When a heart attack claimed Gert Boyle's husband in 1970, the forty-six-year-old housewife and mother of three found herself at the helm of Columbia Sportswear, a small outerwear manufacturer in Portland, Oregon, that was struggling financially. With no business experience whatsoever, Boyle was faced with the challenge of running Columbia, which had been founded in 1937 by her father — a Jewish immigrant who had fled Hitler's Germany. Boyle and her son Tim persevered, turning a company that in 1970 had forty employees and less than $800,000 in annual sales into the leading seller of skiwear in the United States, with more than 2000 employees and over a billion in annual sales. Along the way, thanks in part to a creative marketing campaign that billed her as "one tough mother," Boyle established herself as an industry icon, and the first woman ever inducted into the International Sporting Goods Hall of Fame. One Tough Mother presents an honest and often irreverent account of Boyle's journey from a childhood in Nazi Germany to incredible success in America. She offers insights into succeeding in business and in life, and shares many of the advertisements and strategies that have made her so recognizable.

Presents the story of financier Alfred Lee Loomis and his role in the American victory during World War II, discussing Tuxedo Park, the lavish safe haven he created for some of the world's greatest scientists to meet and share ideas.

A marketing expert who for many years made an ethically questionable living by enabling naive lottery winners to convert their payout terms into less-valuable cash settlements reveals how many winners of the lottery find themselves worse off for their changed circumstances, in an account that evaluates the American obsession with playing the lottery and gambling. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A First-hand account of a pioneering woman's experiences in the world of business and computing. Anecdotal history of computing from the days of punched card computing to the present. Observations, insights and tips drawn from the author's personal experiences as one of the first female programmers at IBM and later founder of SSE.

Examines Japan's innovative, highly successful production methods

A profile of the iconic builder of the first Grand Central Station draws on previously untapped materials to provide coverage of his roles in such historical eras as the Gold Rush, the transportation revolution and the development of the modern corporation. Reprint.

An intimate look inside the secretive world of chocolate explores the history of the Hershey and Mars corporations, the paranoid executives who protect their secrets, the spies who attempt to steal them, and lawyers hired to defend the business. Reprint.

Threadless.com is the phenomenally successful T-shirt company with more than 4 million tees sold since it began in 2000. It pioneered the online business model of crowd-sourced or community-driven design, in which people submit designs that are voted on by the site’s 1 million users and printed. Over the past 10 years, the company has amassed a vast archive of very cool, very hip, and often very entertaining designs, and Threadless is a spectacular showcase of 400 of the very best T-shirts created by the community—a barometer of art and design over the past decade. Much more than a book of extraordinary graphics, Threadless tells the extremely interesting story that inspired Inc. magazine to hail Threadless.com as “the most innovative small company in America.” There are also profiles of individual designers and “think pieces” from influential admirers, including design guru John Maeda, Jeff Howe of Wired, and bestselling business/marketing writer Seth Godin.

An energy insider explains how the sun, wind, biomass, geothermal, and hydrogen resources can become the fuels that create a sustainable future for the planet, in a resource that provides definitive action plans for showing how to influence change.

A close-up look at the career of the colorful and charismatic scoundrel who developed the most famous scheme in the history of American finance explains how, in 1920, Charles Ponzi successfully raked in millions of dollars from would-be investors by promising them he could double their investments in three months. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.