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Berkshire Hathaway, the $300 billion conglomerate that Warren Buffett built, is among the world’s largest and most famous corporations. Yet, for all its power and celebrity, few people understand Berkshire, and many assume it cannot survive without Buffett. This book proves them wrong. In a portrait of the corporate culture that unites Berkshire’s subsidiaries, the book unearths the traits that assure the conglomerate’s continued prosperity. Riveting stories of each subsidiary’s origins, triumphs, and journey to Berkshire reveal how managers generate economic value from intangibles like thrift, integrity, entrepreneurship, autonomy, and a sense of permanence.

A Brief History of Entrepreneurship charts how the pursuit of profit by private individuals has been a prime mover in revolutionizing civilization. Entrepreneurs often butt up against processes, technologies, social conventions, and even laws. So they circumvent, innovate, and violate to obtain what they want. This creative destruction has brought about overland and overseas trade, colonization, and a host of revolutionary technologies—from caffeinated beverages to the personal computer—that have transformed society. Consulting rich archival sources, including some that have never before been translated, Carlen maps the course of human history through nine episodes when entrepreneurship reshaped our world. Highlighting the most colorful characters of each era, he discusses Mesopotamian merchants’ creation of the urban market economy; Phoenician merchant-sailors intercontinental trade, which came to connect Africa, Asia, and Europe; Chinese tea traders’ invention of paper money; the colonization of the Americas; and the current “flattening” of the world’s economic playing field. Yet the pursuit of profit hasn’t always moved us forward. From slavery to organized crime, Carlen explores how entrepreneurship can sometimes work at the expense of others. He also discusses the new entrepreneurs who, through the nascent space tourism industry, are leading humanity to a multiplanetary future. By exploring all sides of this legacy, Carlen brings much-needed detail to the role of entrepreneurship in revolutionizing civilization.

The author of this book is a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and award-winning writer who attributes much of his success to living and working alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey for seventeen years. As a frequent monastic guest, he learned firsthand from the monks as they grew an incredibly successful portfolio of businesses. Service and selflessness are at the heart of the 1,500-year-old monastic tradition's remarkable business success. It is an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions. Combining vivid case studies from his thirty-year business career with intimate portraits of the monks at work, the author of this book shows how Trappist principles can be successfully applied to a variety of secular business settings and to our personal lives as well. The book demonstrates that monks and people like Warren Buffett are wildly successful not despite their high principles but because of them. It also introduces other “transformational organizations” that share the crucial monastic business strategies so critical for success.

Despite social and economic advances around the world, poverty and disease persist, exacerbated by the mounting challenges of climate change, natural disasters, political conflict, mass migration, and economic inequality. While governments commit to addressing these challenges, traditional public and philanthropic dollars are not enough. Here, innovative finance has shown a way forward: by borrowing techniques from the world of finance, we can raise capital for social investments today. Innovative finance has provided polio vaccines to children in the DRC, crop insurance to farmers in India, pay-as-you-go solar electricity to Kenyans, and affordable housing and transportation to New Yorkers. It has helped governmental, commercial, and philanthropic resources meet the needs of the poor and underserved and build a more sustainable and inclusive prosperity. Capital and the Common Good shows how market failure in one context can be solved with market solutions from another: an expert in securitization bundles future development aid into bonds to pay for vaccines today; an entrepreneur turns a mobile phone into an array of financial services for the unbanked; and policy makers adapt pay-for-success models from the world of infrastructure to human services like early childhood education, maternal health, and job training. Revisiting the successes and missteps of these efforts, Georgia Levenson Keohane argues that innovative finance is as much about incentives and sound decision-making as it is about money. When it works, innovative finance gives us the tools, motivation, and security to invest in our shared future.

The past thirty years have seen dozens of otherwise successful investors try to improve education through the application of market principles. They have funneled billions of dollars into alternative schools, online education, and textbook publishing, and they have, with surprising regularity, lost their shirts. In Class Clowns, professor and investment banker Jonathan A. Knee dissects what drives investors' efforts to improve education and why they consistently fail. Knee takes readers inside four spectacular financial failures in education: Rupert Murdoch's billion-dollar effort to reshape elementary education through technology; the unhappy investors—including hedge fund titan John Paulson—who lost billions in textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin; the abandonment of Knowledge Universe, Michael Milken's twenty-year mission to revolutionize the global education industry; and a look at Chris Whittle, founder of EdisonLearning and a pioneer of large-scale transformational educational ventures, who continues to attract investment despite decades of financial and operational disappointment. Although deep belief in the curative powers of the market drove these initiatives, it was the investors' failure to appreciate market structure that doomed them. Knee asks: What makes a good education business? By contrasting rare successes, he finds a dozen broad lessons at the heart of these cautionary case studies. Class Clowns offers an important guide for public policy makers and guardrails for future investors, as well as an intelligent exposé for activists and teachers frustrated with the repeated underperformance of these attempts to shake up education.

Where are the next decade's greatest investment opportunities? Veteran investor Marko Dimitrijevic argues that they can be found in frontier markets, which account for seventy-one of the world's seventy-five fastest-growing economies and 19 percent of the world's GDP. Yet many investors ignore them. Fueled by new access to technology and information, frontier markets are emerging even faster than their predecessors, making them an essential component of a globally diversified portfolio. In Frontier Investor, Dimitrijevic shows through colorful case studies, compelling charts, and fascinating travel anecdotes that it is not only possible but prudent to invest in these unfamiliar and undervalued options. Dimitrijevic explains how frontier markets such as Nigeria, Panama, and Bangladesh are poised to follow the similar paths of Chinese, Indian, and Russian markets, which were considered exotic two decades ago. He details a strategy for how and where to invest, directly or indirectly, to profit from frontier growth. Dimitrijevic covers the risks, political and otherwise, of these markets, the megatrends that promise exciting investment opportunities in the coming years, and the prospects for countries beyond the frontier, including Myanmar, Cuba, and even Iran. Rich with experience and insight, Frontier Investor opens up a whole new world—and worldview—to investors.

To compete with today's increasing globalization and rapidly evolving technologies, individuals and organizations must take their ability to learn—the foundation for continuous improvement, operational excellence, and innovation—to a much higher level. This book combines recent advances in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and education with key research on high-performance businesses to create an actionable blueprint for becoming a leading-edge learning organization. This book examines the process of learning from an individual and an organizational standpoint. From an individual perspective, it discusses the cognitive, emotional, motivational, attitudinal, and behavioral factors that promote better learning. Organizationally, the book focuses on the kinds of structures, culture, leadership, employee learning behaviors, and human resource policies that are necessary to create an environment that enables critical and innovative thinking, learning conversations, and collaboration. It also provides strategies to mitigate the reality that humans can be reflexive, lazy thinkers who seek confirmation of what they believe to be true and affirmation of their self-image.

The author is a practicing psychologist who focuses on assessing and coaching executives who occupy or are candidates for top positions in business organizations. In this book she shares insights from more than twenty years of executive evaluations and offers an empirical method of identifying executives who will be effective within organizations—and to flag those who will ultimately fail—by evaluating hidden aspects of personality and character. The book compares candidates with impressive careers and tries to determine which are likely to act with consistently high integrity and exhibit sound, timely judgment when faced with unanticipated business problems. Central to effective leadership is a psychological quality called “active coping,” which the author defines and explores by referencing case studies, historical figures, and her own scholarly work. This book speaks not only to those in hiring positions and their advisors but also more widely to leaders and anyone who wishes to learn more about their own character and the abilities of those around them. The book offers knowledge, asks questions, and challenges common perceptions, providing a practical tool for those in business and for the general reader.

Moral hazard—the tendency to change behavior when the cost of that behavior will be borne by others—is a particularly tricky question when considering health care. Kenneth J. Arrow's seminal 1963 paper on this topic (included in this volume) was one of the first to explore the implication of moral hazard for health care, and this book examines this issue in the context of contemporary American health care policy. Drawing on research from both the original RAND Health Insurance Experiment and personal research, including a 2008 Health Insurance Experiment in Oregon, the book presents compelling evidence that health insurance does indeed affect medical spending and encourages policy solutions that acknowledge and account for this.

The Robin Hood Foundation is a charitable organization focused on alleviating poverty in New York City. One of the book's authors is the foundation's senior vice president. In that role he developed its metrics-based approach, called “relentless monetization,” to ensure that the money the foundation receives and grants is used most effectively. The other author has served as long-time consultant to Robin Hood on matters of metrics. This book shows how to implement the Robin Hood approach and explains how any nonprofit organizations or philanthropic donor can use it to achieve the greatest benefit from every philanthropic dollar. Drawing on extensive knowledge, the text devotes specific chapters to the difficulties most frequently encountered by donors trying to measure the benefits of their initiatives. This book provides straightforward, targeted advice for funding “smart” nonprofit programs.

We are crossing a new frontier in the evolution of computing and entering the era of cognitive systems. The victory of IBM's Watson on the television quiz show Jeopardy! revealed how scientists and engineers at IBM and elsewhere are pushing the boundaries of science and technology to create machines that sense, learn, reason, and interact with people in new ways to provide insight and advice. This book introduces the fascinating world of “cognitive systems” to general audiences and provides a window into the future of computing. Cognitive systems promise to penetrate complexity and assist people and organizations in better decision making. They can help doctors evaluate and treat patients, augment the ways we see, anticipate major weather events, and contribute to smarter urban planning. The book describes this technology inside and out and explains how it will help us conquer the harnessing and understanding of “big data,” one of the major computing challenges facing businesses and governments in the coming decades.

The 2008 financial collapse, the expansion of corporate and private wealth, the influence of money in politics—many of Wall Street's contemporary trends can be traced back to the work of fourteen critical figures who wrote, and occasionally broke, the rules of American finance. Edward Morris plots Wall Street’s transformation from a clubby enclave of financiers to a symbol of vast economic power. His book begins with J. Pierpont Morgan, who ruled the American banking system at the turn of the twentieth century, and ends with Sandy Weill, whose collapsing Citigroup required the largest taxpayer bailout in history. In between, Wall Streeters relates the triumphs and missteps of twelve other financial visionaries. From Charles Merrill, who founded Merrill Lynch and introduced the small investor to the American stock market; to Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king; to Jack Bogle, whose index funds redefined the mutual fund business; to Myron Scholes, who laid the groundwork for derivative securities; and to Benjamin Graham, who wrote the book on securities analysis. Anyone interested in the modern institution of American finance will devour this history of some of its most important players.

The author's meteoric rise took him from a small town in Northern Kentucky to governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, yet he lost it all—his fortune, his reputation, and his job—in one fatal attack of excessive economic hubris. This honest, frank analysis revisits the events that led to the author's disastrous decision and examines the psychological factors behind bad financial practices in several economic sectors. The book begins with the unbroken string of successes that helped the author achieve a jet-setting lifestyle and land a key spot with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It then describes the circumstances leading up to his $1.6 million loss and the essential lessons he learned from it—primarily that, although there are as many ways to make money in the markets as there are people participating in them, all losses come from the same few sources. Investors lose money in the markets either because of errors in their analysis or because of psychological barriers preventing the application of analysis. While all analytical methods have some validity and make allowances for instances in which they do not work, psychological factors can keep an investor in a losing position, causing him to abandon one method for another in order to rationalize the decisions already made. This cautionary tale includes strategies for avoiding loss tied to a simple framework for understanding, accepting, and dodging the dangers of investing, trading, and speculating.