The Best Business Book I Read This Year
On personal note I believe what Mahatma Gandhi said while British departed from India" We should let the British depart like good friends as we had very long togetherness on this piece of land".I understand it is difficult for everyone to have similar views. While not a social scientist, Bowen writes in the illustrious tradition of C.H. Business of Empire will prove an invaluable reference work for generations to come. Chapter 5 explores the work of the company’s senior executives, the directors.
For the next nearly four years, he obsessively micromanaged the project, pushing teams in Atlanta and Gdansk to make speech recognition seamless. He put in place a surreal testing protocol that involved hiring temps to spend days in empty apartments chattering away to silent speakers, and berated executives who told him it would take decades to develop speech recognition. He took home an early Echo prototype and when, in a moment of frustration, he told it to go “shoot yourself in the head,” it sent a wave of panic through the engineers who were listening in.
These biases and omissions, though, are a small price to pay in a book that immerses the reader so fully in the pomp and turmoil of mediaeval Venice. This collection of essays honours David Fieldhouse, latterly Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at Cambridge and a foremost authority on the economics of the modern British Empire. The contributors include an impressive array of former students, colleagues, and friends, and their subjects range widely across the economic and administrative fields of British imperial history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This world changing mission, however, doesn’t exempt Facebook from possible disruption. Just like any other business, it must continue to adapt and thrive. This combination of world changing mission and innovative tenacity is the secret sauce other businesses can take from Facebook’s story to apply to their own operations. The author provides birds eye view of the British Imperial Years, the rise to the fall. Although it is said "The Sun never sets on British Empire" and I wish Sun of Happiness and compassion never sets on any community or nation but this book is more of a guide to people in power and in public life. What setsEmpire of Painapart from those earlier books is that Keefe doesn’t focus on victims, their families, or others who’ve been extensively covered elsewhere.
After launching, you start to learn a lot more about who’s buying your product, using your service, and falling in love with your company. It’s always worth refining your visual identity now that that knowledge is readily available. It can be super easy and relatively affordable to do a quick design glow-up.
Despite its merits, however, the book has a few drawbacks, largely related to the author’s own cultural sympathies. The Ottoman Empire–referred to, in a rather hostile manner, as ‘the Turks’ in most instances–is portrayed as an inevitable regional disaster falling upon various enclaves in turn, rather than as a complex historical actor. Other Venetian rivals, such as Genoa and Pisa, are likewise passed over.
If workers owed their livelihoods to the company, then in the absence of the East India Company, they would have depended on another source. The “expenditure” data on Table 9.4, likewise, should be treated with great caution. They reflect cash payments including the translation of cash into other types of assets, such as goods and bullion for export. “Expenditure” thus does not signal the market value of resources actually consumed by the company in a specific period of time. The author needs a rigorous framework for measuring the economic impacts of the corporation in order to persuade the reader that the company was an economic juggernaut.
She doesn’t add a great deal to these works, with the exception of well-chosen quotations from a trove of letters Nast wrote late in his life to his second wife, which are touching and revealing about, for example, the sting he felt from business setbacks ... Breeziness is arguably a legitimate stylistic choice for a book about slick magazines. But the abundance of clichés in Condé Nast isn’t defensible ... Some sentences are case studies in what can happen when metaphors collide. Becoming Facebook shares how Facebook navigated in meeting these Free audiobook challenges, but always persisted on in its world disrupting mission of making the world more connected and open. By adopting and staying focused on such a bold mission, the book insists, Facebook has been able to achieve technological marvels like sharing, collecting and categorizing over a billion posts per day.