My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Individuals come and go, but they leave their records and ideas behind them. These become a guide to all who follow. 2. Genius is the art of taking pains. 3. The best ads ask no one to buy. That is useless. The best ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They site advant...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. Advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words: Salesmanship in print. 2. Before he arrived on the scene, advertising agencies were mostly brokers of space in newspapers and magazines. With Lasker's prodding, the industry became a creative force and began earning substanti...

My highlights from the book: 1. This is a story told through a life of creating and developing things, as well as expressing a call to arms for young people to become engineers, creating solutions to our current and future problems. 2. I have tried to seek out those young people who can make the world a better place. I have seen what m...

My top 10 highlights from the book: 1. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that. 2. He remade Apple in his own image. Apple is Steve Jobs with ten thousand lives. 3. I'm looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundatio...

My highlights from the book: 1. He was very important because he was the first one to believe there was a future in financing entrepreneurs in an organized way. 2. He brought a unique style to everything he did. 3. He called his course Manufacturing, but it was really his philosophy of life and of business. 4. At Harvard, Doriot became...

My highlights from the book: 1. He told me he had recently read Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, Buffett was Geffen's hero. 2. Geffen—with searing focus, unyielding drive, and outlandish nerve—had devised and implemented strategies to propel himself to the top of the heap of Hollywood powerbrokers. 3. I used to have phone...

My top highlights from this book: 1. Big opportunities come infrequently. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble. 2. Speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest. 3. Now it is a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it. —W. Somerset Maugham 4. "Moats" —a metap...

My top highlights from this book: 1. His career was to him a tremendous adventure. 2. I have always made it a rule, which I have found by some years experience a safe and profitable one, to have nothing to do with newspaper articles. 3. It is consoling to be thus reminded that the lunatic fringe is a hardy perennial and not a phenomeno...

Here are some of my favorite ideas from the book: Hack away at the unessential: Coco made hats that were stripped of embellishments, of the frills that she dismissed as weighing a woman down. . . Nothing makes a woman look older than obvious expensiveness, ornateness, complication, she said. Be default aggressive: Coco began to edge he...

My highlights from the book: 1. A business can only be managed well if one pays as much attention to the smaller business transactions as one does to the larger ones. 2. All banks have histories, only the Rothschilds have a mythology. 3. Ever since the second decade of the nineteenth century, there has been speculation about the origin...

My highlights from the book: 1. Riches cover a multitude of woes. 2. Only a few crumbling bricks are left today of the dark, foul-smelling alley in Frankfurt where, in the second half of the eighteenth century, a disenfranchised Jew named Meyer Rothschild founded a European banking dynasty. 3. Rothschild was a man of seemingly inexhaus...

My highlights from the book: 1. I started thinking about London and the German aerial assault of 1940-41, and wondered how on earth anyone could have endured it: fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, followed by an intensifying series of nighttime raids over the next six months. In particular I thought about Winston Churchill: How...

My highlights from the book: 1. Sometimes it takes a misstep to figure out where you should be headed. 2. Each game taught me something, each game was both painful and gratifying in its own way, and each game contributed to what came after it. 3. We are surrounded by decisions, and therefore games, in everything we do. 4. If my gravest...

My highlights from the book: 1. Hastily pulled together to fight the Axis, OSS was an odd creature—at once a collection of men and women from the upper crust of society on America's east coast, and a magnet for astonishingly talented and creative people from all walks of life, from Wall Street lawyers to Hollywood filmmakers, even the ...

My highlights from the book: 1. It was the summer I turned fifteen, a magical season for me because that year I'd discovered exactly what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I was going to be a bodybuilder. It wasn't simply that either. I would be the best bodybuilder in the world, the greatest. 2. I'm not exactly sure why I chose body...

My highlights from the book: 1. Casey pursued a Spartan business philosophy that emphasized military discipline, drab uniforms, and reliability over flash. 2. I had heard stories about the company's tireless founder. He was a living legend. Jim Casey started working from the age of eleven to support a family of five. 3. Casey began at ...

My highlights from the book: 1. The cameraman was excited and more than a little nervous. In a matter of moments he would enjoy a unique opportunity: the chance to snap the first unposed picture ever taken of the richest man in the world. The strange thing was that most Americans had never even heard of Daniel Keith Ludwig. 2. How coul...

My highlights from the book: 1. The more successful Linux and open source became the least he wanted to talk about it. The accidental revolutionary started Linux beause playing on a computer was fun. 2. Revolutionaries aren't born. Revolutions can't be planned. Revolutions can't be managed. Revolutions happen. 3. Basically it is short ...

My highlights from the book: 1. Naval has changed my life for the better, and if you approach the following pages like a friendly but highly competent sparring partner, he might just change yours. 2. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom. 3. If you don't ...

My highlights from the book: 1. Ford generally accepted the responsibilities of his celebrity-he'd worked diligently to cultivate it, realizing early on that his personal fame heightened demand for Model Ts. 2. Ford's Model T changed everything. Thanks in great part to Ford's innovative assembly line, Model Ts were mass-produced on a p...

My highlights from the book: 1. It dawned on me that the hordes of financial novices might be ripe for a history that would chronicle how the old Wall Street evolved into the new. A straight history would be a tedious task for readers and do small justice to the turbulent pageant of heroes and scoundrels I was unearthing. 2. So I posed...

My highlights from the book: 1. Microsoft had become the first software company to sell more than a billion dollars worth of software in a single year. 2. Gates was the undisputed mastermind of that success, a brilliant technocrat, ruthless salesman, and manipulative businessman. 3. Gates had slammed his fist into his palm and vowed to...

My highlights from the book: 1. Morgan was the most influential of these businessmen. He wasn’t the richest but that didn’t matter; he was commanding in a way none could match. 2. He was comfortable in his dominion, though never with his fame. 3. Morgan had an aristocrat’s disdain for public sentiment and the conviction that his action...

My highlights from the book: 1. Few men of Loomis’ prominence and achievement have gone to greater lengths to foil history. 2. Independently wealthy, iconoclastic, and aloof, Loomis did not conform to the conventional measure of a great scientist. He was too complex to categorize—financier, philanthropist, society figure, physicist, in...

My highlights from the book: 1. When Hearst was in college, he wrote his father that he intended to do something in publishing and politics -and he did, becoming San Francisco's, then New York's, and finally the nation's most powerful publisher. He served two terms in Congress and was, for half a century, a major force in American poli...

My highlights from the book: 1. The town of Hershey had been created first in the imagination of the chocolate industrialist Milton S. Hershey, who then made it real in a place where there had been little more than a few farmhouses and acres of corn. The chocolate factory, the school, and the town were supposed to make up a self-perpet...

My highlights from the book: 1. Brilliantly told, Revolver brings the brazenly ambitious and profoundly innovative industrialist and leader Samuel Colt to vivid life. In the space of his forty-seven years, he seemingly lived five lives: he traveled, womanized, drank prodigiously, smuggled guns to Russia, bribed politicians, and supplie...

My highlights from the book: 1. There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires, patriarchs of squabbling families who owned private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars, and jousted with presidents, and tried to corner an internat...

My highlights from the book: 1. Sam Walton was no ordinary man. He was a genius in business with an iron mind —some say pig-headed—unwilling to compromise any of his carefully thought out policies and principles. 2. To him, making money was only a game. A test of his imagination and expertise to see how far he could drive a business co...

My highlights from the book: 1. At age thirty Fredrick Wallace Smith was in deep trouble. His dream of creating Federal Express had become too expensive and was fast fizzling out. He had exhausted his father’s Greyhound Bus millions. He was hock for 15 or 20 million more. He appeared in danger of losing his cargo jet planes and also hi...