On April 20, 2010, the "Deepwater Horizon" oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers and creating the largest oil spill in the history of U.S. offshore drilling. But this wasn't the first time British Petroleum and its cost-cutting practices destroyed parts of the natural world. It also was not the first time that BP's negligence resulted in the loss of human life, ruined family businesses, or shattered dreams. From Alaska to Kansas to the Gulf, journalist Mike Magner has been tracking BP's reckless path for years, and in "Poisoned Legacy" he focuses, for the first time, on the human price of BP's rise to power.

In this unique, well-illustrated book, readers learn how fifty financial corporations came to dominate the U.S. banking system and their impact on the nation's political, social, and economic growth. A story that spans more than two centuries of war, crisis, and opportunity, this account reminds readers that American banking was never a fixed enterprise but has evolved in tandem with the country. More than 225 years have passed since Alexander Hamilton created one of the nation's first commercial banks. Over time, these institutions have changed hands, names, and locations, reflecting a wave of mergers, acquisitions, and other restructuring efforts that echo changes in American finance. Some names, such as Bank of America and Wells Fargo, will be familiar to readers. The origins of others, including Zions Bancorporation, founded by Brigham Young and owned by the Mormon Church until 1960, are surprising. Exploring why some banks failed and others thrived, this book wonders, in light of the 2008 financial crisis, whether recent consolidations have reached or even exceeded economically rational limits. A key text for navigating the complex terrain of American finance, this volume draws a fascinating family tree for projecting the financial future of a nation.

In September 1910, the activist Roger Casement arrived in the Amazon jungle on a mission for the British government: to investigate reports of widespread human-rights abuses in the forests along the Putumayo River. Casement was outraged by what he uncovered: nearly thirty thousand Indians had died to produce four thousand tons of rubber for Peruvian and British commercial interests, under the brutal rubber baron Julio Cesar Arana. In 1912, Casement's seven-hundred-page report of the Putumayo violence set off reverberations throughout the world. Drawing on a wealth of original research, "The Devil and Mr. Casement" is a haunting story of modern capitalism with enormous contemporary political resonance.

Das Buch erstellt einen analytischen Bezugsrahmen fur die Erfassung und Evaluation kommunikativer Einflussbeziehungen von Unternehmen. Bislang mangelte es an perspektivischer Vielfalt, theoretischen Fundierungsmoeglichkeiten und geeigneten Instrumenten zur Rekonstruktion und Analyse des komplexen politischen Beziehungsmanagements Multinationaler Unternehmen. Der Autor verknupft Schlusselkonzepte des Issues- und Stakeholdermanagements, der Politikfeldanalyse, Tauschtheorie und Lobbyismusforschung mit dem Netzwerkansatz. Das Ergebnis ist eine neuartige Forschungsheuristik, die es moeglich macht, Public Affairs aus relationaler Perspektive zu betrachten und themenzentrierte politische Anspruchsgruppenkommunikation von Organisationen zu analysieren.

"Magnificently and heartbreakingly told. . . . Hudson] shows vividly that really filthy, face-to-face fraud and hard-sell bullying . . . brought the economy down around our ears."--"The Boston Globe"

In this page-turning, true-crime expose, award-winning reporter Michael W. Hudson reveals the story of the rise and fall of the biggest subprime lender and Wall Street's biggest patron of subprime: Ameriquest and Lehman Brothers. They did more than any other institutions to produce the biggest financial scandal in American history.

It's a tale populated by a remarkable cast of characters: a shadowy billionaire who created the subprime industry out of the ashes of the 1980s S&L scandal; insatiable Wall Street executives; ensnared home owners; investigators who tried to expose the fraud; politicians who turned a blind eye; and, most of all, the drug-snorting, high-living salesman who tell all about the money they made, the lies they told, the deals they closed.

Provocative and gripping, "The Monster" is a searing look at the bottom-feeding fraud and top-down greed that fueled the financial collapse.

THIS 20 PAGE ARTICLE WAS EXTRACTED FROM THE BOOK: Pamphlets: Elbert Hubbard's Selected Writings: Part 1, by Elbert Hubbard. To purchase the entire book, please order ISBN 0766103846.

"Toyota is becoming a double threat: the world's finest manufacturer and a truly great innovator . . . that formula, a combination of production prowess and technical innovation, is an unbeatable recipe for success."

-- "Fortune," February 2006

For the first time, an insider reveals the formula behind Toyota's unceasing quest to innovate and do more with less, a philosophy that has made it one of the ten most profitable companies in the world (and worth more than GM, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and Honda combined). In a rare look into Toyota's ability to consistently achieve breakthroughs that outperform the competition, "The Elegant Solution" explains what Toyota associates have known all along: it's not about the cars. Rather, Toyota's astounding success is just the visible result of a hidden creative process that begins with a seven-digit number.

"One million." That's how many new ideas the Toyota organization implements every year. These ideas come from every level of the organization -- from the factory floors to the corporate suites. And organizations all over the world want to learn how it's done. Now senior University of Toyota advisor Matthew May shows how any company can achieve an environment of everyday innovation and discover the kinds of elegant solutions that hold the power to change the game forever. World-class benchmarks like Lexus, Prius, Scion -- even Toyota's vaunted production system -- are simply shining examples of elegant solutions.

A tactical playbook for team-based innovation, "The Elegant Solution" delivers powerful lessons in breakthrough thinking in a provocative yet practical guide to the three core principles and ten key practices that shape successful business innovation. Innovation isn't just about technology -- it's about value, opportunity, and impact. When a company embeds a real discipline around tapping ingenuity in the pursuit of perfection, the sky is the limit. Dozens of case studies (from Toyota and other companies) illustrate the universal power and applicability of these concepts. A unique "clamshell strategy" prepares managers to successfully lead and sustain the innovation effort.

At once a thought-starter and a taskmaster, "The Elegant Solution" is a vital prescription for anyone wanting to truly master business innovation.

The world of CEOs and boards has become an entitled insiders' club--virtually free of accountability--and the abject failure of our corporate leaders to police themselves is costing Americans trillions and seriously undermining the strength of our economy. Whereas boards are supposed to act as watchdogs, guarding shareholders' interests, they have become enabling lapdogs to CEOs, who are aided and abetted in their pursuit of outrageous pay and unfettered power by a bevy of supporting players, including compensation consultants who justify exorbitant pay packages and accountants and attorneys who see no evil.
Based on extensive original reporting and interviews with high-level insiders at a host of leading companies, John Gillespie and David Zweig--both Harvard MBAs with thirtyplus years of Fortune 100 experience--reveal the inner workings of this dysfunctional culture and the many methods CEOs and boards use to shut shareholders out, entrench themselves, and fight reforms with shareholders' own money. "Money for Nothing "is a vital expose of how the game is played and a powerful call for change, laying out the specific reforms that are needed to fix the glaring dysfunctions that are imperiling the health of American business.

In "Right of the Dial," Alec Foege explores how the mammoth media conglomerate Clear Channel Communications evolved from a local radio broadcasting operation, founded in 1972, into one of the biggest, most profitable, and most polarizing corporations in the country. During its heyday, critics accused Clear Channel, the fourth-largest media company in the United States and the nation's largest owner of radio stations, of ruining American pop culture and cited it as a symbol of the evils of media monopolization, while fans hailed it as a business dynamo, a beacon of unfettered capitalism.What's undeniable is that as the owner at one point of more than 1,200 radio stations, 130 major concert venues and promoters, 770,000 billboards, and 41 television stations, Clear Channel dominated the entertainment world in ways that MTV and Disney could only dream of. But in the fall of 2006, after years of public criticism and flattening stock prices, Goliath finally tumbled--Clear Channel Communications, Inc., spun off its entertainment division and plotted to sell off one-third of its radio stations and all of its television concerns, and to transfer ownership of the rest of its holdings to a consortium of private equity firms. The move signaled the end of an era in media consolidation, and in "Right of the Dial," Foege takes stock of the company's successes and abuses, showing the manner in which Clear Channel reshaped America's cultural and corporate landscape along the way.

No existe un Steve Jobs, sino que debemos hablar de cuatro Jobs (el joven indeciso que no sabe que hacer con su vida, el fundador de Apple, el hijo prodigo propietario de Pixar y su regreso triunfal a la marca de la manzana con el lanzamiento del iPod, el iPhone y el iPad). En todas sus vidas el exito ha sido el denominador comun, un exito alcanzado gracias a un talento desmesurado, un carisma arrollador y una dedicacion absoluta a la persecucion de sus objetivos. Sin duda una obra de referencia sobre uno de los grandes genios de nuestra epoca.

With an updated Afterword by the author
This is the epic saga of the American automobile industry's rise and demise, a compelling story of hubris, missed opportunities, and self-inflicted wounds that culminates with the president of the United States ushering two of Detroit's Big Three car companies--once proud symbols of prosperity--through bankruptcy. With unprecedented access, Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Ingrassia takes us from factory floors to small-town dealerships to Detroit's boardrooms to the White House. Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves did? Complete with a new Afterword providing fresh insights into the continuing upheaval in the auto industry--the travails of Toyota, the revolving-door management and IPO at General Motors, the unexpected progress at Chrysler, and the Obama administration's stake in Detroit's recovery--"Crash Course" addresses a critical question: America bailed out GM, but who will bail out America?

This is the story of the greatest might-have-been in the history of the fast food business. How did a company that began almost by accident become the innovation leader by 1960? What caused a decade-long slide that began right at the moment of their greatest success? Understanding begins with studying the experiences that forged Burger Chef and its leaders, and then learning from the mistakes corporations can make when they replace innovation and entrepreneurship with process and control-a lesson as important today as it was a half-century ago.

E Pluribus Kinko's describes how a highly democratic business structure helped Kinko's grow and profit for thirty years, and how the loss of democracy contributed to the company's decline and disappearance. From 1970 to 1999, Kinko's grew from a one-hundred-square-foot copy shop to a two-billion-dollar industry leader with over 1,000 branches worldwide, with thousands of engaged and participative citizen-coworkers. The foundations of our democracy were The Philosophy, which was like a constitution that clearly articulated stakeholder rights and expectations, our Partnership Ethos, which used profit sharing to spread the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship throughout the organization, and our habit of Pot-Stirring, which produced the frequent revolutions Thomas Jefferson believed were necessary in a healthy democracy. It was very messy - and very profitable.

One of the biggest questions of the financial crisis has not been answered until now. What happened at Lehman Brothers and why was it allowed to fail, with aftershocks that rocked the global economy? In this news-making, often astonishing book, a former Lehman Brothers Vice President gives us the straight answers--right from the belly of the beast.
In "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense," Larry McDonald, a Wall Street insider, reveals, the culture and unspoken rules of the game like no book has ever done. The book is couched in the very human story of Larry McDonald's Horatio Alger-like rise from a Massachusetts "gateway to nowhere" housing project to the New York headquarters of Lehman Brothers, home of one of the world's toughest trading floors.
We get a close-up view of the participants in the Lehman collapse, especially those who saw it coming with a helpless, angry certainty. We meet the Brahmins at the top, whose reckless, pedal-to-the-floor addiction to growth finally demolished the nation's oldest investment bank. The Wall Street we encounter here is a ruthless place, where brilliance, arrogance, ambition, greed, capacity for relentless toil, and other human traits combine in a potent mix that sometimes fuels prosperity but occasionally destroys it.
The full significance of the dissolution of Lehman Brothers remains to be measured. But this much is certain: it was a devastating blow to America's--and the world's--financial system. And it need not have happened. This is the story of why it did.

"From the Hardcover edition."