Business Memoirs

A.G. Gaston, the poor grandson of slaves, was born in the Deep South in 1892. Over the course of his extraordinary life, he amassed a fortune of over $130 million and a vast business empire. The story of his remarkable life is written with eloquence and grace by his niece, an Emmy¿ Award-winning journalist and her daughter, who holds degrees from Yale and Harvard.

Paul Van Doren is the founder of Vans - the shoe company beloved by skateboarders, creatives, and fans everywhere for its laid-back, colorful SoCal vibe, and famous for its people-oriented company culture. How did Van Doren establish a family shoe business that evolved into a globally recognized brand with annual revenue of more than four billion dollars? A blue-collar kid with no higher education and zero retail experience, Van Doren leveraged a knack for numbers, a genius for efficiency, and the know-how to make a great canvas tennis shoe into an all-American success story.

The rags-to-riches story of one of America's wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian - the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business. Kerkorian combined the courage of a World War II pilot, the fortitude of a scrappy boxer, the cunning of an inscrutable poker player, and an unmatched genius for making deals.

The New Tycoons: Inside the Trillion Dollar Private Equity Industry That Owns Everything takes the listener behind the scenes of these firms: their famous billionaire founders, the overlapping stories of their creation and evolution, and the outsized ambitions that led a group of clever bankers from small shops operating in a corner of Wall Street into powerhouse titans of capital. This is the story of the money and the men who handle it.

Only a handful of people embody the legacy of hip-hop and entrepreneurship like Jay Z. A modern-day King Midas, everything he touches - sports bars, streaming services, record labels, and cognac - turns to gold. How exactly did he do it? Forbes senior editor Zack O'Malley Greenburg reveals the story of Jay Z's legendary rise from the Marcy Projects of Brooklyn to stages and corner offices worldwide. He draws on more than 100 interviews with those who knew Jay Z from the beginning.

How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford's outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism.

National icon Willie Nelson has evolved over the years from country music outlaw swimming against a whiskey river to a Zen-like figure of wisdom and contentment. In this autobiographical collection of life advice, The Tao of Willie, one of America's truest hearts reveals the spiritual and practical lessons learned from decades of hard knocks and good bounces.

Whitey Basson is hailed as a genius by his peers. He became a legend when he bought OK Bazaars for the sum of a single Rand. In this authorised biography, award-winning financial journalist Niel Joubert pieces together the fascinating story of how Basson grew Shoprite from eight small stores into the largest retailer in Africa.

In The Rule, legendary trader and hedge fund pioneer Larry Hite recounts his working-class upbringing in Brooklyn as a dyslexic, partially blind kid who was anything but a model student - and how he went on to found and run Mint Investment Management Company, one of the most profitable and largest quantitative hedge funds in the world.

In Wenger: My Life and Lessons in Red and White, world-renowned and revolutionary soccer coach Arsène Wenger finally tells his own story for the very first time. Wenger opens up about his life, sharing principles for success on and off the field with lessons on leadership, personal development, and management.

Soul in the Game is a book of inspiring stories and hard-won lessons on how to live a meaningful life, crafted by investor and writer Vitaliy Katsenelson. Drawing from the lives of classical composers, ancient Stoics, and contemporary thinkers, Katsenelson weaves together a tapestry of practical wisdom that has helped him overcome his greatest challenges: in work, family, identity, health—and in dealing with success, failure, and more.

The inspirational story of a former Microsoft executive’s quest to build libraries around the world and share the love of books What’s happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of 35, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world", he strove to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector - and succeeded spectacularly.

We've all read about the experts: the artists, the scientists, the engineers - that special group of people known as Imagineers for The Walt Disney Company. But who are they? How did they join the team? What is it like to spend a day in their shoes?

As the coach during professional football’s most storied era, Tom Landry transformed the gridiron from a no-holds-barred battlefield to the highly-technical chess match it is today. With his trademark fedora and stoic facade, he was a man of faith and few words, for twenty-nine years guiding “America’s Team” from laughingstock to well-oiled machine, with an unprecedented twenty consecutive winning seasons and two Super Bowl titles.

Called “one of the most disruptive brands in beauty” by Forbes, Glossier revolutionized the beauty industry with its sophisticated branding and unique approach to influencer marketing, almost instantly making the company a juggernaut with rabid fans. It also taught a generation of business leaders how to talk to Millennial and Gen Z customers and build a cult following online.

The National Football League's current dominance has obscured how professional football got its start. In The League, John Eisenberg reveals that Art Rooney, George Halas, Tim Mara, George Preston Marshall, and Bert Bell took an immense risk by investing in the professional game. At that time, the sport barely registered on the national scene. The five owners succeeded only because at critical junctures in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, each sacrificed the short-term success of his team for the longer-term good of the League.

What matters most to you? Should you focus on earning a living, pursuing your passions, or devoting yourself to the causes that inspire you? The surprising truth is that you don’t have to choose—and that you’ll find more success if you don’t. That’s the breakthrough message of the TOMS One for One movement. You don’t have to be rich to give back and you don’t have to retire to spend every day doing what you love. You can find profit, passion, and meaning all at once—right now.

In 2012, on his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, an improvised explosive device left Dan Crenshaw's right eye destroyed and his left blinded. Only through the careful hand of his surgeons, and what doctors called a miracle, did Crenshaw's left eye recover partial vision. And yet, he persevered, completing two more deployments. Why? There are certain stories we tell ourselves about the hardships we face—we can become paralyzed by adversity or we can adapt and overcome. We can be fragile or we can find our fortitude. Crenshaw delivers a set of lessons to help you do just that.

From 1914 to 1916, Ernest Shackleton and his men survived the wreck of their ship Endurance, crushed in the Antarctic ice, stranded 1,200 miles from civilization with no means of communication and no hope for rescue. When the ice began to break up, Shackleton set out to save them all on his heroic 800-mile-trip across the frigid South Atlantic, in little more than a rowboat.

In life, moments arise when you have to decide your next move. When choosing whether to accept a new job, purchase a house, attend a school, or start a relationship, how do you settle on which direction to take? Trey Gowdy has found that most consequential decisions boil down to three simple options: start, stay, or leave.