The Last of the Imperious Rich

The Last of the Imperious Rich
Author: Peter Chapman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2010-09-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1101442700

On September 11, 1844, Henry Lehman arrived in New York City on a boat from Germany. Soon after, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he and his brother Emanuel established a modest cotton brokering firm that would come to be called Lehman Brothers. On September 15, 2008, Dick Fuld, the last CEO of Lehman Brothers, filed for corporate bankruptcy amid one of the worst financial crises in American history. After 164 years, one of the largest and most respected investment banks in the world was gone, leaving everyone wondering, "How could this have happened?" Peter Chapman, an editor and writer for The Financial Times, answers this question by exploring the complete history of Lehman Brothers between those two historic Septembers. He takes us back to its early days as a cotton broker in Alabama, and then to its glory days as one of the leading corporate financiers in America. He also provides an intimate portrait of the people who ran Lehman over the decades-from Henry Lehman, the founder, to Bobbie Lehman, who led the company into the world of radio, motion pictures, and air travel in first part of the 20th century, to Dick Fuld, who allowed it to morph into a dealer of shoddy securities. Throughout his account of this imperiously rich firm, Chapman examines the impact Lehman Brothers had not only on American finance but also on American life. As a major backer of companies like Pan American Airlines, Macy's, and RKO, Lehman helped lead the country into major new industries and helped support some of its most intrepid entrepreneurs. He then shows how, starting in the 1980s, Lehman's increased focus on short-term gain investments led the firm down the dangerous path that would eventually lead to its demise. In the end, the story of Lehman Brothers is not only the story of a truly important American company but a cautionary tale of what happens when leaders lose sight of their core mission in their quest for something too good to be true. Praise for The Last of the Imperious Rich: "Thought provoking and illuminating" - The New York Times "Chapman has succeeded in holding up a mirror to America's past - and what its future might hold" - Bloomberg

The Lehman Trilogy

The Lehman Trilogy
Author: Stefano Massini
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 958
Release: 2020-06-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062940473

Basis for the 2022 'Tony Award Best Play' winner Magnificent in scope, internationally lauded, and transcendent, the novel in verse that inspired the sensational West End and Broadway play of the same name. The Lehman Trilogy follows the epic rise and fall of three generations of that infamous family and through them tells the story of American ambition and hubris. After leaving his native Bavaria, Henry Lehman arrives in America determined to make a better life. Sensing opportunity in the Deep South, he opens a textile shop in Alabama, laying the foundation for a dynasty that will come to dominate and define modern capitalism. Emanuel and his brother Mayer begin investing in anything and everything that will turn a profit, from cotton to coal to railroads to oil to airplanes—even at the expense of the very nation that forged them. Spanning three generations and 150 years, The Lehman Trilogy is a moving epic that dares to tell the story of modern capitalism through the saga of the Lehman brothers and their descendants. Surprising and exciting, brilliant and inventive, Stefano Massini’s masterpiece—like Hamilton—is a story of immigration, ambition, and success; it is the story of America itself from a daring and original perspective. Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

Moral Intelligence 2.0

Moral Intelligence 2.0
Author: Doug Lennick
Publisher: Pearson Prentice Hall
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0132486709

The best-performing companies have leaders who actively apply moral values to achieve enduring personal and organizational success. Lennick and Kiel extensively identify the moral components at the heart of the recent financial crisis, and illuminate the monetary and human costs of failed moral leadership in global finance, business and government. The authors begin by systematically defining the principles of moral intelligence and the behavioral competencies associated with them. Next, they demonstrate why sustainable optimal performance–on both an individual and organizational level–requires the development and application of superior moral and emotional competencies. Using many new examples and real case studies and new interviews with key business leaders, they identify connections between moral intelligence and higher levels of trust, engagement, retention, and innovation. Readers will find specific guidance on moral leadership in both large organizations and entrepreneurial ventures, as well as a new, practical, step-by-step plan for measuring and strengthening every component of moral intelligence–from integrity and responsibility to compassion and forgiveness. The authors also provide practical ways for readers to develop their own moral and emotional competencies.

Empire Falls

Empire Falls
Author: Richard Russo
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 498
Release: 2011-11-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307809889

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • The bestselling author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace. “Rich, humorous ... Mr. Russo’s most seductive book thus far.” —The New York Times Welcome to Empire Falls, a blue-collar town full of abandoned mills whose citizens surround themselves with the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends and neighbors and who find humor and hope in the most unlikely places, in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Richard Russo. Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles’ soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everything” includes Miles himself. Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

Hand to Mouth

Hand to Mouth
Author: Linda Tirado
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2015-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0425277976

The real-life Nickel and Dimed—the author of the wildly popular “Poverty Thoughts” essay tells what it’s like to be working poor in America. ONE OF THE FIVE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS OF THE YEAR--Esquire “DEVASTATINGLY SMART AND FUNNY. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief attempt, as a semi-undercover journalist, to survive on low-wage retail and service jobs. TIRADO IS THE REAL THING.”—Barbara Ehrenreich, from the Foreword As the haves and have-nots grow more separate and unequal in America, the working poor don’t get heard from much. Now they have a voice—and it’s forthright, funny, and just a little bit furious. Here, Linda Tirado tells what it’s like, day after day, to work, eat, shop, raise kids, and keep a roof over your head without enough money. She also answers questions often asked about those who live on or near minimum wage: Why don’t they get better jobs? Why don’t they make better choices? Why do they smoke cigarettes and have ugly lawns? Why don’t they borrow from their parents? Enlightening and entertaining, Hand to Mouth opens up a new and much-needed dialogue between the people who just don’t have it and the people who just don’t get it.

History's Lost Moments Volume V

History's Lost Moments Volume V
Author: Tom Horton
Publisher: Trafford Publishing
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2014-10-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 149074469X

Tom Hortons stories, over 400 in all, on local and Southern history, have entertained and enlightened folks for decades. As a noted history teacher, newspaper columnist, and banquet speaker, Horton has captured the attention of his listeners and readers as he recounts the unique and less well-known aspects of the Souths colorful history. You will find everything from tales of the colonial pirates who squandered gold along our coast to modern bank mergers that left shareholders out in the cold. Soon, Tom Horton plans to turn his hand to fiction - for some of old Carolinas stories still cannot be told otherwise. As the old folks always said, Sooner or later, the truth will out. Meanwhile, sit back and enjoy Volume V of Historys Lost Moments.

The Last Tycoons

The Last Tycoons
Author: William D. Cohan
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 754
Release: 2007-04-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0385521774

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A tale of vaulting ambitions, explosive feuds, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth—a story of high drama in the world of high finance. • "Rips the roof off of one of Wall Street's most storied investment banks." —Vanity Fair Wall Street investment banks move trillions of dollars a year, make billions in fees, pay their executives in the tens of millions of dollars. But even among the most powerful firms, Lazard Frères & Co. stood apart. Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were its weapons of choice. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built. William D. Cohan, himself a former high-level Wall Street banker, takes the reader into the mysterious and secretive world of Lazard and presents a compelling portrait of Wall Street through the tumultuous history of this exalted and fascinating company. Cohan deconstructs the explosive feuds between Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner, superstar investment bankers and pillars of New York society, and between the man who controlled Lazard, the inscrutable French billionaire Michel David-Weill, and his chosen successor, Bruce Wasserstein. Cohan follows Felix, the consummate adviser, as he reshapes corporate America in the 1970s and 1980s, saves New York City from bankruptcy, and positions himself in New York society and in Washington. Felix’s dreams are dashed after the arrival of Steve, a formidable and ambitious former newspaper reporter. By the mid-1990s, as Lazard neared its 150th anniversary, Steve and Felix were feuding openly. The internal strife caused by their arguments could not be solved by the imperious Michel, whose manipulative tendencies served only to exacerbate the trouble within the firm. Increasingly desperate, Michel took the unprecedented step of relinquishing operational control of Lazard to one of the few Great Men still around, Bruce Wasserstein, then fresh from selling his own M&A boutique, for $1.4 billion. Bruce’s take: more than $600 million. But it turned out Great Man Bruce had snookered Great Man Michel when the Frenchman was at his most vulnerable. The Last Tycoons is a tale of vaulting ambitions, whispered advice, worldly mistresses, fabulous art collections, and enormous wealth—a story of high drama in the world of high finance.

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense
Author: Lawrence G. McDonald
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2010-10-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0307588351

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.

Jungle Capitalists

Jungle Capitalists
Author: Peter Chapman
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2009-08-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847676863

In this powerful and gripping book, Peter Chapman shows how the pioneering example of the banana importer United Fruit set the precedent for the institutionalized greed of today's multinational companies. From the business's 19th Century beginnings in the jungles of Costa Rica, via the mass-marketing of the banana as the original fast food, United Fruit's involvement in bloody coups in Guatemala and El Salvador, the mid-1970s and the spectacular suicide on Park Avenue of the company's chairman, from its bullying business practices to its covert links to the US government, United Fruit blazed the trail of global capitalism through the 20th Century. Chapman weaves a dramatic tale of big business, lies and power to show how one company pioneered the growth of globalization and - in doing so - has helped farm the banana to the point of extinction.

A History of Leadership

A History of Leadership
Author: Morgen Witzel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2019-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1351666495

The evolution of leadership into a widely accepted concept occurred without any shared understanding and acceptance of its meaning and relevance in contemporary society. Why do some people become leaders? What is the source and legitimacy of leadership power? This book journeys into the heart of the relationship between leaders and followers, the social space and the arena where both contest and collaboration take place and leadership itself is played out. In the book, Morgen Witzel moves beyond traditional traits and skills framing, offering a fresh, historical analysis that involves many different actors with different motives and needs. By analysing the evolution of power relationships, the book analyses the interactions around how power is used and control is bargained for to illuminate the centrepiece of leadership. A wide-ranging history of a slippery subject, this book provides students, scholars and reflective practitioners with an empirical, historical base on which to test their own ideas and experiences.