Following the success of their best-selling One Hour China Books, Peking University Professors Jonathan Woetzel and Jeffrey Towson are back with a collection of essays on China business ¿ and to detail four things everyone is getting wrong about China.In this one hour "speed read", the authors present +30 essays that make four main contrarian points:1) China needs smarter, not faster growth.2) Yes, Chinese consumers are rising. But they are changing even faster. And they are disrupting everything.3) China can innovate big time.4) At home and abroad, Chinese companies can beat you fair and square.
"One hour with this book will make you an expert on business in China." - Dick Gephardt, Majority-Minority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives, 1989-2002 "Without question, the best 60 minutes you will spend on China." - Jonathan Anderson, Emerging Markets Advisors This is the China book for everyone - whether an expert or novice. It can be read in an hour and gives you most of what you need to know about China business today - and its increasing impact on the rest of the world. This "speed-read" book is the distilled knowledge of two Peking University business professors with over 30 years of experience on the ground in China and the emerging markets. According to authors Jeffrey Towson and Jonathan Woetzel, "if we had the undivided attention of someone from Ohio, Brighton or Lima for just one hour, this little book is what we would say." Author Jonathan Woetzel is a senior partner of McKinsey & Company. He opened McKinsey's Shanghai location in 1995 and has been resident since then. He currently the global leader of its Cities Special Initiative and the Asia-based Director of the McKinsey Global Institute. He has led many of the Firm's most significant projects in China including the first major international listing of a Chinese company and the development of the economic plans for the cities of Shanghai, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Xian and Harbin among others. He co-chairs the Urban China Initiative along with Tsinghua University and Columbia University to catalyze the next stage of China's urbanization. Author Jeffrey Towson is a private equity investor, professor and best-selling author. His area of expertise is developing economy investing and cross-border strategies - primarily US-China deals in healthcare and consumer products. He was previously Head of Direct Investments for Middle East North Africa and Asia Pacific for Prince Alwaleed, nicknamed by Time magazine the "Arabian Warren Buffett" and arguably the world's first private global investor.
From bestselling author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, the classic guide to the art of principled dissent and disagreement In Letters to a Young Contrarian, bestselling author and world-class provocateur Christopher Hitchens inspires the radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, and angry young (wo)men of tomorrow. Exploring the entire range of "contrary positions"—from noble dissident to gratuitous nag—Hitchens introduces the next generation to the minds and the misfits who influenced him, invoking such mentors as Emile Zola, Rosa Parks, and George Orwell. As is his trademark, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast to stagnant attitudes across the ideological spectrum. No other writer has matched Hitchens's understanding of the importance of disagreement—to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress, to democracy itself.
CNBC's Fast Money Commentator Steve Cortes shows how to buck the trend and become a well-informed investor The public needs to think independently and not be duped, particularly because those who are selling their messages or promoting their ideas have a plethora of powerful media through which to do so. Against the Herd presents six contrarian views of major events that will shape the future. Steve Cortes of CNBC pulls no punches in explaining these trends. Many will find his views counterintuitive and even controversial. Some will find his forecasts alarming. But open-minded readers who are willing to heed his well-informed advice will find it illuminating, beneficial, and profitable. Steve Cortes presents six contrarian views of major events that will shape the future for investors including the fall of China and the end of the golden era of free trade The contrarian stances are presented because they are actionable Reveals how these events will affect global markets and specific investments, and how and when to take advantage of these key moves Against the Herd shows you how to profit by bucking conventional wisdom and what to do to get ready when situations call for contrarian investing.
Although many people consider bloody-mindedness and stubbornness as being perfect qualifications for a contrarian investor, the approach is in fact a little different than that. Yes, it requires one to act against the crowd. However, it is futile to do so without good reason. A naiÌ?ve contrarian investor pops into a pub looking for a fight and is delighted if his first opponent is Lennox Lewis. A more seasoned contrarian looks to fight only little old ladies. But looking for the right opponent in a local pub is far from straightforward - little old ladies can sometimes be veteran jujitsu champions - and detecting the easier battles in the stock market is similarly challenging. At first blush, many stocks are attractive and other appealing stocks may initially look like dogs. There is no trustworthy shortcut to separate the dogs from the delightful. The long cut is the implementation of much hard work. Hard work as in understanding a company's business model, why other investors hate it, what positive factors they might have missed, how its balance sheet and cash flow interact, and whether its valuation is sufficiently attractive. None of that is rocket science perhaps, but that does not make it easy. The bull arguments are often well hidden and can only be discovered through meticulous work, a sceptical mindset, and deep thought. In this collection of his writings, top fund manager Alastair Mundy takes a contrarian look at a host of topics and issues, providing a range of ideas and approaches and encouraging investors to think hard about their approach to investment. This book should be essential reading for any investor - contrarian or otherwise.
Introducing the global mind-set changing the way we do business. In this fascinating book, global entrepreneurship expert Daniel Isenberg presents a completely novel way to approach business building—with the insights and lessons learned from a worldwide cast of entrepreneurial characters. Not bound by a western, Silicon Valley stereotype, this group of courageous and energetic doers has created a global and diverse mix of companies destined to become tomorrow’s leading organizations. Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid is about how enterprising individuals from around the world see hidden value in situations where others do not, use that perception to develop products and services that people initially don’t think they want, and ultimately go on to realize extraordinary value for themselves, their customers, and society as a whole. What these business builders have in common is a contrarian mind-set that allows them to create opportunities and succeed where others see nothing. Amazingly, this process repeats itself in one form or another countless times a day all over the world. From Albuquerque to Islamabad, you will travel with Isenberg to discover unusual yet practical insights that you can use in your own business. Meet the founders of Grameenphone in Bangladesh, PACIV in Puerto Rico, Sea to Table in New York, Actavis in Iceland, Studio Moderna in Slovenia, Hartwell Metals in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, Given Imaging in Israel, WildChina in China, and many others. You’ll be moved by the stories of these plucky start-ups—many of them fueled by adversity and, more often than not, by necessity. Great stories, stunning successes, crushing failures—they’re all here. What can we, in the East and West, learn from them? What can you learn—and what will these entrepreneurial stories, so compellingly told, inspire you to do? Let this book open doors for you where you once saw only walls. If you’ve ever felt the urge to turn a glimmer of an idea into something extraordinary, these stories are for you.
A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.
When small- and medium-sized business owners first hear George Cloutier's rules, they often think he's a madman. His controversial rules for doing business—rules that aren't taught at Harvard Business School—include: The best family business has one member. Weekends are for working, not playing golf or coaching. Never pay your vendors on time. Wear your control freak badge with pride. Quit denial: if your business is failing during a recession, it's your fault. As the founder and CEO of American Management Services, Cloutier has emerged as "the leading advocate for small business" (Reuters), having spent over thirty years guiding business owners through the tough choices that line the road to profitability. He and his company have worked with more than six thousand companies, averting certain ruin for some and generating seemingly impossible growth and profitability for others. Cloutier graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School, but the lessons in this book aren't from there. Unlike his classmates, most of whom headed straight to Wall Street, Cloutier has been on the docks at 2 a.m. counting heads of lettuce for food distributors to make sure nothing would disappear without a waybill. He's spent long, overnight hours in truck stops, making sure sticky fingers stayed out of the tills. Cloutier and his colleagues at American Management Services become personal pitt bulls to the CEOs who hire them, doing whatever it takes to bring their clients' businesses back into long-term profitability. Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing is the long- overdue wake-up call for 23 million small- and midsize business owners across America. This book serves up the hard-boiled, unadulterated truth to aspiring and established entrepreneurs, without apologies. His no-nonsense advice may be hard to hear at times, but it works.
WHAT VALUABLE COMPANY IS NOBODY BUILDING? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. ‘Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.’ ELON MUSK, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla ‘This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.’ MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO of Facebook ‘When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.’ NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, author of The Black Swan
An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls classist, Anna is shunned by the literary establishment and, in her hurt, radicalized by the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Determined to follow Rand’s theory of rational selfishness, Anna alienates herself from the scene and eventually her friends and family. Finally, in true Randian style, she abandons everyone for the boundless horizons of Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about her beloved muse. Things look better in Hollywood—until the money starts running out, and with it Anna’s faith in the virtue of selfishness. When a death in the family sends her running back to New York and then spiraling at her mother’s house, Anna is offered a different kind of opportunity. A chance to kill the ego causing her pain at a mysterious commune on the island of Lesbos. The second half of Anna’s odyssey finds her exploring a very different kind of freedom – communal love, communal toilets – and a new perspective on Ayn Rand that could bring Anna back home to herself. "A gimlet-eyed satirist of the cultural morasses and political impasses of our times" (Alexandra Kleeman), Lexi Freiman speaks in The Book of Ayn not only to a particular millennial loneliness, but also to a timeless existential predicament: the strangeness, absurdity, and hilarity of seeking meaning in the modern world.
