Power and Profit


Book Description

Newly available in paperback, this is a wonderfully readable account of the role of merchants and money in the medieval world. Professor Spufford, who has made a lifelong study of the subject, brings together a vast amount of material from archives all over the world to build up this important economic history of the origins of capitalism essential reading for the scholar, but also engaging and entertaining to the layman.




Power, Pleasure, and Profit


Book Description

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.




People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent


Book Description

“Urgent work, by the foremost champion of ‘progressive capitalism.’ ” —The New Yorker An authoritative account of the dangers of unfettered markets and monied politics, People, Power, and Profits shows us an America in crisis. The American people, however, are far from powerless, and Joseph Stiglitz provides an alternative path forward through his vision of progressive capitalism, with a comprehensive set of political and economic changes.




Passion Profit Power


Book Description

By using Sylver's techniques for attaining their highest goals, readers can discover for themselves how to have better sex and relationships, create more wealth, and attain more personal power. Focused on three categories--passion, profit and power, each section contains 50 short lessons and exercises to give readers the tools to use every day to achieve their goals.




The Profit Paradox


Book Description

A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.




Power Your Profits


Book Description

Discover how to create “success in all aspects of life and business” (Lisa Nichols, New York Times bestselling author) with this comprehensive, bulletproof plan for taking your business from startup mode to the multi-million-dollar mark straight from the inventor of the Predictable Success Method™. In the United States, most small business owners struggle daily to make ends meet. Two-thirds of businesses earn less than $25,000 a year. Thankfully, Susie Carder—entrepreneur and business coach to everyone from Steve Harvey to Paul Mitchell—has developed the ultimate formula for incredible success. But she didn’t create it overnight. Susie Carder was at rock bottom financially during the Great Recession of 2008 when she was inspired to dig in and rebuild her fortune from the ground up. Today, she takes what she learned during that difficult time and shares her radical business strategies that have helped countless entrepreneurs and small business owners increase their revenues by more than 3,000%. As the creator of the Predictable Success Method™, Carder has a proven, twenty-year track record that includes building two $10 million companies herself, which she later sold. Filled with clear-eyed and practical advice, Power Your Profits teaches you how to run your daily operations, understand your finances, account for sales, and employ marketing systems that lead to predictable and substantial revenue and profit growth. And now, she’s sharing her hard-won wisdom—worth $5,000 an hour in coaching fees—with you.




Grow


Book Description

Ten years of research uncover the secret source of growth and profit … Those who center their business on improving people’s lives have a growth rate triple that of competitors and outperform the market by a huge margin. They dominate their categories, create new categories and maximize profit in the long term. Pulling from a unique ten year growth study involving 50,000 brands, Jim Stengel shows how the world's 50 best businesses—as diverse as Method, Red Bull, Lindt, Petrobras, Samsung, Discovery Communications, Visa, Zappos, and Innocent—have a cause and effect relationship between financial performance and their ability to connect with fundamental human emotions, hopes, values and greater purposes. In fact, over the 2000s an investment in these companies—“The Stengel 50”—would have been 400 percent more profitable than an investment in the S&P 500. Grow is based on unprecedented empirical research, inspired (when Stengel was Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble) by a study of companies growing faster than P&G. After leaving P&G in 2008, Stengel designed a new study, in collaboration with global research firm Millward Brown Optimor. This study tracked the connection over a ten year period between financial performance and customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy. Then, in a further investigation of what goes on in the “black box” of the consumer’s mind, Stengel and his team tapped into neuroscience research to look at customer engagement and measure subconscious attitudes to determine whether the top businesses in the Stengel Study were more associated with higher ideals than were others. Grow thus deftly blends timeless truths about human behavior and values into an action framework – how you discover, build, communicate, deliver and evaluate your ideal. Through colorful stories drawn from his fascinating personal experiences and “deep dives” that bring out the true reasons for such successes as the Pampers, HP, Discovery Channel, Jack Daniels and Zappos, Grow unlocks the code for twenty-first century business success.




Profit Power Economics


Book Description

A new economy is emerging from the global financial crisis. In this groundbreaking book, seasoned executive and Harvard-trained economist Mia de Kuijper guides readers through the fundamentals of this economy and explains how companies and individuals can create sustainable wealth now. The key is wielding one of twelve contemporary sources of profit power. Control just one and you are on the road to high returns. Turning profit power into sustainable wealth requires new strategies, enumerated here, for choosing and valuing investments, structuring and managing global enterprises, confronting competitive threats, and navigating markets which may increasingly display power law dynamics and where distributions may have "fat tails." To derive this book's unique framework for achieving high returns, de Kuijper rethought parts of economic theory itself in light of the most transformative force in the new economy (dubbed the Transparent Economy by de Kuijper), namely the vanishing cost of information and connectivity. Based on original research and illustrated with lively lessons from the experiences of the author and other successful investors and leaders, Profit Power Economics draws a detailed picture of the new competitive arena and gives readers a step-by-step approach to build (or find) exceptionally high-return enterprises and to utilize today's shifting market dynamics to influence choice and build wealth.




New Patterns of Power and Profit


Book Description

How did Capital One and Uber implement nearly identical business models, focusing on customers that are most profitable to serve? Why are Google and Amazon so valuable to us? Why are Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon so difficult for competitors to displace? And why can Google charge almost anything it wants for keywords, since no form of competition will force prices down? The information-based business models of these companies, and many more, are exploiting the patterns described in this book. This book instills pattern-based thinking that will prepare all readers for greater success in our rapidly changing world. It will help executives, regulators, investors, and concerned citizens better navigate their way through the digital transformation of everything. Professor Clemons presents six patterns for staying competitive and achieving profitable business models. The author'sreframe-recognize-respond framework teaches readers how to transform unfamiliar problems into familiar patterns, how to determine which patterns to apply in different situations, and how to respond most effectively. Information changes everything. This book is a guide to power and profit from understanding changes in the age of digital transformation.




Power, Profit and Prestige


Book Description

Power, Profit and Prestige applies incisive historical and sociological analysis to make sense of the United States’ post-Cold War imperial behavior. Philip Golub studies imperial identity formation and shows how an embedded culture of force and expansion has shaped American foreign policy. He argues that the US logic of world power and deeply rooted assumptions about American primacy inhibits democratic transformation at domestic and international levels. This resistance to change may lead the US empire into a crisis of its own making. This enlightening book will be particularly useful to students of history and international relations as they explore a world where America is no longer able to set the global agenda.