Biography of entrepreneurs pdf writer

Emotions: The objective of a biographical approach cannot be to unduly psychologize the entrepreneur, his behavior, or his opinions on political, business, or personal issues. This is all the more true as success and failure with all of their personal, structural and contingent causes constitute a central momentum in the life of an entrepreneur.

The concepts and methodological considerations of a new history of emotions may be helpful in this context. Plumpe, 81—96, 57—80, and 27—56, respectively. Entrepreneurs may choose business models or forms of organization for their functionality or for context-sensitive and highly individualistic, even private, reasons. The social role of the entrepreneur cannot be separated from his or her enterprise.

At the same time, the urge for autonomy is characteristic of the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Transfers of knowledge not only refer to formal education but especially to knowledge about business practices, in particular, and social and cultural practices, in general. Transfers of property rights refer to diferent models for mobilizing social, cultural and economic capital, e.

The last case has proven to be a major problem especially with family businesses: The prospect of future dynastical succession both intrigues and appalls many founders who consider themselves irreplaceable. The handling of an unscheduled, controversial, or poorly planned succession produces problems not only within the family but also within the corporation or the network of business partners.

Both dimensions of transfer — knowledge and property rights — relate to family and kin, which turned out to be important agents in the constitution of transnational networks. Embeddedness: The idea of embeddedness of economic activity refers both to social relations in a wide sense of the word family and kin, friendship, labor relations, business partners, and even competitors as well as to the cultural embeddedness of markets, sectors, and business procedures.

Jahrhundert Munich, forthcoming. Christopher H. Johnson New York, , 1—21 and , respectively. Temporality: The idea of taking into account the time of history not only reminds us to situate the object of a biography within a generational succession. Important moments and decisions may be densely narrated, but they are not the only moments of change and dynamics; change over the long run may be as fundamental.

Putting the focus on decisive moments can evoke the false illusion of biographical straightness, of an obstacle course from one point of culmination to another. Thinking about temporality may also remind us that the outcome of a decision is unknown to entrepreneurs as they make them. The life courses of the biographical subjects were not linear — and their biographical depiction should not be either.

Supposedly nondecisive phases in the lives of entrepreneurs should not be contracted inappropriately in biographical accounts. The diference between narrated time and narrative time hints at temporal gaps and distortions that are present in the self- representation of biographical subjects as well as in our own construction of their life tales.

We do not need to renounce them as a means of representation, but we may choose them consciously. Self- Representation: The self-image of biographical subjects as well as their outside perception and depiction can be important dimensions of biography. This includes the self- representation of entrepreneurs within their country of origin, within an immigrant, religious, or local community, or on other levels.

Such narratives of self-made men and women versus nouveaux riches, and tales of rise and decline represent unspoken biographies written long before biographers started their work. Examining these narratives and the ways biographies and even the memories of the subjects have been written, rewritten, and overwritten by the subjects themselves, by family, contemporaries or successors — like some sort of palimpsest — prevents us from unconsciously borrowing for our own historiographical narrative.

They allow a rich and dense narration, they give coherent explanations for decisive moments that oten are diicult to assess if written sources are missing and decisions were made only ater oral deliberation. Thorough source critique can prevent biographers from overvaluing these instruments of self-historicization and from uncritically adopting the perspective of the person who ought to be the object of study.

First of all, microhistory reminds us of the pitfalls of the biographical method, which ought to be not only about giving a life story. Biographies tend to individualize corporate decisions, to reiterate the self-perception of businesspeople and their posture of omnipresent dominance within the enterprise. Biographies run the risk of retroactively reinforcing hierarchies as they oten neglect forms of cooperation, shared responsibility, and joint management.

Such people might exist, but in most cases, historical reality is more complicated. They are interconnected in manifold ways and on diferent levels. If there were functional relations, they do not resemble a one-way street and were neither evident to the agents nor clear to us. Jahrhundert: Netzwerke — Nachfolge — soziales Kapital, ed. Susanne Hilger and Ulrich S.

Paul L. Robertson London, , — Most oten, this narrative is as monocausal as it is linear. Second, such founding myths are integrated into a generational sequence. The subsequent generation oten gets moralized, and false historical necessities are constructed. This fable is deeply moral: On the one hand, the sense of justice is engaged against inept heirs and attracts sympathy for the disappointed founder.

These changes, even if primarily privately motivated, can be both economically rational and socially accepted. This is the last reminder of the microhistorical approach. Its methodological framework fosters our intellectual openness and discourages us from telling easy tales of biographical success and failure. Instead of a Conclusion Biographies and group biographies and the history of individual businesses can and need to be studied in their own right.

Nevertheless, the biographical approach includes the methodological problem of interpreting particular cases against the background of cultural, social, and economic processes. This exceeds the elementary demand for historical contextualization, which, by the way, is not simple at all. The microhistorical approach encourages us to choose X in an experimental way, putting aside presuppositions and obvious reference points: Relating the biography of Henry Ford to the history of automatization would only lead us to reproduce what we already know about him and the Tin Lizzy.

Complexity is added not only to a limited area of observation, to the particular biography, but also to relevant theories and conceptions of business, economy and society, which unconsciously underlie our assessment of past and present reality. In this way, microhistory encourages us to increase the complexity of entrepreneur biographies.

It leaves us the freedom and the responsibility to decide on the scales of the study and on our experimental perspectives. Barbara W. Stephen B. Oates Amherst, MA, , 93—, 93 originally published in His major publications on the educational and business history of the Third Reich include Dr. Oetker und der Nationalsozialismus.

Biography of entrepreneurs pdf writer

Bridging brand and experience design Adrian Ho. Handout Grammar notes Silvia Ramos. Two portraits of Alibaba founder Jack Ma provide the other side of the picture. This year, we have a biography from somebody who had equally close access to Jack Ma. Englishman Duncan Clark has lived and worked in China for over two decades as an investment advisor, first for Morgan Stanley and then his own firm, BDA.

He first met Ma in in the small apartment where Alibaba was born. Phil Knight, chairman emeritus of Nike. Photo credit: Nike. Phil Knight borrowed 50 bucks from his father to sell high-quality, low-cost shoes imported from Japan to the US. Internet pioneer Steve Case. Photo credit: Third Wave Book. Steve Case is a pioneer of the internet age.

He co-founded internet service provider AOL in and later merged it with Time Warner to preside over the biggest media and communication empire in the nineties. In his version of The Third Wave , which is part memoir and part roadmap for the future, Steve describes three eras of the internet. The first wave was AOL and others connecting consumers to the internet.

The second wave saw the likes of Google and Facebook ride on the internet. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk is considered the new Steve Jobs, inspiring entrepreneurs everywhere with his disruptive ideas and cool factor. His quotes serve as a guide just as Steve Jobs quotes used to do the rounds. Bloomberg Businessweek writer Ashlee Vance brings journalistic detailing into his biography of Elon Musk.

Give Musk credit. His book is a mixture of practical wisdom and personal narrative. He shares his everyday experiences — including goof-ups — in building and managing companies, right from his days at Netscape with Marc Andreessen. Photo credit: Steve Jurvetson. Jeff Bezos went from being a bookseller to transforming the retail industry. Amazon took risky early bets in other areas too, such as cloud computing.

Its influence extends across the world, rising fast to dominate ecommerce in many countries beyond its home territory. Veteran tech journalist Brad Stone captures the relentless drive and out-of-the-box thinking behind the rise of Amazon. This book is still a must-read. Sheryl Sandberg. Photo credit: World Economic Forum. The founders spoke about gender-related hurdles they face, but also the limitations they sometimes place upon themselves.

He distinguishes out, though, for his relentless search for new markets that have seen him steer Amazon into high-risk projects like the Kindle and cloud computing while also revolutionising shopping in the same way Henry Ford did with manufacturing. The Everything Store is a riveting, comprehensive account of the business that made one of the initial and most significant stands on the world wide web and fundamentally altered how we browse and purchase.

The definitive biography of Warren Buffett, amongst the most admired individuals in the world, is available here. The renowned Omaha investor has never published a book, but he gave one writer, Alice Schroeder , an unparalleled opportunity to interview him and others who were most important to him about his career, beliefs, problems, victories, mistakes, and insights.

As a consequence, the person known as "The Oracle of Omaha" has a comprehensive and emotionally engaging biography. Buffett has never revealed his entire life narrative, even though the mainstream media follows him regularly. Warren Buffett is full of contradictions. He set out to demonstrate that a good person can come in first. He promoted honesty as an investor, CEO, board member, writer, and speaker over the years, treating his investors as partners and serving as their stewards.

From the humble Omaha headquarters of his firm Berkshire Hathaway , he simultaneously rose to the position of the richest man in the world. Nothing about this is "basic". When Alice Schroeder first met Warren Buffett, she was a skilled writer with a good eye for detail and financial acumen. She also worked as an analyst for the financial industry.

He was impressed by her financial articles, and as she got to know him, she discovered that while much had been published about his investment approach, no one had gone further to examine his bigger ideology, which is intertwined with a complicated persona and the specifics of his experience. This led to his deciding to work with her on the autobiography he wouldn't ever pen down.

Buffett, before this publication, never spent endless hours conversing with a writer, answering questions, allowing them to complete visibility to his family, children, friends, acquaintances, and business partners, unlocking his archives, and remembering his early years. It was a brave thing to do, as The Snowball makes very evident. Being a mortal, his journey has had both pluses and minuses, as most journeys do.

Buffett's principles and beliefs that have improved people's lives will be remembered instead of his position on the wealth scoreboard, even though his fortune is still remarkable. This story depicts why Warren Buffett is today's most remarkable example of American business success. Here is a remarkable success tale of a man whose empire was established by hard work rather than deception.

In Sam Walton's own words, this is "a tale of risk-taking, work and effort, and business; of understanding where you wish to go and getting prepared to do whatever it requires to achieve that goal. It's also a tale about adhering to your principles and trusting in your ideas even when others might not. It tells the tale of how Sam Walton transformed Walmart, the biggest retailer in the world, from a single discount store in a struggling textile town.

He never lacked the common touch while reigning as the unquestioned merchant monarch of the late 20th century. Here, Walton shares his remarkable tale in his unique terms. Genuinely modest yet always confident in his goals and successes, Walton expresses his ideas in a straightforward, plain manner. Starbucks' president and chairman, Howard Schultz now interim CEO , decided to resume his role as CEO in , 8 years after he had backed away from the regular management of the business and taken on the role of chairman.

Schultz was committed to assisting Starbucks in getting back on track, reestablishing its essential principles, and regaining its economic health since he believed the company had wandered off course. In Onward, he and fellow writer, Joanne Gordon, tells the incredible story of Howard's comeback and the company's sustainable change under his management, demonstrating how Starbucks once more successfully achieved sustainability and profitability without losing compassion amid one of the most turbulent economic periods in history.

The book zooms in to reveal, in engrossing detail, how one firm battled and remade itself in the midst of everything. The fast-moving story gives readers an insight into Schultz's mind as he learns to accept his limits and his changing management style while being pushed by the pressure that arises on a daily basis as disputes. The fascinating, honest tale Onward charts the development of both a business and a businessman.

Schultz's core leadership principle, Onward, is that success is not just about winning, but also about winning the right way. In the end, he gives readers what he works so hard to convey every day: a sense of optimism that, no matter how difficult things become, the future may still be just as successful as the past, or perhaps more successful, depending on how success is defined.

The amazing unseen tale of how Netflix evolved from a vision to a business is recounted in the style of Phil Knight's Shoe Dog, and it is all narrated by co-founder and former CEO, Marc Randolph. Brick-and-mortar video storefronts previously reigned supreme. Late fines were commonplace, video streaming was unknown, and the mass acceptance of DVDs appeared to be about as far off as flying automobiles.

In fact, when Marc Randolph had an idea in , these were the generally recognised rules of the nation. It was a straightforward idea—using the internet to rent movies—but it was one of several, much worse recommendations that Randolph would make to Reed Hastings on their daily journey to work, including those for customised baseball bats and a shampoo delivery company.