Corporate America

The fifth edition of The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America continues a 25-year tradition of collating Warren Buffett's philosophy in a historic collaboration between Mr. Buffett and Prof. Lawrence Cunningham. As the book Buffett autographs most, its popularity and longevity attest to the widespread appetite for this unique compilation of Mr. Buffett’s thoughts that is at once comprehensive, non-repetitive, and digestible.

Twenty-one years after its incorporation and 16 years after its stock peak, Yahoo sold for 96% less than its value on January 3, 2000, when it had closed at an all-time high of $118.75 per share, resulting in a market capitalization of $120 billion. Wall Street valued Yahoo!, at that time in business less than six years, higher than it did Disney, News Corporation, and Comcast combined. Yahoo!'s story is one of missed strategies, failed opportunities, and poor execution. 

Arguments about taxation are among the most heated - no other topic is as influential to the role of government and the distribution of costs and benefits in America. But while understanding of our tax system is of vital importance, the complexity can create confusion. Two of America's leading authorities on taxes, Leonard E. Burman and Joel Slemrod, bring clarity in this concise explanation of how our tax system works, how it affects people and businesses, and how it might be improved.

An accurate picture of the LGBTQ rights movement's achievements is incomplete without this surprising history of how corporate America joined the cause. At a time when the LGBTQ movement is facing considerable political backlash, The Queering of Corporate America complicates the narrative of corporate conservatism and provides insights into the future legal, political, and cultural implications of this unexpected relationship.

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

The American economy is strong in large part because nobody believes that America would ever default on its debt. Yet in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt did just that, when in a bid to pull the country out of depression, he depreciated the US dollar in relation to gold, effectively annulling all debt contracts. American Default is the story of this forgotten chapter in America's history. 

In Catch Me if You Can, Frank W. Abagnale recounted his youthful career as a master imposter and forger. In The Art of the Steal, Abagnale tells the remarkable story of how he parlayed his knowledge of cons and scams into a successful career as a consultant on preventing financial foul play—while showing you how to identify and outsmart perpetrators of fraud.

Arthur Levitt was the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. For years, he attempted to regulate accounting firms, corporate reporting, and brokerages, but the political cost was so high that he had to resign. Now, as a free agent, he goes to bat for the common investor and tells it like it is. He tells us how investors today are being fed lies and distortions.

Lloyd Constantine began his career in legal services, representing impoverished clients in civil rights and constitutional cases. Decades later, he would make headlines for representing retailers and consumers against a cartel that undermined one of the fundamental tenets of commerce in America: competition. A man who thrives on competition himself, Constantine now gives us the insider's story on the biggest antitrust lawsuit in history - a case that pitted his small firm against financial-industry giants Visa and MasterCard, along with Clifford-Chance, the largest law firm in the world.

The Board Game presents the undeniable case for having more women corporate directors at the decision-making tables of America's public companies. Fifty-eight women directors tell how they won their first board seats. From her executive-search perspective, author Betsy Berkhemer-Credaire gives valuable advice to women at all career stages - so YOU, your sisters, your mothers, and your daughters will have a chance to win The Board Game.

In today’s chaotic world, where the multiplication of information sources creates competing narratives, credibility is the key to winning the war of ideas. This is the reason why governments and corporations resort to astroturfing - creation of ostensibly grassroots movements set up to advance political agendas and commercial campaigns. The democratization of information and polarization of politics offer a perfect storm.

In 1955, as a result of a secret agreement reached between the Eisenhower Administration and a German breakaway group in Antarctica, a transnational corporate space program began to emerge. The secret infusion of personnel and resources from US military contractors into Antarctica allowed this transnational corporate program to steadily grow into a major space power, which would eventually surpass and eclipse the secret space programs run by the US Navy, Air Force, and the classified space programs of other nations.

When Maeve DuVally came out as a transgender woman while working as a corporate communications manager at Goldman Sachs, she knew she couldn't do it quietly. DuVally intimately documents her struggle to be herself in this environment, initially keeping her identity a secret with wardrobe changes in the lobby bathroom after work. Eventually she declares herself and, to her surprise, Goldman Sachs embraces the effort. Surgery follows. When DuVally finally takes those first steps on heels through the corridors of this institution on the way to her first meeting as a woman, the listener cheers.

Todos os anos, desde 1978, Warren Buffett escreve aos acionistas de seu conglomerado, a Berkshire Hathaway, apresentando um relato do período que passou. Suas cartas expõem com clareza e concisão a filosofia e a estratégia com que Buffett conduz sua holding, avaliada em mais de 600 bilhões de dólares. Este livro traz uma cuidadosa seleção de trechos de cartas feita por Lawrence Cunningham, professor da Universidade George Washington e profundo conhecedor da obra de Buffett.

Why are cellphone plans so much more expensive in the United States than in Europe? It seems a simple question. But the search for an answer took Thomas Philippon on an unexpected journey through some of the most complex and hotly debated issues in modern economics. Ultimately, he reached a surprising conclusion: American markets, once a model for the world, are giving up on healthy competition.

Conventional wisdom holds that America has been a Christian nation since the Founding Fathers. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse argues that the idea of "Christian America" is nothing more than a myth - and a relatively recent one at that.

Today's business environment poses unprecedented perils for the average American as for the first time ever, more than half of Americans now own stock. Identifying the problems of the past, Skeel offers a strikingly new diagnosis of the fundamental flaws in corporate America today, and of what can be done to fix them.

Investors today are being fed lies and distortions, are being exploited and neglected. In the wake of the last decade’s rush to invest by millions of households and Wall Street’s obsession with short-term performance, a culture of gamesmanship has grown among corporate management, financial analysts, brokers, and fund managers, making it hard to tell financial fantasy from reality, salesmanship from honest advice. In Take on the Street, Arthur Levitt—former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission—shows how you can take matters into your own hands.

Provocative political commentator Arianna Huffington yanks back the curtain on the unholy alliance of CEOs, politicians, lobbyists, and Wall Street bankers who have shown a brutal disregard for those in office cubicles and on factory floors.

When Lt. Commander Bobby Thompson surfaced in Tampa in 1998, it was as if he had fallen from the sky, providing no hint of his past life. Eleven years later, St. Petersburg Times investigative reporter Jeff Testerman visited the rundown duplex Thompson used as his home and the epicenter of his sixty-thousand-member charity, the US Navy Veterans Association. But something was amiss. Thompson’s charity’s addresses were just maildrops, his members nonexistent, and his past a black hole.