The gripping story of Helena Rubinstein, Eugne Schueller, and the dark side of the beauty business they helped to create Helena Rubinstein and L'Oral's Eugne Schueller both started out in the beauty business during the first years of the twentieth century, and, by the time World War II broke out, had come to dominate it. However, their motivations could not have been more different. Rubinstein, a Polish Jew, claimed the world of paid work for women, and working women's enthusiasm for her products made her the first self-made female millionaire. Schueller, a French conservative in the Henry Ford mold, thought women belonged in the home, and during the Nazi Occupation he used his company as a source of cash to buy economic and political influence.Schueller eventually won the long fight for supremacy: in 1988 his company swallowed Rubinstein's. But the victory cost him his reputation when, in the wake of the takeover, he was exposed as a Nazi collaborator. Deepening the scandal, his wartime activities were shown to have been abetted and condoned by a cadre of young men who, by the time the news broke, had scaled the peaks of wealth and power in postwar France.By then Schueller and Rubinstein were both long dead. But cultural historian and biographer Ruth Brandon argues that the battle they began continues to this day. She examines their conflict to ask important contemporary questions about beauty standards and the often murky intersection of individual political aims and the role of business. Filled with remarkable twists, turns, and larger-than-life characters, Ugly Beauty is a riveting true story about what lies beneath the flawless exterior of the cosmetics industry.

Why do some projects deliver under budget and ahead of schedule, while others cost more and take longer than expectedMore important, which products work better: the quick and thrifty or the slow and expensive?In a story-filled blend of quirky pop culture and practical engineering insight, Dan Ward's F.I.R.E. answers those questions and more. Ward's extensive research and firsthand experience show how the world's top technologists consistently deliver best-in-class results on shoestring budgets and cannonball schedules, and using skeleton crews.This remarkable book will make you laugh, make you think, and equip you to leverage the power of constraints. Discover the secrets of F.I.R.E. and learn how to:Build strategies for speed that enhance accountability and ensure your products are well aligned with the market's needs.Design your organizations, products, and processes with thrift in mind, solving problems with intellectual capital, not financial capital.Unleash the power of small budgets and small teams, using short schedules, short meetings, and short documents.Streamline your designs and cut through unnecessary, unproductive layers of bureaucracy.But this is not just a book about how to win. With unflinching candor, Ward shows how the F.I.R.E. method, even when followed wisely and well, can result in a flop. Taking a deep look at several negative outcomes, he shows how to make failures optimal rather than epic.F.I.R.E. provides strategic concepts for leaders, decision-making principles for managers, and practical tools for people working on anything from spacecraft and fighter jets to websites and children's toys. Technology professionals and curious amateurs alike will come away with a deeper understanding of effective product design. Plus, there's a funny story about a dishwasher that just may change the way you buy major appliances.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNAHow can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatnessThe Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiorityAnd if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to greatThe Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How greatAfter the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was differentWhy did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only goodOver five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. Some of the key concepts discerned in the study, comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

In 2004, Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, the world's leading foundation for entrepreneurship, published a groundbreaking essay with a radical premise: that Americans literally have no conception of the secret that truly underlies our economic success, and that for the United States to survive and continue to lead the world's economy, it is imperative we learn to understand and employ that secret.The secret that has led the American economy to become the world's strongestOur unparalleled skill as entrepreneurs. As Schramm compellingly shows in this sweeping manifesto, entrepreneurship alone not anything else can give America the necessary leverage to remain an economic superpower. Not technology, since everyone now has the same technology, or access to it. Not education we are years behind other nations in this area. Not basic manufacturing, long since moved overseas from the United States. And not capital markets, now truly global entities.Drawing on detailed research conducted by the Kauffman Foundation and on his decades of experience as an entrepreneur himself and as a leader and mentor to other entrepreneurs, Schramm persuasively demonstrates in detail what this entrepreneurial imperative means for the way we run universities and foundations, lead companies, make personal job decisions, and even conduct our foreign affairs. The Entrepreneurial Imperative will change not only the way our government, corporations, and nonprofits operate, but also our day-to-day lives as working Americans.

Rick Pitino is a basketball icon: the only coach in college history to lead three different schools to the Final Four, the winner of the 1996 NCAA championship, the owner of a sparkling career record, a bestselling author, and a lock for the College Basketball Hall of Fame. Yet Pitino's journey has not been without life-altering adversity: He's experienced profound personal and professional losses. In 2001, after three losing seasons as coach and president of the Boston Celtics, Pitino resigned, walking away from the $23 million left in his contract. And while recovering from the only breakdown in his extraordinary basketball career, Pitino who had previously suffered the devastating loss of his infant son, Daniel endured additional tragedies: His brother-in-law and best friend Billy Minardi, a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, perished in the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11, less than a year after another brother-in-law had been fatally struck by a taxi. Pitino writes, "From that point on, my life changed forever. Nothing will ever be the same."This realization gave Pitino a new perspective. With it, the innovative leader felt the freedom to act even more dynamically than he ever had in the past. Returning to college basketball, he has rebuilt and revitalized the storied program at Louisville, guiding the Cardinals to a history-making Final Four appearance in 2005 that stamped him the only coach in history to take three schools that far. And in 2008, he rallied an injury-plagued Louisville team from a disappointing start and led it to the Elite Eight, setting the stage for greater success to come.The failures and tragedies he recounts make this book unique. More than just a recitation of what works and why, it's about how to succeed after you've failed; how to pick yourself up after being knocked down; and how to reframe yourself and see the world in a new light. This is a comeback story, a manual for overcoming life's difficulties. Pitino has experienced success as an author with his tremendously popular books Success Is a Choice and Lead to Succeed, but in Rebound Rules: The Art of Success 2.0, he's crafted a book that's more deeply personal, more inspiring, more practical, and more powerful than any he's written before.

A road-tested formula for improving your performance, from one of the business world's most successful and productive executives. Robert C. Pozen taught a full course load at Harvard Business School while serving as the full-time chairman of a global financial-services firm. He's written six books and hundreds of articles, raised a family with his wife of more than four decades, and served on many boards of local charities and public companies. Pozen is a prince of productivity, a man who has worked smarter and faster than almost everyone around him for more than forty years.In Extreme Productivity, Pozen reveals the secrets to workplace productivity and high performance. His book is for anyone feeling overwhelmed by an existing workload facing myriad competing demands and multiple time-sensitive projects. Offering antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and a backlog of e-mails, Extreme Productivity explains how to determine your highest priorities and match them with how you actually spend your time. Pozen shows that in order to be truly productive, professionals must make a critical shift in their mind-set: from hours worked to results produced. He helps people at all stages of their careers read, write, and make presentations quicker and more effectively. He provides professionals with practical tips on how to efficiently use their time in the office while leading full and productive personal lives as well.

From Randi Zuckerberg, social media and technology expert and former marketing executive at Facebook, comes a welcome, essential guide to understanding social media and technology and how they influence and inform our lives online and off.Technology and social media have changed, enhanced, and complicated every facet of our lives from how we interact with our friends to how we elect presidents, from how we manage our careers to how we support important causes, from how we find love to how we raise our children.The technology revolution is not going away. We can't hide from it or pretend that it's not changing our lives in a thousand different ways. So how do we dealIn Dot Complicated, Randi Zuckerberg shows us. Through first hand accounts of her time at Facebook and beyond, where Zuckerberg witnessed this remarkable shift, she details the opportunities and obstacles, problems and solutions, to this new online reality. In the process, she establishes rules to bring some much-needed order and clarity to our connected, complicated, and constantly changing lives online.The Internet, social networks, and smartphones,Zuckerberg writes, have given us amazing new tools and ways of communicating, collaborating, and living with one another. We can use new technology to understand and solve some very old challenges that individuals and communities around the world have faced since long before Facebook, or anything like it, existed.Invaluable, timely, and engaging, Dot Complicated reveals how to make it through your life online in one piece from the etiquette of unfriending and the power of crowdsourcing to the perils of photo tags and the importance of teaching your kids how to be tech savvy.

Filling your ranks with exceptional employees has never been more important or more challenging. Hiring People, a comprehensive and essential resource for any manager on the run, shows you how.Learn to: Attract, find, and retain top performers Conduct an effective talent search Get the most out of interviews Craft an irresistible offer Use recruiters effectively Build a referral network you can depend on The Collins Best Practices guides offer new and seasoned managers the essential information they need to achieve more, both personally and professionally. Designed to provide tried-and-true advice from the world's most influential business minds, they feature practical strategies and tips to help you get ahead.

When industry giants such as GE, Toyota, and Sharp and investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are making multibillion-dollar investments in clean technology, the message is clear. Developing clean technologies is no longer a social issue championed by environmentalists; it's a moneymaking enterprise moving solidly into the business mainstream. In fact, as the economy faces unprecedented challenges from high energy prices, resource shortages, and global environmental and security threats, clean tech technologies designed to provide superior performance at a lower cost while creating significantly less waste than conventional offerings promises to be the next engine of economic growth.In The Clean Tech Revolution, authors Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder identify the major forces that have pushed clean tech from back-to-the-earth utopian dream to its current revolution among the inner circles of corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street trading floors, and in government offices around the globe. By highlighting eight major clean-tech sectors solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, the smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration they uncover how investors, entrepreneurs, and individuals can profit from this next wave of technological innovation. Pernick and Wilder shine the spotlight on the winners among technologies, companies, and regions that are likely to reap the greatest benefits from clean tech and they show you why the time to act is now.Groundbreaking and authoritative, The Clean Tech Revolution is the must-read book to understand and profit from the clean technologies that are reshaping our fast-changing world.

Based on a groundbreaking study, analysing data on 200 management practices gathered over a 10 year period. Reveals the effectiveness of the 4+2 practices (4 primary and 2 of 4 possible secondary) practices that really matter the ones that, if followed rigorously, ensure sustained business success. With a new introduction by the authors. With hundreds of well known management practices and pre*ions promoted by consultants and available to business, which are really effective and contribute to the growth and continued success of a companyWhich do little or nothingBased on the "Evergreen Project," a massive, 5 year study involving the business school faculties of ten universities, the authors set out to find the management practices that truly promote long term growth and success. Their findings will revolutionize the art and practice of business management.The book shows that there are essentially six management practices that all successful companies must master simultaneously. They range from focusing on a strategy of growth to maintaining the depth and quality of human talent in the organization.

Dig deep and you will find the most compelling argument for working together: Happiness. In business there are always unique individual achievers, but pull down the veil and you'll often find someone alongside them. Michael Eisner does just that in Working Together. Using his own collaboration with Frank Wells at Disney as a launching point for examining other famously successful partnerships, Eisner offers us an intimate and deeply personal look at some of the most rewarding business partnerships, uncovering what makes them tick and offering unconventional wisdom and unexpected insights. In this essential book for businesspeople everywhere, Eisner shines a light on these startlingly long-lasting and enriching partnerships, weaving together ten separate narratives from investment gurus to entertainment impresarios, from fashion designers to big-box retailers into a larger story about the true nature of achievement in life and in business.Ten Stories, Ten Magical Partnerships:Michael D. Eisner and Frank Wells (Disney)Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway)Bill and Melinda Gates (The Gates Foundation)Brian Grazer and Ron Howard (Imagine Entertainment)Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti (Valentino)Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell (Studio 54)Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus (The Home Depot)Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken (restaurateurs)Joe Torre and Don Zimmer (New York Yankees)John Angelo and Michael Gordon (finance) Collectively, the stories you're about to read form a blueprint for building partnerships that matter, that last, and that allow each of us to do our very best work.

After years of TV and radio coverage, gallons of newsprint ink, and billions of scholarly opinions on the blogosphere, do we really understand the financial engineering that brought the global economy to the brink?The terms and acronyms that make up the language of economics are enough to cause the layman's head to start spinning: leverage, securitization, futures, options, MBS, CDS, CDO. Luckily, we have veteran journalist Paddy Hirsch senior producer at APM's Marketplace and acknowledged Whiteboard Guru to help us crack the code. In Man vs. Markets, he proves that it's not impossible to understand what's going on in the glass-and-steel canyons of Wall Street; that most international financial transactions aren't all that different from those taking place every day in stores, in car dealerships, even on the playgrounds of Main Street.BondsThey're basically loans. FuturesYou probably used one when you ordered your Thanksgiving turkey last year. OptionsEver bought a fully transferable, returnable airline ticketThat's pretty much the same thing.With a winning combination of acquired wisdom, common sense, market savvy, and an outrageous sense of humor, Hirsch clearly explains and defines the instruments that power our financial system and very nearly caused its demise. Clever, insightful, hugely educational, and always entertaining, Man vs. Markets translates the often confusing language of finance, enabling every one of us to truly comprehend what makes the markets tick.

Newly revised and updated, Leadership and the One Minute Manager teaches leaders the world-renowned method of developing self-reliance in those they manage: Situational Leadership II.In Leadership and the One Minute Manager, you'll learn why adapting leadership styles to team members based on their key goals and tasks is so important and why knowing when to delegate, support, or direct is critical. By consistently using Situational Leadership II's proven model and powerful techniques, leaders can develop and retain competent, motivated, confident employees. This remarkable, easy-to-follow book is a priceless guide to personalized leadership that elicits the best performance from your team and the best bottom line for any business.

Meet the men and women whose deeply personal philanthropy is dramatically changing the way we think about giving There are 8.6 million millionaires in the United States, and these numbers are set to rise in what will be the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. As $41 trillion dollars (or over three times the national GDP) moves from the World War II generation to their baby- boomer children over the next couple of decades, it will become imperative that the beneficiaries of this wealth—even those not joining the ranks of the superrich—begin thinking about philanthropy, perhaps for the first time in their adult lives. Here they will find the personal journeys of the most successful givers of their generation. This new generation of wealth has already begun to change the face of philanthropy and to reshape the entire nonprofit sector. In Be the Change, bestselling author Lisa Endlich presents eleven compelling profiles of this twenty-first century generosity. Through candid, revealing, and often surprising interviews, readers will venture into the hearts and minds of the top names in philanthropy today—men and women who have chosen to use their immense riches and influence to meaningfully improve the lives of others in the most dramatic ways. These intimate conversations include in-depth interviews with: ?Melinda Gates, one of the driving forces behind the largest philanthropic organization the world has ever seen; ?Bob and Suzanne Wright, he's the former vice chairman of GE and longtime head of NBC Universal and their Autism Speaks has brought awareness of autism onto the national and international stage; ?Paul Tudor Jones, founder of Tudor Investments and the Robin Hood Foundation; ?Peter Bloom, founding chairman of the groundbreaking DonorsChoose.org. From Connie Duckworth, a former Goldman Sachs partner, who brings steady employment to Afghani women and education to them and their children, to Johann Olav Koss, an Olympic gold medalist who now strives to give children in the direst circumstances the chance to play, these philanthropists demonstrate that giving doesn't begin or end with a signed check. They grant Endlich exclusive access to the stories of how they learned from early failures and developed a personal, sustainable way of giving, and they also share the catalyzing moment when they saw a problem so heartbreaking they simply could not turn away. In doing so, these new philanthropists offer valuable lessons—ones that will inspire readers to start giving, keep giving, and become the change they want to see in the world.

The world has changed in the seventeen years since the controversial initial publication of Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, a stirring treatise about the perceived antagonism between ecology and business. Yet Hawken's impassioned argument that business both causes the most egregious abuses of the environment and, crucially, holds the most potential for solving our sustainability problems is more relevant and resonant than ever.Containing updated and revised material for a new audience, The Ecology of Commerce presents a compelling vision of the restorative (rather than destructive) economy we must create, centered on eight imperatives: Reduce energy carbon emissions 80 percent by 2030 and total natural resource usage 80 percent by 2050. Provide secure, stable, and meaningful employment to people everywhere. Be self-organizing rather than regulated or morally mandated. Honor market principles. Restore habitats, ecosystems, and societies to their optimum. Rely on current income. Be fun and engaging, and strive for an aesthetic outcome.

Change or Die. What if you were given that choiceIf you didn't, your time would end soon a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change matters mostThis is the question Alan Deutschman poses in Change or Die, which began as a sensational cover story by the same title for Fast Company. Deutschman concludes that although we all have the ability to change our behavior, we rarely ever do. From patients suffering from heart disease to repeat offenders in the criminal justice system to companies trapped in the mold of unsuccessful business practices, many of us could prevent ominous outcomes by simply changing our mindset.A powerful book with universal appeal, Change or Die deconstructs and debunks age-old myths about change and empowers us with three critical keys relate, repeat, and reframe to help us make important positive changes in our lives. Explaining breakthrough research and progressive ideas from a wide selection of leaders in medicine, science, and business (including Dr. Dean Ornish, Mimi Silbert of the Delancey Street Foundation, Bill Gates, Daniel Boulud, and many others), Deutschman demonstrates how anyone can achieve lasting, revolutionary changes that are positive, attainable, and absolutely vital.

Your business can take a lesson from the American military's fighter pilots. At Mach 2, the instrument panel of an F-15 is screaming out information, the horizon is a blur, the wingman is occupied, the jet is hanging on the edge -- and yet fighter pilots routinely handle the stress. It's not much different in today's unforgiving business world. One slipup and your company is bankrupt before your employees know what hit them.What works on the squadron level for F-15 pilots will also work for your marketing team, sales force, or research and development group. By analyzing the work environment and attacking its centers of gravity in parallel, you'll begin to utilize the Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle that will rapidly impact your business's future success. U.S. fighter squadrons have been using this program for nearly fifty years to reduce their mistake rate, cut casualties and equipment losses, and rack up an envious victory record. Now, with Flawless Execution, your business can too.

Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popularWall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. Ariely applies this scientific analysis of the human condition in his “Ask Ariely” Q & A column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he responds to readers who write in with personal conundrums ranging from the serious to the curious: What can you do to stay calm when you’re playing the volatile stock market What’s the best way to get someone to stop smoking How can you maximize the return on your investment at an all-you-can-eat buffet Is it possible to put a price on the human soul Can you ever rationally justify spending thousands of dollars on a RolexIn Ask Ariely, a broad variety of economic, ethical, and emotional dilemmas are explored and addressed through text and images. Using their trademark insight and wit, Ariely and Haefeli help us reflect on how we can reason our way through external and internal challenges. Readers will laugh, learn, and most importantly gain a new perspective on how to deal with the inevitable problems that plague our daily life.

More than ten years after his first bestselling book The EMyth changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of small business owners Michael Gerber trepreneur author and speaker extraordinaire res the next salvo in his highly successful EMyth Revolution. Drawing on lessons learned from working with more than 15000 small medium sized and very large organisations Gerber has discovered the truth behind why management doesn't work and what to do about it. Unearthing the arbitrary origins of commonly held doctrines such as the omniscience of leader (Emperor) and the most widely embraced myth of all EMyth Manager offers a fresh provocative alternative to management as we know it. It explores why every manager must take charge of his own life reconcile his own personal vision with that of the organisation and develop an entrepreneurial mind set to achieve true success.

Chronicling the rise and fall of the efficient market theory and the century-long making of the modern financial industry, Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market is as much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk. The book brings to life the people and ideas that forged modern finance and investing, from the formative days of Wall Street through the Great Depression and into the financial calamity of today. It's a tale that features professors who made and lost fortunes, battled fiercely over ideas, beat the house in blackjack, wrote bestselling books, and played major roles on the world stage. It's also a tale of Wall Street's evolution, the power of the market to generate wealth and wreak havoc, and free market capitalism's war with itself.The efficient market hypothesis long part of academic folklore but codified in the 1960s at the University of Chicago has evolved into a powerful myth. It has been the maker and loser of fortunes, the driver of trillions of dollars, the inspiration for index funds and vast new derivatives markets, and the guidepost for thousands of careers. The theory holds that the market is always right, and that the decisions of millions of rational investors, all acting on information to outsmart one another, always provide the best judge of a stock's value. That myth is crumbling.Celebrated journalist and columnist Fox introduces a new wave of economists and scholars who no longer teach that investors are rational or that the markets are always right. Many of them now agree with Yale professor Robert Shiller that the efficient markets theory represents one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought. Today the theory has given way to counterintuitive hypotheses about human behavior, psychological models of decision making, and the irrationality of the markets. Investors overreact, underreact, and make irrational decisions based on imperfect data. In his landmark treatment of the history of the world's markets, Fox uncovers the new ideas that may come to drive the market in the century ahead.

How does your company define creativityOr doescreativity define your companyIn this remarkable book, Jerry Hirshberg, founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI), distills his experience as leader of the world's hotbed of automotive innovation and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity.In The Creative Priority Hirshberg weaves together enlightening real-world anecdotes with the story of NDI's genesis to illustrate eleven interlocking strategies that came to define NDI's creative priority. Richly illustrated with NDI's elegant designs and sketched, The Creative Priority is at once a compelling narrative, a rich store of hands-on experience, and a grab bag of breakthrough insights that can help your business perform its most vital function.