The American samurai knows that the old attitudes just won't cut it in today's market. He knows that the battle to make the U.S. a great economic power might be lost, but he's still willing to fight to the end to put quality back in American products. If you are ready to become a crusader for quality and success, William Lareau shows you how. In frank language, he explains:
-- Why managers -- not workers -- are responsible for 99% of all day-to-day business breakdowns
-- Why every American samurai must learn the Japanese word "Kaizen" -- and put it into effect in their company today
-- Why building to specs guarantees stagnation
-- A 12-step, "Plan-Do-Check-Act" program that can become your pathway to achieving and maintaining quality.

LEGO is one of the world's best-loved and most familiar brands, adored by generations of children. What is less well known, though, is how close this iconic company came to total collapse in 2003. Brick by Brick is the compelling story of a Danish family-owned company that enjoyed decades of success before its inability to keep in step with a rapidly changing market brought it crashing to earth. It's also the story of an extraordinary recovery. As disaster stared them in the face, the management of LEGO embarked on an audacious and innovative plan to turn their fortunes around, and then painstakingly implemented it. Today, the company is riding high once again, and enjoying results that are the envy of their competitors. Granted unprecedented access to every part of the LEGO Group, David Robertson not only charts each twist in the company's story but explains precisely what went wrong and how it was fixed. His clear-sighted analysis will prove invaluable to all those who want to understand how companies can not only ride the storm of change, but benefit from it.

The dramatic story of the last fifty years of the Speyer banking dynasty, a Jewish family of German descent, is surprisingly little known today, yet at the turn of the 20th century, Speyer was the third largest investment banking firm in the United States, behind only Morgan and Kuhn, Loeb. It had branches in London, Frankfurt and New York, and the projects it financed included the Southern Pacific Railroad, the London Underground and the infrastructure of the new Cuban republic. Later, it was the first major banking firm to finance Germany's Weimar Republic, as well as providing League of Nations loans to Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria. Yet, the firm was doomed by the nationalist passions aroused by World War I. Its English partner was denaturalised and exiled; its American partner enjoyed reduced standing because of his connection to Germany; and the Frankfurt branch closed with the coming of the Third Reich, its German partner fleeing into exile. The firm was dissolved in 1939, a surprisingly anticlimactic end to one of the great international banking companies of modern times. George W. Liebmann here tells the story of the firm and the family - shedding new light on the protagonists of a remarkable dynasty, who came undone in the dramatic years of the early 20th century.

The first-person account of the family that changed the American retail landscape.

Longtime Dollar General CEO Cal Turner, Jr. shares his extraordinary life as heir to the company founded by his father, Cal Turner, Sr., and his grandfather, a dirt farmer turned Depression-era entrepreneur. Cal's narrative is at its heart a father-son story, from his childhood in Scottsville, Kentucky, where business and family were one, to the triumph of reaching the Fortune 300--at the cost of risking that very father/son relationship. Cal shares how the small-town values with which he was raised helped him guide Dollar General from family enterprise to national powerhouse.

Chronicling three generations of a successful family with very different leadership styles, Cal Jr. shares a wealth of wisdom from a lifetime on the entrepreneurial front lines. He shows how his grandfather turned a third-grade education into an asset for success. He reveals how his driven father hatched the game-changing dollar price point strategy and why it worked. And he explains how he found his own leadership style when he took his place at the helm--values-based, people-oriented, and pragmatic. Cal's story provides a riveting look at the family love and drama behind Dollar General's spectacular rise, pays homage to the working-class people whose no-frills needs helped determine its rock-bottom prices, and shares the life and lessons of one of America's most compelling business leaders.

Business Without Boundary was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The firm of General Mills is probably best known to millions of people as the maker of Gold Medal Flour and as the progenitor of that first lady of the kitchen and the airwaves, Betty Crocker. But, although its greatest fame is as a flour miller, the company engages in a host of other activities that attest to the foresight and creative thinking of its executives. In fact, the sky seems to be the only limit as the company extends its sights upward in Operation Skyhook, a United States navy research project for which General Mills makes and launches into the stratosphere giant plastic balloons. James Gray relates not only the history of General Mills since its founding in 1928 but also the background of the major companies that merged to form the larger corporation: the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis, the Sperry Company of San Francisco, the Kell group of Texas and Oklahoma mills, and the Larrowe Milling Company of Detroit. Anyone interested in advertising and promotion will find fascinating the accounts of the early successes in radio advertising, including the first use of singing commercials and the phenomenal rise of Betty Crocker (voted the second best-known woman in America!) The scientific and technical research that is a cornerstone of the modern corporation is described in detail, as is the development of the products control method, a General Mills innovation now widely adopted in industry. For those curious to understand how business expands, for those interested in a close-up of industrial leaders, for anyone who wants to sharpen his view of America at work, this is an important book.

The pharmaceutical revolution that gathered pace in the 1930s delivered a plethora of almost magical new drugs such as penicillin, streptomycin, cortisone, and the birth control pill. This revolution grew from academic-business relationships in five countries: USA, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, and France. Many other countries tried and failed to replicate this success, yet a handful of Scandinavia companies made important breakthroughs in a narrow band of specialities. This is the story of how one Norwegian company- Nyegaard & Co. -achieved international success from the 1970s onwards with a breakthrough product facilitating X-ray pictures of the soft tissues of the body. The company succeeded by harnessing research skills and creating scientific and business alliances abroad, building its own momentum step by step: the corporation as entrepreneur. It thereby broke with the conventional way a national medical ecosystem facilitated the crucial scientific progress. This is a story both of personal initiatives and great organizational transformations in several stages. In the 1950s, Nyegaard & Co. was a small hierarchical home market-oriented generics company. By the end of the 1990s, it had developed into a fairly large and multinational hierarchical company, preoccupied as much with shareholder value as scientific progress. It has also become a company that no longer had the same ability to innovate as before and therefore became merged into another one.

Once a shoestring operation built on plywood sets and Australian rules football, ESPN has evolved into a media colossus. A genius for cross-promotion and its near-mystical rapport with its viewers empower the network to set agendas and create superstars, to curate sports history even as it mainstreams the latest cultural trends. Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned X's and O's into billions of $$$. Vogan's institutional and cultural history focuses on the network since 1998, the year it launched a high-motor effort to craft its brand and grow audiences across media platforms. As he shows, innovative properties like SportsCentury, ESPN The Magazine, and 30 for 30 built the network's cultural cache. This credibility, in turn, propelled ESPN's transformation into an entity that lapped its run-of-the-mill competitors and helped fulfill its self-proclaimed status as the "Worldwide Leader in Sports." Ambitious and long overdue, ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire offers an inside look at how the network changed an industry and reshaped the very way we live as sports fans.

'Such a dazzling version of the boo phenomenon that as readers turn the pages they will be rooting for the company to survive even though they know the story ends in disaster.' The Sunday Times'boo hoo is an engrossing account of how two childhood friends persuaded some of the world's savviest investors and fashion houses - including Bernard Arnault's LVMH and the Benetton family - to fund a sports and designer clothing company to the tune of $100m.' The Guardian '[his] tale captures the hype and excitement of developing what was seen by many as a ground-breaking company with state-of-the-art technology- Along the way, it tells of endless rounds of raising finance, glamorous parties, staff clashes and bitter sparring with the press.' BBC.co.uk 'The game would be to bring boo.com to market, when it would soon be worth more than $1 billion and make its backers rich. Can all this have happened last year? It seems more like a tale from a different aeon, but the lessons it teaches are timeless.' The Spectator'

One of the hottest books on the shelves at Waterstones.' Sunday Times Style magazine'boo hoo-is 386 pages of oddly gripping text made nearly unbelievable by the amount of money that was given voluntarily to two twentysomething Swedes-the very readable book-adds lurid colour to [the] story.' The Daily Telegraph 'Reading [this] has the fascination of watching a high-speed car crash replayed in slow motion. You know what's going to happen, you can see the confident glow on the drivers' faces, but can't warn them about the curve in the road that is coming to unstick them. Schadenfreude is irresistible. And yet everyone walks away unhurt.' The Independent'With its evocative and colourful narrative, you'll quickly find yourself transported to the duo's world of ridiculous money-fuelled excess. Boo hoo offers up a truly entertaining insight into the frenzied and dizzying world of dotcommery at a time when everybody with a bright idea had a chance to make a million.' Virginstudent.com

Once a shoestring operation built on plywood sets and Australian rules football, ESPN has evolved into a media colossus. A genius for cross-promotion and its near-mystical rapport with its viewers empower the network to set agendas and create superstars, to curate sports history even as it mainstreams the latest cultural trends. Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned X's and O's into billions of $$$. Vogan's institutional and cultural history focuses on the network since 1998, the year it launched a high-motor effort to craft its brand and grow audiences across media platforms. As he shows, innovative properties like SportsCentury, ESPN The Magazine, and 30 for 30 built the network's cultural cache. This credibility, in turn, propelled ESPN's transformation into an entity that lapped its run-of-the-mill competitors and helped fulfill its self-proclaimed status as the "Worldwide Leader in Sports." Ambitious and long overdue, ESPN: The Making of a Sports Media Empire offers an inside look at how the network changed an industry and reshaped the very way we live as sports fans.

This engaging book begins with the history of Triumph, its rescue by the Standard Motor Company and the quest to replace the bestselling Herald with a more modern design, including the strong influence of the Italian designer Giovanni Michelotti. Triumph 1300 to Dolomite Sprint covers the full range of models that succeeded the successful Triumph Herald. Starting with the front-wheel drive 1300 and 1500 models, author Kevin Warrington covers the conversion from front to rear-wheel drive, the introduction of the two-door Toledo and four-door Dolomite range and finishes with the range-topping high performance but fragile Dolomite Sprint. Including coverage of the Dolomite's strong sporting history, and with accompanying period and modern colour photographs, this book provides all the information the enthusiast will need about this remarkable range of mid-range Triumph cars.

For over 130 years, Imperial Oil dominated Canada's oil industry. Their 1947 discovery of crude oil in Leduc, Alberta transformed the industry and the country. But from 1899 onwards, two-thirds of the company was owned by an American giant, making Imperial Oil one of the largest foreign-controlled multinationals in Canada. Imperial Standard is the first full-scale history of Imperial Oil. It illuminates Imperial's longstanding connections to Standard Oil of New Jersey, also known as Exxon Mobil. Although this relationship was often beneficial to Imperial, allowing them access to technology and capital, it also came at a cost, causing Imperial to be assailed as the embodiment of foreign control of Canada's natural resources. Graham D. Taylor draws on an extensive collection of primary sources to explore the complex relationship between the two companies. This groundbreaking history provides unprecedented insight into one of Canada's most influential oil companies as it has grown and evolved with the industry itself.

'A fast-paced, highly readable history of one of the defining companies of our time. If you're interested in Snapchat, or just plain mystified by it, you must read this book' -- Brad Stone Would you turn down three billion dollars from Mark Zuckerberg? When he was just twenty-three years old, Evan Spiegel, the brash CEO of the social network Snapchat, stunned the world when he and his co-founders walked away from a three-billion-dollar offer from Facebook: how could an app teenagers use to text dirty photos dream of a higher valuation? Was this hubris, or genius? In How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars, Billy Gallagher takes us inside the rise of one of Silicon Valley's hottest start-ups. Snapchat began as a late-night dorm room revelation before Spiegel went on to make a name for himself as a visionary CEO worth billions, linked to celebrities like Taylor Swift and his fiancee, Miranda Kerr. A fellow Stanford undergrad and fraternity brother of the company's founding trio, Billy Gallagher has covered Snapchat from the start. His inside account offers an entertaining trip through the excess and drama of the hazy early days with a professional insight into the challenges Snapchat faces as it transitions from a playful app to one of the tech industry's preeminent public companies. In the tradition of great business narratives, How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars offers the definitive account of a company whose goal is no less than to remake the future of entertainment.

The story of Tasmania's most controversial forestry giant, the corruption that gave it power and the forces that brought it down. At its peak, Gunns Ltd had a market value of $1 billion, was listed on the ASX 200, was the largest employer in the state of Tasmania and was its largest private landowner. Most of its profits came from woodchipping, mainly from clear-felled old-growth forests. A pulp mill in Tasmania's Tamar Valley was central to its expansion plans. Gunns' collapse in 2012 was a major national news story, as was the arrest of its CEO for insider trading. Quentin Beresford illuminates for the first time the dark corners of the Gunns empire and how it was embedded in an anti-democratic and corrupt system of power supported by both main parties, business and unions. Simmering opposition to Gunns and all it stood for ramped up into an environmental campaign not seen since the Franklin Dam protests. Fearless and forensic in its analysis, the book shows that Tasmania's decades-long quest to industrialise nature fails every time.

From its earliest flights in 1926, carrying mail and occasionally a solo passenger to Chicago, to its acquisition by Delta in 2010, Northwest Airlines soared to the heights of technological achievement and business innovation--and sunk to the depths of employee discord, passenger dissatisfaction, and financial bankruptcy. Its story, rich in singular successes and failures, also has the sweep of the history of American business in the twentieth century. "Non-Stop: A Turbulent History of Northwest Airlines" captures both the broad context and the intriguing details as it weaves together the accounts of individuals who gave the airline its unique character: from founder Lewis Brittin and pioneering female executive "Rosie" Stein to the CEOs who saw the company through its glory days and its final tumultuous decade.

What was it like to pilot a crippled airliner, to be in the vanguard of the new profession of stewardess, to ride in the cabin of a luxurious Stratocruiser for the first time? These are the experiences that come alive as Jack El-Hai follows Northwest from its humble beginnings to its triumph as the envy of the airline industry and then ultimately to its decline into what aggrieved passengers and employees called "Northworst."

"Non-Stop" hits the airline's high points (such as its contributions during World War II and the Korean War) and the low--D. B. Cooper's parachute getaway from a Northwest airliner in 1971 and a terrorist's disruption of the airline's last year. Touching on everything from airline food and advertising to smoking regulations and labor relations, the story of Northwest Airlines encapsulates the profound changes to business, travel, and culture that marked the twentieth century.

If you lived at Downton Abbey, you shopped at Selfridge's.
Harry Gordon Selfridge was a charismatic American who, in twenty-five years working at Marshall Field's in Chicago, rose from lowly stockboy to a partner in the business which his visionary skills had helped to create. At the turn of the twentieth century he brought his own American dream to London's Oxford Street where, in 1909, with a massive burst of publicity, Harry opened Selfridge's, England's first truly modern built-for-purpose department store. Designed to promote shopping as a sensual and pleasurable experience, six acres of floor space offered what he called "everything that enters into the affairs of daily life," as well as thrilling new luxuries--from ice-cream soda to signature perfumes. This magical emporium also featured Otis elevators, a bank, a rooftop garden with an ice-skating rink, and a restaurant complete with orchestra--all catering to customers from Anna Pavlova to Noel Coward. The store was "a theatre, with the curtain going up at nine o'clock." Yet the real drama happened off the shop floor, where Mr. Selfridge navigated an extravagant world of mistresses, opulent mansions, racehorses, and an insatiable addiction to gambling. While his gloriously iconic store still stands, the man himself would ultimately come crashing down.
The true story that inspired the Masterpiece series on PBS - "Mr. Selfridge" is a co-production of ITV Studios and Masterpiece
"Enthralling . . . an] energetic and wonderfully detailed biography."--"London Evening Standard"
"Will change your view of shopping forever."--"Vogue" (U.K.)

Winner, Alberta Historical Resources Foundation Heritage Award, Canadian Museums Association Outstanding Achievement in Publications, and Redgees Legacy AwardShortlisted, Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book PrizeRemember pearl-snap Western shirts, Scrubbies jeans, and denim jackets, George W. Groovy, Cowboy Kings, Red Straps? Take a trip down memory lane and relive the GWG story! Remember the slogans "Anything Goes," "They wear longer, because they're made stronger," and Wayne Gretzky's declaration that "I grew up in GWGs"? GWGs have been a cultural icon in Canada since the company's founding in 1911. Here, at long last, is the complete, lushly illustrated history of the Great Western Garment Company, whose products were staples for some generations and defined cool for others. This lavish book includes archival photographs, advertisements, product photos, and insights on the long history of this iconic Canadian company. Begun in Edmonton, GWG not only manufactured jeans, but also helped immigrant women support their families, becoming a model of management and labour working collaboratively. GWG eventually became the largest workwear manufacturing company in Canada, providing different styles of work and leisure clothing for men, women, and children, and for the military during both world wars. Although Levis acquired the company during the 1960s and '70s and closed the last factories in 2004, the GWG brand remains a part of pop culture. It is firmly fixed in the Canadian psyche and still holds a place in Canadian hearts.

One of Canada's most successful homegrown buisnesses, Black's Photography grew from a single store to a national, and international, chain. Robert Black, the former Vice President, weaves his own, and his family's, story into the history of the company. Beginning with his great-grandparents, Robert takes the story through the generations, imparting what each had contributed to the success of Black's. Part family history, part autobiography, and part business history, Picture Perfect is a unique look at a unique family business that rewrote the book on photography. Black and his brothers used new methods of advertising, took advantage of every innovation, did their own photofinishing, and introduced the practice of printing 4 x 6 photos, when no one else was doing it.

Knitting is a booming pastime, enjoying a resurgence of interest, spawning books, movies, a brisk online trade in wool and knitted goods -- even trade fairs. In Canada, Cottage Craft has long held a strong reputation for its fine wool, dyed to the palette of the local landscape, and the fine craftsmanship of the women who weave and knit its quality materials. Behind Cottage Craft is the story of a woman of vision and remarkable resolve. Grace Helen Mowat looked upon traditional rural crafts -- knitting, weaving, and rug hooking -- as cash crops for the straitened farm women of Charlotte County, New Brunswick. In 1911, unmarried and with limited means, she commissioned a handful of St. Andrews women to make rugs according to her designs, which were then sent to Montreal. The Arts and Crafts movement was in full swing -- the rugs sold quickly. This is the story of how Grace Helen Mowat built Cottage Craft into a burgeoning home-grown business that continues to attract customers the world over.

Part "Fast Food Nation," part "Bobos in Paradise," STARBUCKED combines investigative heft with witty cultural observation in telling the story of how the coffeehouse movement changed our everyday lives, from our evolving neighborhoods and workplaces to the ways we shop, socialize, and self-medicate.
In STARBUCKED, Taylor Clark provides an objective, meticulously reported look at the volatile issues like gentrification and fair trade that distress activists and coffee zealots alike. Through a cast of characters that includes coffee-wild hippies, business sharks, slackers, Hollywood trendsetters and more, STARBUCKED explores how America transformed into a nation of coffee gourmets in only a few years, how Starbucks manipulates psyches and social habits to snare loyal customers, and why many of the things we think we know about the coffee commodity chain are false.
""Starbucked" is ...smart cultural criticism minus any academic gobbledygook. Mr. Clark is quite funny as he dryly sends up the excess of the corporate behemoth, and Starb"u"cked is an entertaining, highly readable book....Full of cocktail-party-worthy tidbits." --Adelle Waldman, "New York Observer"