political and ideological spheres of imperial powers. Reduced to an experience occurring within a person, faith was deemed unapproachable by scientific methods. This has, in effect, constituted a silence regarding the everyday experience of religiosity amongst those drawn to Christianity.

Ethnography of Faith is a detailed study of the ways in which people engage with and experience the religious in order to recognise and understand this suppressed voice of religiosity. In her analysis of the Luther-an church in the Soutpansberg of early twentieth century South Africa, Caroline Jeannerat listens closely to how people describe their own faith and that of others in the archive: in accounts of work done, in texts written for mission publications, in songs composed for church services, in letters and newspaper articles and in oral memories.

A careful reading of this archive – for breaks, for misunderstandings and oppositions, for sentiments of agreement, praise, compatibility and claims of shared experiences – identifies negotiations of meaning which give indications of conceptualisations of faith that stand in distinction to those of the missionaries and their expectations.

The discovery of the Black Giant in 1930 was the largest oil strike in the U.S. at that time, and its gushers changed the face of the oil industry. Oilmen, promoters, oil patch workers, and the nation's unemployed streamed into the tiny hamlets of East Texas for their share, but they faced wars between "big oil" and independent oilmen, bootleg or "hot oil," martial law, and legalized price-fixing. Yet the Black Giant turned out to be the salvation of the drought-stricken farmers, helped in the fight against Germany and Japan, and made lots of folks "Texas rich." The characters, times, and oil industry skulduggery are recalled and explained in dozens of sidebars full of humorous facts and trivia. The author, law professor at Washington College of Law, The American University, practiced oil and gas law for over 35 years and focused on oil and gas matters during the Arab oil embargo for the U.S. Department of the Interior.

"Selling under the Swastika" is the first in-depth study of commercial advertising in the Third Reich. While scholars have focused extensively on the political propaganda that infused daily life in Nazi Germany, they have paid little attention to the role played by commercial ads and sales culture in legitimizing and stabilizing the regime. Historian Pamela Swett explores the extent of the transformation of the German ads industry from the internationally infused republican era that preceded 1933 through the relative calm of the mid-1930s and into the war years. She argues that advertisements helped to normalize the concept of a "racial community," and that individual consumption played a larger role in the Nazi worldview than is often assumed. Furthermore, "Selling under the Swastika" demonstrates that commercial actors at all levels, from traveling sales representatives to company executives and ad designers, enjoyed relative independence as they sought to enhance their professional status and boost profits through the manipulation of National Socialist messages.

"Gentlemen Bankers" investigates the social and economic circles of one of America s most renowned and influential financiers to uncover how the Morgan family s power and prestige stemmed from its unique position within a network of local and international relationships.

At the turn of the twentieth century, private banking was a personal enterprise in which business relationships were a statement of identity and reputation. In an era when ethnic and religious differences were pronounced and anti-Semitism was prevalent, Anglo-American and German-Jewish elite bankers lived in their respective cordoned communities, seldom interacting with one another outside the business realm. Ironically, the tacit agreement to maintain separate social spheres made it easier to cooperate in purely financial matters on Wall Street. But as Susie Pak demonstrates, the Morgans exceptional relationship with the German-Jewish investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co., their strongest competitor and also an important collaborator, was entangled in ways that went far beyond the pursuit of mutual profitability.

Delving into the archives of many Morgan partners and legacies, "Gentlemen Bankers" draws on never-before published letters and testimony to tell a closely focused story of how economic and political interests intersected with personal rivalries and friendships among the Wall Street aristocracy during the first half of the twentieth century."

Many of us read books every day, either electronically or in print. We remember the books that shaped our ideas about the world as children, go back to favorite books year after year, give or lend books to loved ones and friends to share the stories we've loved especially, and discuss important books with fellow readers in book clubs and online communities. But for all the ways books influence us, teach us, challenge us, and connect us, many of us remain in the dark as to where they come from and how the mysterious world of publishing truly works. How are books created and how do they get to readers? The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know (R) introduces those outside the industry to the world of book publishing. Covering everything from the beginnings of modern book publishing early in the 20th century to the current concerns over the alleged death of print, digital reading, and the rise of Amazon, Mike Shatzkin and Robert Paris Riger provide a succinct and insightful survey of the industry in an easy-to-read question-and-answer format. The authors, veterans of "trade publishing," or the branch of the business that puts books in our hands through libraries or bookstores, answer questions from the basic to the cutting-edge, providing a guide for curious beginners and outsiders. How does book publishing actually work? What challenges is it facing today? How have social media changed the game of book marketing? What does the life cycle of a book look like in 2019? They focus on how practices are changing at a time of great flux in the industry, as digital creation and delivery are altering the commercial realities of the book business. This book will interest not only those with no experience in publishing looking to gain a foothold on the business, but also those working on the inside who crave a bird's eye view of publishing's evolving landscape. This is a moment of dizzyingly rapid change wrought by the emergence of digital publishing, data collection, e-books, audio books, and the rise of self-publishing; these forces make the inherently interesting business of publishing books all the more fascinating.

Documenting important milestones in the epic journey traversed by the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) over the last 50 years, 50 Years of Central Banking in Kenya puts into perspective the evolution of central banking globally and within the East African region, and contemplates future prospects and challenges. The volume is timely, mainly because within the last 50 years the global financial landscape has shifted. Central bankers have expanded their mandates, beyond the singular focus on inflation, and consider economic growth as their other important objective. Bank regulation has moved from Basel I, to Basel II, and some countries have fully migrated to Basel III while some are still at the cross-roads. 50 Years of Central Banking in Kenya captures the wide-ranging discussions on central banking, from a symposium to celebrate the 50 year anniversary on 13 September 2016 in Nairobi. The participants at the symposium included current and former central bank governors from Kenya and the East Africa region, high level officials from multilateral financial institutions, policy makers, executives of commercial banks in Kenya, private sector practitioners, civil society agents, executives and researchers from think tanks based in Kenya and the Africa region, leading academics in banking and finance, and university students. Beyond the symposium, the volume highlights the evolution of specific functions of CBK over the last 50 years (such as monetary policy, bank regulation, and payments system), as well as developments in Kenya's financial system which strongly relate to the functionality of CBK, such as financial innovation, the evolution of financial markets, and non-bank financial institutions in Kenya.

At the end of the 1950s the 100-year-old clothing firm Burberry was a troubled company with an uncertain future, whose new owners did not know what to do with it once they had secured it. Brian Kitson joined Burberry in 1958 expecting a temporary summer job and stayed for over twenty years. His research into the company's distinguished past, encouraged by the last Mr Burberry, began to suggest a possible direction for regeneration...Written with great verve and wit, Burberry Days tells of the author's unexpected adventures as an international travelling Burberry salesman throughout the 1960s and '70s, as well as exploring the origins of the company's emblematic trench coat and the familiar house check. The book also offers some controversial reasons why Britain, with so much to offer - from the Savile Row suit, the Jermyn Street shirt and Scottish cashmere to workforce skills and great design talent - can still only count Burberry in the premier league of international fashion houses.

OEffentliche Verwaltungen koennen ahnlich flexibel sein wie Unternehmen im Wettbewerb. Seit rund einem Dutzend Jahren wird versucht, mit unterschiedlichen Modellen aus der Privatwirtschaft ebenso den notwendigen Erfolg herbeizufuhren wie mit einem umfangreichen Regelungskatalog, der als "Neues Steuerungsmodell" Teilerfolge erzielen konnte. Modelle funktionieren in der Regel nur, wenn sie einerseits in eine adaquate Strategie eingebunden werden, andererseits bedarf es einer stringenten Umsetzung mittels eines echten Change-Management, orientiert an den Erfolgen bestgefuhrter Unternehmen. Das Praxishandbuch stellt die bisherigen Konzepte auf den Prufstand und zeigt auf, dass und wie strukturelle, organisatorische und mentale AEnderungen greifen koennen. Teils unter Einbeziehung tradierter Erfolgssysteme, uberwiegend jedoch mittels Handlungsanweisungen, die zu vielfachen Verbesserungen fuhren und das Auswechseln von Turschildern durch Erfolgsnachweise ermoeglichen.

Die Vertrauenswurdigkeit von Personen und Institutionen des Wirtschaftslebens wird zunehmend kritisch in der OEffentlichkeit diskutiert. Informationen, die von Unternehmen herausgegeben und von renommierten Prufungsunternehmen bestatigt wurden, haben sich spater als unrichtig erwiesen. Angesichts der im Rahmen der Globalisierung immer starker werdenden Wirtschaftsverflechtungen erhoeht sich jedoch der Anspruch an die Qualitat der Wirtschaftsinformationen. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersucht die Arbeit den Prozess der Vertrauensbildung in den Berufsstand der Wirtschaftsprufer am Beispiel Polens, wo dieser Berufsstand seit Beginn der neunziger Jahre quasi ganzlich neu entstanden ist.

Die "black box" des internationalen Standortentscheidungsprozesses wird erstmalig geoeffnet. Im Anschluss an seine standort- und entscheidungsprozesstheoretische Betrachtung werden mittels einer aufwendigen empirischen Untersuchung weitere Besonderheiten dieses komplexen Entscheidungsprozesses sichtbar. Einen Schwerpunkt der Prozessspezifika bilden dabei die schwer messbaren qualitativen Standortfaktoren. Ihre praktische Bedeutung und Handhabung werden exemplarisch herausgearbeitet.

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE WEEK BY THE NEW YORK POST ALSO AVAILABLE AS AN AUDIOBOOK A from-the-trenches view of New York Daily News and New York Post runners and photographers as they stop at nothing to break the story and squash their tabloid arch-rivals. When author Mike Jaccarino was offered a job at the Daily News in 2006, he was asked a single question: "Kid, what are you going to do to help us beat the Post?" That was the year things went sideways at the News, when the New York Post surpassed its nemesis in circulation for the first time in the history of both papers. Tasked with one job-crush the Post-Jaccarino here provides the behind-the-scenes story of how the runners and shooters on both sides would do anything and everything to get the scoop before their opponents. The New York Daily News and the New York Post have long been the Hatfields and McCoys of American media: two warring tabloids in a town big enough for only one of them. As digital news rendered print journalism obsolete, the fight to survive in NYC became an epic, Darwinian battle. In America's Last Great Newspaper War, Jaccarino exposes the untold story of this tabloid death match of such ferocity and obsession its like has not occurred since Pulitzer- Hearst. Told through the eyes of hungry "runners" (field reporters) and "shooters" (photographers) who would employ phony police lights to overcome traffic, Mike Jaccarino's memoir unmasks the do-whatever-it-takes era of reporting-where the ends justified the means and nothing was off-limits. His no-holds-barred account describes sneaking into hospitals, months-long stakeouts, infiltrating John Gotti's crypt, bidding wars for scoops, high-speed car chases with Hillary Clinton, O.J. Simpson, and the baby mama of a philandering congressman-all to get that coveted front-page story. Today, few runners and shooters remain on the street. Their age and exploits are as bygone as the News-Post war and American newspapers, generally. Where armies once battled, often no one is covering the story at all. Funding for this book was provided by: Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund

The remarkable story of one man's journey to leadership of the world's largest energy company, The Caravan Goes On is the first published inside account of the workings of the corporation by a CEO and represents a significant addition to the literature on the turbulent development of the world's oil industry. Frank Jungers, former President, Chairman and CEO of the petroleum giant Aramco, tells the inside story of his three decades in Saudi Arabia (1947-1978) with the world's largest oil producing company. A North Dakota farm boy Jungers rose to the top of one of the most important hydrocarbon enterprises ever, a company that eventually found itself responsible for nearly one-quarter of the world's oil resources. He writes of his face-to-face encounters with King Faisal and other Saudi leaders, and his role in steering the company through major international crises that included the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the dramatic oil price increases of the 1970s, the Arab oil embargo and the OPEC hostage incident of 1975. Central to Jungers' story is his role in helping to develop Aramco's Saudi workforce in preparation for the eventual transfer of company ownership from four American oil majors to the Government of Saudi Arabia. He explains the unique nature of the ownership transfer, which was remarkably different from the bitter nationalization process seen in Iraq, Libya, Iran and Venezuela. Jungers describes how Aramco and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in an important sense grew up together, and he highlights the crucial role played by Aramco in the development of the young nation's infrastructure and economy. The Caravan Goes On describes the origins of the petroleum industry in Saudi Arabia, with the granting of a concession in 1933 to a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, the first of Aramco's four oil-company parents. Jungers talks of his own origins as the son of farmer in North Dakota, the family's migration westward due to drought and depression, and his engineering studies at the University of Washington. Jungers began his career in Saudi Arabia working at Ras Tanura, site of Aramco's first oil refinery and oil tanker terminal. He describes how Aramco built its initial workforce, consisting of Americans, Italians, Saudis and other nationalities; he explains how it soon became clear that the future of the Saudi oil industry belonged not with foreign oil interest but to the people of Saudi Arabia; and he relates how he and others worked to give Saudis the training and incentives needed to take over and successfully operate what would become the world's premier oil producing and exporting company. At the same time, Aramco, with its technological expertise and its access to international specialists, began playing a central role in the development of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The company, with support and encouragement of the Saudi Kings, took a lead role in building healthcare, agriculture, the railroads, the electric grid and other sectors of the Saudi economy. The story of the "King Faisal Era" (including the monarch's role in the oil price issue, the Arab oil embargo and his closed-door meetings with the King and his key advisers, including Oil Minister Shaikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani) are vividly described, as well as the shock of King Faisal's tragic death and the tense moments of the OPEC hostage incident that began in Vienna and ended in North Africa. Jungers speaks of his involvement in launching Saudi Arabia's Master Gas System, now a central part of the national economy and his pivotal role in the consolidation of Saudi Arabia's electrical power grid in the Eastern Province. When he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2008 to attend the celebrations of the company's 75th anniversary he fully realized the success of the Aramco venture - how it had indeed prepared large numbers of Saudis for the responsibilities of leading their country's oil industry into a new and exciting economic era. This personal, colorful and up-close view is required reading for oil-industry watchers as well as those interested in big business, geopolitics, America's role in the Middle East and the extraordinary transformation and emergence of modern Saudi Arabia since oil was discovered in its Eastern Province.

The new questionTen 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 studyGreat 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 findingsThe 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.

The award-winning bestseller: "Stone's book, at last, gives us a Jeff Bezos biography that can fit proudly on a shelf next to the best chronicles of America's other landmark capitalists." -- "Forbes"""
Amazon.com's visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now.
Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, and his book is the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. THE EVERYTHING STORE is the book the business world can't stop talking about, the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.