The Real Deal - My Life in Business and Philanthropy

In one of the most fascinating business autobiographies of this or any other year, Sumner Redstone tells the unvarnished story of how he overcame every obstacle to build a vast media and entertainment engine that includes Paramount Pictures, MTV, Nickelodeon, Blockbuster, Simon & Schuster, and now CBS. A larger-than-life figure in the grand tradition of the Hearsts, Paleys, and Pulitzers, and voted in a recent survey of 600 corporate executives as the number-one most inspiring CEO, this is the man who can truly say, "I am Viacom."

A Passion to Win gives a riveting look behind the scenes at the highly charged negotiations that won Redstone both Viacom and Paramount. The book reveals the intense business calculations and strong emotions of Redstone's head-to-head confrontations with such adversaries as Barry Diller and H. Wayne Huizenga. A Passion to Win takes the reader along on the financial roller-coaster ride that began when Blockbuster went into the tank, risking Redstone's fortune and life's work. By the end of that ride, Redstone had righted his company and revolutionized the video industry. In a world of high-visibility corporate battles, Redstone pulls no punches. This is the man who faced down a pack of thugs when they threatened producer Bob Evans during the filming of The Cotton Club. And this is a book that shows the reader what it takes to win.

Behind it all is the same iron will that helped Redstone to survive a deadly fire at Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel by clinging with one hand to a third-story ledge before being rescued -- with burns so severe over nearly half his body that doctors feared he would die.

Born in a Boston tenement, he graduated first in his class at Boston Latin, went through Harvard in three years, was chosen for a special cryptography unit in the U.S. Army whose assignment was to crack Japanese codes during World War II, then, after Harvard Law School, successfully pleaded cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court -- all of this before embarking on his astounding business career.

With his trademark charm and eloquence, Greg Norman reveals the secrets behind his myriad achievements, tracing his journey from Queensland, Australia, to the World Golf Hall of Fame to chairman and CEO of a global business.

Since the days in 1975 when he made thirtyeight dollars a week working as a trainee, Norman has won ninety-one professional tournaments around the world, including two British Opens and twenty U.S. PGA Tour titles, and he held the No. 1 World Ranking for an astonishing 331 weeks.

Norman has brought the same competitive fire to the boardroom, building a business that reflects the diversity of his interests and the power of his brand. Norman has done something very few professional athletes have ever managed -- he has transcended the sport that made him famous.

As head of Great White Shark Enterprises, Norman presides over a multimillion-dollar empire that ranges from golf course design to real estate to apparel to wine. An astute businessman with unmatched desire and drive, he has an unerring instinct for knowing what will work and what won't. He has combined a hands-on approach with an overall strategic vision to produce an internationally recognized and respected brand.

In these pages, Norman illustrates the principles that are at the core of his successes and offers readers concrete advice for applying their own talents to successfully play both the "front nine" and the "back nine" of life. Practical, engaging, and incisive, The Way of the Shark shares the lessons Greg Norman has learned both on the course and off, demonstrating how anyone, at any stage of his or her career, can be a champion.

The unauthorized biography of an immigrant's son whobecame a multibillionaire working for Bill Gates, and probably the highest-paid employee in American history.

In January 2000, Bill Gates gave his vast responsibilities and title of Microsoft CEO to his best friend Steve Ballmer, a man relatively unknown to the public. Based on in-depth study and interviews with classmates and Microsoft insiders, Fredric Alan Maxwell vividly brings to life one of the technology industry's most colorful and controversial figures: Steven Anthony Ballmer. From Ballmer's relatively humble suburban Detroit beginnings (where he and his archrival Scott McNealy went to competing high schools) and his 1974 meeting with Gates in a Harvard dorm, Maxwell richly details how the competition addicts Ballmer and Gates have worked together for the past twenty years to form Microsoft's ego and id. The up-by-the-bootstraps saga reveals both the good boy Ballmer -- the dedicated son, great friend, and supportive schoolmate -- and the bad boy Ballmer -- the ruthless businessman who earned the nickname "The Em-balmer."

The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns is Alan Greenberg’s remarkable story of ascending to the top of one of Wall Street’s venerable powerhouse financial institutions. After joining Bear Stearns in 1949, Greenberg rose to become formally head of the firm in 1978. No one knows the history of Bear Stearns as he does; no one participated in more key decisions, right into the company’s final days. Greenberg offers an honest, clear-eyed assessment of how the collapse of the company surprised him and other top executives, and he explains who he thinks was responsible. This is a candid, fascinating account of a storied career and its stunning conclusion.

"Whoever coined the adage about hindsight being twenty-twenty didn’t make any allowance for astigmatism or myopia. Whose hindsight? And from what distance? A picture clarifies or blurs with the passage of time, and whatever image emanates at a given instant is colored by the biases of the observer. Knowing that my perceptions of the fall of Bear Stearns are inevitably somewhat subjective, I’ve tried to make sense of exactly what happened when and how this or that development along the way contributed to the ultimate outcome. I’ve wanted to get a fix on the moment when we ceased controlling our own destiny—not out of intramural curiosity but because that loss of control resonated and replicated globally. For those of us who across decades gave so much of ourselves to Bear Stearns, what took place during a single week in March 2008 was a watershed in our lives. With sufficient time and distance, as the context expanded, we could recognize it as the signal event of an enormous disruption that the world will be struggling to recover from for years to come."