What can you learn from the world's most successful companies? Marvel characters have been shaping pop culture for decades and when comic books were no longer keeping the company afloat, Marvel Studios was born. Marvel Studios is the multibillion-dollar home to iconic franchises. They are known for creating brilliant multilayered worlds and storylines that allow their audiences to escape into a fantasy and inspire the creative side of every viewer. But, behind those visionaries is a well-oiled storytelling machine dedicated to getting the Hulk's smash fists in the hands of every child and a sea of Spiderman costumes deployed every Halloween. The Marvel Studios Story educates you on how one of the largest creative companies in the planetary universe runs their business and keeps their fans and their parent company, Disney, counting the profits. Through the story of Marvel Studios, you'll learn: How to recognize and pursue additional revenue streams. How a company can successfully balance the creative with business to appease investors and fans alike. And how to keep a decades-old superhero franchise new and exciting without losing sight of its roots. The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history's most successful movie studios.

Since its invention in Italy in the fourteenth century, marine insurance has provided merchants with capital protection in times of crisis, thus oiling the gears of trade and commerce. With a focus on customs, laws, and organisational structures, this book reveals the Italian origins of marine insurance, and tracks the spread of underwriting practices and institutions in Europe and America through the early modern era. With contributions from eleven leading researchers from seven countries, the book examines key institutional developments in the history of marine insurance. The authors discuss its invention in Italy, and its evolution from private to corporate structures, assessing the causes and impacts of various state interventions. Amsterdam and Antwerp are analysed as one-time key centres of underwriting, as is the emergence and maturity of marine insurance in London. The book evaluates an experiment in corporate underwriting in Cadiz, and the development of insurance institutions in the United States, before applying the metrics of underwriting to discuss commerce raiding in the Atlantic up to the nineteenth century.

A colourful history of advertising. The process of producing goods and services is relatively easy to recognize as socially beneficial. But television ads? Telemarketers? Jingles? Junk mail? It is popular to view these commercial activities as inherently wasteful or manipulative, marginally informative or entertaining, at best. The most vociferous critics marshal economic and sociological data to argue that advertising dilutes culture and moral values, encourages conspicuous consumption, defrauds the public, and promotes dangerous products and behaviours. In Selling the Dream, John Hood takes the provocative stand that advertising images and sales pitches are actually part of the goods and services themselves, delivering an essential component of the consumer's experience. As such, they are inextricably linked to the basic tenets of the free-market system, and, in the boldest of terms, Hood argues that commercial communication is morally consistent with the principles of a democratic society, including freedom of choice, competition, and innovation. Tracing the history of advertising from Ancient Roman times to the present, through the first American newspaper ad in 1704, P.T. the modern consumer society, Hood offers a colourful account of advertising in its cultural context. Moreover, he addresses such controversial issues as the promotion of harmful and immoral products (such as tobacco and alcohol), marketing to children, the role of advertising in service industries such as health care and education, and the impact of the Internet and other new media on the conduct of commerce. In the process, he offers a compelling perspective on advertising and its essential role in business, communication, and popular culture. Advertising is a ubiquitous part of our consumer culture. It draws from business, economics, politics, and history to present a colourful picture of advertising in context and argues that advertising is an essential ingredient of competition, innovation, and free-market economic growth. Deals with controversial issues, such as advertising immoral products and advertising to children.

The Pyramid of Lies by international financial journalist Duncan Mavin, is the true story of Lex Greensill, the Australian farmer who became a hi-flying billionaire banker before crashing back down to earth, exposing a tangled network of flawed financiers, politicians and industrialists. Lex Greensill had a simple, billion-dollar idea - democratising supply chain finance. Suppliers want to get their invoices paid as soon as possible. Companies want to hold off as long as they can. Greensill bridged the two, it's mundane, boring even, but he saw an opportunity to profit. However, margins are thin and Lex, ever the risk taker, made lucrative loans with other people's money: to a Russian cargo plane linked to Vladmir Putin, to former Special Forces who ran a private army, and crucially to companies that were fraudulent or had no revenue. When the company finally collapsed it exposed the revolving door between Westminster and big business and how David Cameron was allowed to lobby ministers for cash that would save Greensill's doomed business. Instead, Credit Suisse and Japan's SoftBank are nursing billions of dollars in losses, a German bank is under criminal investigation, and thousands of jobs are at risk. What Bad Blood did for Silicon Valley and The Smartest Guys in the Room did for Wall Street, The Pyramid of Lies will do for the world of shadow banking and supply chain finance. It is a world populated with some of the most outlandish characters in business and some of the most outrageous examples of excess. It is a story of greed and ambition that shines a light on the murky intersection between politics and business, where lavish fortunes can be made and lost.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented the model of the Silicon Valley start-up and set in motion a process of corporate becoming that made it possible for HP to transform itself six times over the 77 years since its founding in the face of sweeping technological changes that felled most of its competitors over the years. Today, HP is in the throes of a seventh transformation to secure its continued survival by splitting in two independent companies: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Based on extensive primary research conducted over more than 15 years, this book documents the differential contribution of HP's successive CEOs in sustaining the company's integral process of becoming. It uses a comprehensive strategic leadership framework to examine and explain the role of the CEO: (1) defining and executing the key tasks of strategic leadership, and (2) developing four key elements of the company's strategic leadership capability. The study of the strategic leadership of HP's successive CEOs revealed the paradox of corporate becoming, the existential situation facing successive CEOs (that justifies the book's empathic approach), and the importance of the CEO's ability to harness the company's past while also driving its future. Building on these novel insights, the book shows how the frameworks used to conceptualize the tasks of strategic leadership and the development of strategic leadership capability can serve as steps toward a dynamic theory of strategic leadership that animates an evolutionary framework of corporate becoming. This framework will be helpful for further theory development about strategic leadership and also offers practical tools for founders of new companies and CEOs and boards of directors of existing companies who intend to create, run or oversee companies built for continued relevance, longevity and greatness.

This volume is the result of a symposium in which 15 distinguished scholars, business leaders, lawyers, social scientists, philosophers, and theologians considered management and corporations in 1985.

The power of the presidential pardon has our national attention now more than ever before. In The Pardon, New York Times bestselling author and CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin provides a timely and compelling narrative of the most controversial presidential pardon in American history—Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, revealing the profound implications for our current political landscape, and how it is already affecting the legacies of both Presidents Biden and Trump.

In this deeply reported book, Toobin explores why the Founding Fathers gave the power of pardon to the President and recreates the behind-the-scenes political melodrama during the tumultuous period around Nixon’s resignation. The story features a rich cast of characters, including Alexander Haig, Nixon’s last chief of staff, who pushed for the pardon, and a young Justice Department lawyer named Antonin Scalia, who provided the legal justification.

Ford’s shocking decision to pardon Nixon was widely criticized at the time, yet it has since been reevaluated as a healing gesture for a divided country. But Toobin argues that Ford’s pardon was an unwise gift to an undeserving recipient and an unsettling political precedent. The Pardon explores those that followed: Jimmy Carter’s amnesty for Vietnam draft resisters, Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich, and the extraordinary story of Trump’s unprecedented pardons at the end of his first term.

The Pardon is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the complex dynamics of power within the highest office in the nation, and the implications of presidential mercy.

Take a critical view of the institutions that affect our everyday lives with this extended essay. The most important of these is the modern-day corporation, which continues to resist social control despite an ability to adapt to the environment like no other entity in human history.

Corporations continue to explode with power, and religious, educational, and governmental organizations are looking to them as examples. An increasing number of entities are learning how to conduct themselves by looking at their corporate counterparts, and, as a result, they're no longer fulfilling their true purposes.

Author Francis X. Healy Jr. examines the implications of these disturbing developments. Discover why institutions continue to miss expectations, why society suffers as a result of corporate models, and how money and power interact in problematic ways.

The pursuit of money and power is stifling the true purposes of institutions with honorable objectives. Many groups that once carried at least a facade of being above it all are now stuck in the moneypower continuum; if something doesn't change soon, the consequences will be devastating.

The battle for the control of RJR Nabisco in the Autumn of 1988, which became the largest and most dramatic corporate takeover in American history, sent shock-waves through the international business world and became a symbol of the greed, excess and egotism of the eighties.

Barbarians at the Gate recounts this two-month battle with breathtaking pace and flair, and transports back to the Wall Street empire before it crumbled, through the boardroom doors, into the midnight meetings, the betrayals, the deal makers and publicity flaks, into a world where - as Nabisco CEO Ross Johnson put it - 'a few million dollars are lost in the sands of time'.

Twenty years on, the world is once again recovering from a period of financial extravagance and irresponsibility. This revised edition brings the ultimate business thriller up to date for a new generation of readers.

Learning From Upheaval The best seat in the house to understand a centuryOf challenge and transformation.Ideas distilled from substantial investments in human Performance improvement.The story has the all-encompassing sweep of the full twentieth century. Distance learning pioneer Jamison Handy and then Bill Sandy were interacting with America's legendary industrial giants on the topic most relevant to survival and success---the performance of human beings. There is no better vantage point to capture the drama of change. Throughout the turmoil, Sandy's specialty of performance improvement kept him focused not just on what was happening but why, and most important, what could be done about it. Sophisticated concepts of personal and organizational growth are served up as stories. Bill Sandy's success depended on his ability to understand issues, conceptualize solutions, and convey those concepts in a way that others could easily grasp. The author, who has lived through all the fads, extracts major principles from the turbulence and offers wisdom a man can do when he reflects on a lifetime spent riding the waves of change. One core principle is to maintain a sense of humor. Irreverence gives spice to this saga of personal and organizational transformation. www.LearningFromUpheaval.com

First published in 1981, this edited collection reviews the operations of state-owned enterprises, examining the actual performance of such organisations in the advanced industrialised countries. The authors consider the regularities and characteristics of state-owned enterprises, in particular the persistent efforts of managers to increase their autonomy and escape from the oversight of government agencies and the public. Chapters consider principles of finance and decision-making in these organisations and provide a truly international perspective with case studies in Italy, France and Britain. This is a timely reissue in context of the current economic climate, which will be of great value to students and academics with an interest in the nationalisation of companies, international business and the relationship between governments and managers.

In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolise everything wrong with Silicon Valley. In the tradition of Brad Stone's Everything Store and John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, award-winning investigative reporter Mike Isaac's Super Pumped delivers a gripping account of Uber's rapid rise, its pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company's toxic internal culture and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth and bad behaviour, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

'A fascinating page-turner... An indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.' Walter Isaacson, no. 1 bestselling author of Steve Jobs Perfect for readers of Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance and Zero to One by Peter Theil Out of PayPal's ranks have come household names like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Reid Hoffman. Since leaving Paypal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. Yet for all their influence, the incredible story of where they started has gone largely untold. In The Founders, award-winning author Jimmy Soni narrates how a once-in-a-generation collaboration turned a scrappy start-up into one of the most successful businesses of all time. Facing bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s, their success was anything but certain. But they would go on to change our world forever. Informed by hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, The Founders explores how the seeds of so much of what drives the internet today were planted two decades ago.

The story of Oxford University Press spans five centuries of printing and publishing. Beginning with the first presses set up in Oxford in the fifteenth century and the later establishment of a university printing house, it leads through the publication of bibles, scholarly works, and the Oxford English Dictionary, to a twentieth-century expansion that created the largest university press in the world, playing a part in research, education, and language learning in more than 50 countries. With access to extensive archives, The History of OUP traces the impact of long-term changes in printing technology and the business of publishing. It also considers the effects of wider trends in education, reading, and scholarship, in international trade and the spreading influence of the English language, and in cultural and social history - both in Oxford and through its presence around the world. By the late eighteenth century, the University Press was both printer and publisher. This volume charts its rich and complicated history between 1780 and 1896, when transformations in the way books were printed led, in turn, to greater expertise in distributing and selling Oxford books. Simon Eliot and twelve expert contributors look at the relationship of the Press with the wider book trade, and with the University and city of Oxford. They also explore the growing range of books produced - including, above all, the creation and initial publication of the Oxford English Dictionary.