On the Brink


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Hardcover
478 pages
ISBN 9780446561938 Published Feb. 2010
Business Plus
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On the Brink
Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System
By Henry M Paulson 

Related Blog Posts
The Best Business Books of 2010 from strategy + business
Posted Nov. 24, 2010 10:28 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

strategy + business's "best of" list is always a special treat—in large part because it's never just a list, but a series of essays. The magazine gathers together a different team of experts each year, and each takes the task of writing on their chosen category and the books in it. I've listed their picks below, linking to the essays at the head of each category.

On the Economy, The Fog of Panic by David Warsh

On Leadership, Highlights in a Low Year by Walter Kiechel III

On Innovation, Innovation as a Social Act by Krisztina “Z” Holly

On China, Probing China’s Infrastructure by Sheridan Prasso

On Human Capital, Talent Redefined by Sally Helgesen

On the Human Mind, You Are What You Think by Judith E. Glaser

On Management, The Chorus Takes a Bow by David K. Hurst

On Biography & History, True Tales of Fortune by James O’Toole

The covers below represent s + b's Top Shelf—the best books of each category.

As Theodore Kinni writes in his introduction to the essays:

Two years after the financial collapse, the idea of hunkering down and waiting for a return to business as usual—as people did in previous recessions—seems a less and less viable strategy. But what should you do instead?

In this edition of our annual review of the year’s best business books, you will find a reading list that offers intriguing and compelling answers to this question.

We've been following this list since 2003, and you can peruse past year's lists with the links below.

2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009



Bloomberg Picks 30
Posted Nov. 19, 2010 9:02 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Here's a list we missed late last month. Though the post is rather cryptically titled Hellhound Bites Citigroup, Schwarzman Finds Gold Mine: Top Business Books, Bloomberg's James Pressley explains exactly why they put the list together:

With so many business books being published each month, we’re often asked for recommendations. Here are 30 of our favorite hardbacks published this year.

I've taken out the author's brief descriptions of each book (head on over to the original post for those), and have taken the liberty to break the books up into a few categories. You'll notice while perusing the titles that the list tends toward larger narratives (many of the financial crisis), biographies and financial history, which I'm a big fan of, and I think makes a lot of sense for Bloomberg and its readers.

A quick note: Many of the books I put in the "Economics" category are, at least in part, about the economic crisis. The books I chose to list in the "Economics" category are those that offer a detailed prescription to the crisis, rather than just documenting the causes and events of it (not that the latter is a lesser task). The books in the "Economics" category were also, by-and-large, written by economists, while those in the "Histories & Narratives of the Economic Crisis" were written by journalists and participants on Wall Street.

Histories & Narratives of the Economic Crisis

Economics

Financial History & Biographies

Other

Looking over the list, I'm reminded once again what a good year this has been for business books.

If you're an entrepreneur looking for ideas or nuts-and-bolts books on business, this list may not be a great help to you (We'll provide you one that will be on December 15th). But if you're an investor in or student of markets and business, it doesn't get much better than this.



Amazon's Best of 2010
Posted Nov. 4, 2010 9:28 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Amazon has announced their Best of 2010 list, and a business book cracked the top 10 overall choices. Michael Lewis's The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine barely did so, coming in at number 10. (Two other books in the top ten that may appeal to nonfiction readers are The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson, which came in at numbers one and five respectively.)

As they've done in previous years, Amazon has broken the books into separate categories and listed their editors' picks next to the customer favorites. I always enjoy seeing the differences between what editors choose and customers vote for with their pocket books. And I would enjoy it more if I were Michael Lewis, who topped both lists in the Business and Investing category.

The customer favorites were:

The editors' picks were:

If you're interested in what's been listed in the past, I've linked to our post from previous years below.

Best of 2009 | Best of 2008 | Best of 2007 | Best of 2006 | Best of 2005 | Best of 2004



Books as Intellectual Assets in an Economic Discourse
Posted March 18, 2010 3:30 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Michael Lewis's latest book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, was released this week to a lot of media attention and bestseller lists. We'll review the book more in depth on this site and elsewhere over the coming weeks, but its very release is what's giving me hope this week.

You see, for all the doom-and-gloom surrounding publishing these days, publishers themselves have done a quietly masterful job of finding books that put the Great Recession, and what caused it, in focus over the last year and a half—Michael Lewis being but the latest (albeit one of the finest) voices in the choir that publishers have been directing. And I think it is a very important task they're accomplishing. In a media environment dominated by the 24 hour news-cycle, and inundated with soundbites and tweets that flutter into the crowded cultural ether, soon to be forgotten, it is important that someone documents what went wrong in depth—where, why, when and how—and, dare I say, on paper.

And we need these books and the discussions they raise not only in academic circles, not only in and our intellectual and political culture; we need it in our popular culture. An academic dissection of what exactly went wrong, by the numbers, is important. But we need more than an economist's dissertation on the situation (though many economist's have written excellent and accessible books on the crisis). Newspapers and magazines can document the events as they're happening, and often provide a invaluable insight or angle that sheds light on what's going on. But the story is ever-changing, always evolving, and their job is to follow it, to report on its latest developments—sometimes at the expense of the larger picture (though some of the best books on the recession have been from journalists that stepped back from it all to distill that picture). Cable news and the echo chamber of the political blogosphere have their place, but we need more than talking points and counterpoints.

And this is what publishers have been so good at: finding authors and books that can inform and influence all of those discussions (and, at the same time, transcend them) and then getting them out there to do so. The are capturing the larger narratives by finding authors that can write them. They have told many stories, by many authors, from many different angles, exposing the different elements and individuals involved in the crisis. The books they've put out are, generally, well-researched and written well enough to hold serious intellectual weight, but not so obscure that the general public can't understand what's going on. The stories in these books are complicated, and often insane, but these authors are making them accessible, and publishers are making them available.

It may sound like hyperbole, but I think these books can help better not only the business and financial worlds, but the world itself. They tell a story we'll need to hear before we can correct the course our economy has been on. I sincerely hope those with their hands on the levers of power are listening to (and reading) them as they're discussing how to do so.

Here is a quick list of some of the books that I'd suggest (if you have some, please add them in the comments section):

That's just a start, and I know I'm missing a lot... probably some big ones. And that's not even getting into those books that focus more on how we recover, reset and reform our financial system (and individual companies) now that all the damage has occurred—books like Anna Bernasek's The Economics of Integrity that discuss solutions on a macro level and the Boston Consulting Group's Accelerating Out of the Great Recession that do so on a micro level.

Andrew Ross Sorkin concluded his book, Too Big to Fail, with a great story:

When the post-bailout debate was still at its highest pitch, Jamie Dimon sent Hank Paulson a note with a quote from a speech that Theodore Roosevelt delivered at the Sorbonne in April 1910 entitled "Citizenship of the Republic." It reads:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

It was a remarkable quote for Dimon to have chosen. While Roosevelt's words described a hero, they were deeply ambiguous about whether that hero succeeded or failed. And so it is with Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and the dozens of public- and private-sector figures who populate this drama. It will be left to history to judge how they fared during their own time "in the arena."

In my opinion, publishers are doing a wonderful job of documenting "the arena" for us all (and hopefully those inside the arena) to consider... and for history to judge.




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