Creativity Inc.

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.

Winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To achieve that end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now...

Few entrepreneurs can claim to have radically changed the way we live, and Ray Kroc is one of them. His revolutions in food-service automation, franchising, shared national training, and advertising have earned him a place beside the men and women who have founded not only businesses, but entire empires. But even more interesting than Ray Kroc the business man is Ray Kroc the man. Not your typical self-made tycoon, Kroc was 52 years old when he opened his first franchise.  

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?

Developing video games—hero's journey or fool's errand? The creative and technical logistics that go into building today's hottest games can be more harrowing and complex than the games themselves, often seeming like an endless maze or a bottomless abyss. In Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Jason Schreier takes listeners on a fascinating odyssey behind the scenes of video game development, where the creator may be a team of 600 overworked underdogs or a solitary geek genius.

While most books and press focus on the more sensational moments of creation and conclusion, The Messy Middle argues that the real key to success is how you navigate the ups and downs after initial investment is secured. It will give you all the insights you need to build and optimise your team, improve your product and develop your own capacity to lead. Building on seven years of meticulous research with entrepreneurs, small agencies, start-ups and billion-dollar companies, Scott Belsky offers indispensable lessons on how to endure and thrive in the long term.

The secrets of creative thinking by a lecturer at the world famous St. Martin's College of Art who has spent a lifetime researching innovative thinkers. A scuba-diving company faces bankruptcy because sharks have infested the area. Solution? Open the world's first extreme diving school. The Art of Creative Thinking reveals how we can transform ourselves, our businesses, and our society through a deeper understanding of human creativity.

In Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Walter Isaacson provides an extraordinary account of Jobs' professional and personal life. Drawn from three years of exclusive and unprecedented interviews Isaacson has conducted with Jobs as well as extensive interviews with Jobs' family members and key colleagues from Apple and its competitors, this is the definitive portrait of the greatest innovator of his generation.

What valuable company is nobody building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to 10, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from zero to one. This book is about how to get there.

One day in November 1994, Lawrence Levy received a phone call out of the blue from Steve Jobs, whom he'd never met, offering him a job running Pixar, a little-known company that had already lost Jobs $50 million. With Pixar's prospects looking bleak, it was with some trepidation that Levy accepted the position. After a few weeks he discovered that the situation was even worse than he'd imagined.

In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.

Over 10,000 years ago there were fewer than 10 million people on the planet. Today there are more than six billion, 99 per cent of whom are better fed, better sheltered, better entertained and better protected against disease than their Stone Age ancestors. Yet, bizarrely, however much things improve from the way they were before, people still cling to the belief that the future will be nothing but disastrous.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Rising Strong, written and read by Brené Brown. The physics of vulnerability is simple: if we are brave enough often enough, we will fall. This is a book about what it takes to get back up and how owning our stories of disappointment, failure and heartbreak gives us the power to write a daring new ending. Struggle can be our greatest call to courage and Rising Strong our clearest path to deeper meaning, wisdom and hope.

Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Who Is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovits, read by Dennis Boutsikaris. If you're going to listen to one audiobook about Hollywood, this is the one. As co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Michael Ovitz earned a reputation for ruthless negotiation, brilliant strategy and fierce loyalty to his clients. He reinvented the role of the agent and helped shape the careers of hundreds of A-list stars and directors, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Sean Connery, Steven Seagal, Bill Murray, Robin Williams and David Letterman.