Tag Archives: Business

In My Hands Today…

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Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World – Tom Wright, Bradley Hope

An epic true-tale of hubris and greed from two Pulitzer-finalist Wall Street Journal reporters, Billion Dollar Whale reveals how a young social climber pulled off one of the biggest financial heists in history–right under the nose of the global financial industry–exposing the shocking secret nexus of elite wealth, banking, Hollywood, and politics.

The dust had yet to settle on the global financial crisis in 2009 when an unlikely Wharton grad was setting in motion a fraud of unprecedented gall and magnitude–one that would come to symbolize the next great threat to the global financial system.

Billion Dollar Whale will become a classic, harrowing parable about the financial world in the twenty-first century.

In My Hands Today…

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House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company – Eva Dou

On December 1, 2018, Meng Wanzhou, daughter of Ren Zhengfei, founder and CEO of China’s most powerful company, Huawei Technologies, was detained at the request of U.S. authorities as she prepared to board a flight out of Vancouver, Canada. The detention of Huawei’s female scion set the U.S.-China trade skirmish on fire – and, for the first time, revealed the Ren family’s prominence in Beijing’s power structure.

In The Listening State, acclaimed Washington Post reporter Eva Dou exposes the untold story of the rise of Ren Zhengfei and the mysterious family dynasty at the center of Huawei, whose connections to state apparatus reveal a deeper truth about China’s surveillance web and its global ambitions. Through its technologies, Huawei has helped solidify and enforce China’s growing police state, in which outspoken entrepreneurs like Jack Ma have been silenced, tycoons have disappeared, and executives must put patriotism above profit.

Based on over a decade of on-the-ground reporting and an astonishing trove of confidential documents never published in English, The Listening State paints an epic story of familial and political intrigue that shines a clarifying light on how business and government work together in an authoritarian state, and how companies fit into China’s international ambitions under Xi Jinping.

The story of Ren Zhengfei and Huawei exposes the human face of China’s modern security state and gets to the heart of the central questions of the U.S.-China trade How did these turbocharged Chinese companies emerge? Who really controls them? And what does China’s growing surveillance web mean for the Chinese people – and for the rest of the world?

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Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women – Vanda Krefft

A fun and fascinating social history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School, which from the 1910s to the 1960s, trained women for executive secretary positions but surreptitiously was instilling the self-confidence and strategic know-how necessary for them to claim equality, power, and authority in the wider world.

It’s a safe bet that most of the secretaries on the TV series Mad Men would have attended the Katharine Gibbs School in New York City. The iconic institution was in its heyday synonymous with supplying secretaries—always properly attired in heels, ladylike hats, and white gloves—to male executives. In Expect Great Things! Vanda Krefft turns the notion of a “Gibbs girl” on its head, showing us that while the school was getting women who could type 120 words per minute into the C-suite, its more subversive mission was to get them out of the secretarial pool to assume positions of power on the other side of the desk. And Gibbs graduates did just that, paving the way for 21st-century women to succeed in any profession they choose.

Katharine Gibbs was one her own success stories. She started her school when, as a 46-year-old widow, she was left near-broke with two young sons. The school taught typing and stenography but Gibbs also hired accomplished professors from elite colleges to teach academic subjects—it was a well-rounded education that produced early feminists ready to tackle the sexism of their era. “Expect great things!” was her motto and her philosophy. Within a decade she’d opened schools in three elegant locations. With nostalgic period photographs throughout, Expect Great Things! takes us back to Katie Gibbs’s life and tells the stories of the women she influenced. We meet Gibbs graduates who worked for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe. Others forged pathfinding roles as an Emmy-winning television star, a women’s rights advisor to four U.S. presidents, a writer of Wonder Woman comic books, the head of the Women’s Marines, a best-selling young adult author, and a U.S. Ambassador.

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Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism – Sarah Wynn-Williams

From trips on private jets and encounters with world leaders to shocking accounts of misogyny and double standards behind the scenes, this searing memoir exposes both the personal and the political fallout when unfettered power and a rotten company culture take hold. In a gripping and often absurd narrative where a few people carelessly hold the world in their hands, this eye-opening memoir reveals what really goes on among the global elite.

Sarah Wynn-Williams tells the wrenching but fun story of Facebook, mapping its rise from stumbling encounters with juntas to Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction when he learned of Facebook’s role in Trump’s election. She experiences the challenges and humiliations of working motherhood within a pressure cooker of a workplace, all while Sheryl Sandberg urges her and others to “lean in.”

Careless People is a deeply personal account of why and how things have gone so horribly wrong in the past decade—told in a sharp, candid, and utterly disarming voice. A deep, unflinching look at the role that social media has assumed in our lives, Careless People reveals the truth about the leaders of Facebook: how the more power they grasp, the less responsible they become and the consequences this has for all of us.

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No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson – Gardiner Harris

One day in 2004, Gardiner Harris, early for a flight, sat down at an airport bar and started talking to the woman on the bar stool beside him. She was a drug sales rep for Johnson & Johnson, and her horrific story about unethical sales practices and the devastating impact they’d had on her family fundamentally changed the nature of how Harris covered the company—and the entire pharmaceutical industry—for The New York Times. His subsequent investigations and ongoing research since that conversation led to new federal laws and ultimately to No More Tears, a blistering exposé of a trusted American institution and the largest healthcare conglomerate in the world.

Harris takes us light years away from the company’s image as the child-friendly “baby company” as he uncovers reams of evidence showing decades of deceitful and dangerous corporate practices that have threatened the lives of millions. He covers multiple disasters: lies and cover-ups regarding baby powder’s link to cancer; the surprising dangers of Tylenol; a criminal campaign to sell dangerous anti-psychotics to children; a popular drug for cancer patients that increases the risk of tumor growth. Deceptive marketing efforts that accelerated opioid addictions rival even those of the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. All told, Johnson & Johnson’s products have helped cause drug crises that have contributed to the deaths of as many as two million people and counting.

Filled with shocking, infuriating, but utterly necessary revelations, No More Tears is a landmark work of investigative journalism that lays bare the deeply rooted corruption behind the image of babies bathing with a smile.