Bill Gates, John Brooks, Business Adventures

Bill Gates's Favorite Business Book - WSJ: "Brooks grew up in New Jersey during the Depression, attended Princeton University (where he roomed with future Secretary of State George Shultz ) and, after serving in World War II, turned to journalism with dreams of becoming a novelist. In addition to his magazine work, he published a handful of books, only some of which are still in print. He died in 1993. As the journalist Michael Lewis wrote in his foreword to Brooks's book "The Go-Go Years," even when Brooks got things wrong, "at least he got them wrong in an interesting way." Unlike a lot of today's business writers, Brooks didn't boil his work down into pat how-to lessons or simplistic explanations for success. (How many times have you read that some company is taking off because they give their employees free lunch?) You won't find any listicles in his work. Brooks wrote long articles that frame an issue, explore it in depth, introduce a few compelling characters and show how things went for them. In one called "The Impacted Philosophers," he uses a case of price-fixing at General Electric GE +1.34% to explore miscommunication—sometimes intentional miscommunication—up and down the corporate ladder. It was, he writes, "a breakdown in intramural communication so drastic as to make the building of the Tower of Babel seem a triumph of organizational rapport."...." (read more at link above)

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