Business

Brief Summary Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age. Move Fast and Break Things tells the story of how a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs began in the 1990s to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms-Facebook, Amazon and Google-that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries. Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: tolerating piracy of books, music, and film while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture in which we now live. The enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70%, book publishing, film and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Google's YouTube today controls 60% of the streaming audio business and pays only 11% of the streaming audio revenues. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to creators and owners of the content. With the reallocation of money to monopoly platforms comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook, and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from artists to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long. The stakes in this story go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, music and other forms of entertainment from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy. Move fast and Break Things offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half-century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it. ISBN:9780316275774 Author:Jonathan Taplin

Brief Summary The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: The Four Disciplines at the Heart of Making Any Organization World Class. In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that's every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni's focus is on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization--an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success. Readers are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as the frustrated head of one consulting firm faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career, and everything he holds true about leadership itself. In the story's telling, Lencioni helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating organizational health, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it. ISBN:9780787954031 Author:Patrick Lencioni

Brief Summary The Art of the Strategist: 10 Essential Principles for Leading Your Company to Victory "From ancient battlefields to the modern business landscape, competitors have tried innumerable approaches to conquering adversaries. Success for the victors has taken many forms and traveled many paths, but at its heart, winning strategy can be boiled down to ten universal principles. When learned and implemented, these principals become powerful drivers of business excellence. Renowned strategy expert William A. Cohen, whose considerable experience in the military, corporate, and academic sectors forms the basis for The Art of the Strategist, presents the timeless lessons of: • commitment to a definite objective • seizing and maintaining the initiative • economization to mass (concentration of resources) • positioning • surprise • multiple simultaneous alternatives • the indirect approach • simplicity • timing • exploiting success With examples including the conquests of Hannibal and Alexander the Great, the political triumphs of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the business successes of internet giant VeriSign and other high-profile companies, The Art of the Strategist proves how superior strategy trumps other factors in almost every competitive arena. The ten lessons in turn form a roadmap to decisive victory in business." ISBN:9780814407820 Author:William A. Cohen