Books

From the series “interesting things I’ve read lately”:

Business:
Howard Schultz: Pour Your Heart Into It – The romanticized history of the huge success that is today Starbucks. The writing is alert, which makes it easy to read, with all the lessons organized in chapters, going all the way from startup to a big company. I’ll highlight two of these lessons (because I think they fit well in our context):

• Corporate experience before founding a start up helps a lot. Unlike the famous dropouts Jobs, Gates, Ellison, that I consider exceptions, young Howard tells us about how important school, experience in a good company (Xerox) and the best sales courses were for him.
• The need to deliver 110% of what you promised – the company to its clients, the management to its employees, but also the employees to the company – which can be achieved only by pouring a lot of heart into everything. Hence – the title.

Fiction, History and Business:
Ken Follett: The Century Trilogy – Three books about the 20th century (Fall of Giants=The First World War, Winter of the World=The Second World War, Edge of Eternity=will be released in 2014). The young man takes a few families (English, Americans, Germans, Russians) and walks them through the entire horror century. Ken, as always, has the great quality of looking at the same story from the point of view of every character, which makes you understand the stories much better. There are no good and bad characters; you just understand the reasons each character has and the constraints affecting them. These are books with a lot of history and politics in them and they are exceptionally well written. If you want to understand what happened in the past and what’s happening now in the world without reading a boring history book – this is the solution. The business element appears in the context of globalization and there are some interesting pages dedicated to it.

Jeffrey Archer: Kane and Abel Series – Three books about American politics and business. (Kane and Abel, The Prodigal Daughter, Shall We Tell The President?). The first book is very good, the second one is good and third one is weak – but the three of them make good sense together.

Fiction and history:
Ken follett: Pillars of the Earth si World Without End – England in 1100 and 1300, the middle class of English society. We always read about the kings in those times, but we rarely read good books about the others. Pillars of the Earth is supposed to be Ken Follett’s best book. I’ve also seen these two books on elefant.ro

(English version by Teodora Popescu)