Jack Ma named his favorite childhood book as 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,' about a woodcutter who takes the initiative to change his own fate.

Jack’s most favourite Wuxia novel is The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, in which he admires the character, Feng Qingyang, most. In the Chinese CCTV talk show, Jack said that he particularly appreciated Feng Qingyang’s ability to solve the problems unconventionally, and that he taught his student Ling Hu Chong to be a great wanderer. Wwhile he himself was a teacher before, he always wanted his students and colleagues to surpass him and be successful in their own life too.

The passing this week of Louis Cha, better known by his pen name Jin Yong, brought a reminder of how important his books were for Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, in the company’s early days. Millions have read Mr. Cha’s tales of the martial arts underworld, making him likely the best known modern writer in the Chinese-speaking world.Mr. Ma, a devotee of the wuxia martial arts style Mr. Cha wrote about, is one of his biggest fans.

If a country wants to remain economically vibrant, it needs to manufacture things. In recent years, however, many nations have become obsessed with making money out of selling services, leaving the real business of manufacturing to others.Makers is about how all that is being reversed. Over the past ten years, the internet has democratised publishing, broadcasting and communications, leading to a massive increase in the range of participation in everything digital - the world of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing - the world of things.Chris Anderson, bestselling author of The Long Tail, explains how this is happening: how such technologies as 3D printing and electronics assembly are becoming available to everybody, and how people are building successful businesses as a result. Whereas once every aspiring entrepreneur needed the support of a major manufacturer, now anybody with a smart idea and a little expertise can make their ideas a reality. Just as Google, Facebook and others have created highly successful companies in the virtual world, so these new inventors and manufacturers are assuming positions of ever greater importance in the real world.The next industrial revolution is on its way.

2017 Reprint of 1939 First Edition. Volume One Only. Volume Two published separately by Martino Fine Books ISBN 978-1-68422-065-6. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Schumpeter is without doubt one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. "Business Cycles" [1939] is considered his great work. We reprint the first edition published in 1939 in two volumes. In "Business Cycles" Schumpeter focuses powerfully on the historical role of technological innovation in accounting for the high degree of instability in capitalists societies. He aims to analyze empirically the actual process of economic development using historical and statistical material based on the theoretical framework he developed in earlier writings. He tried to integrate theory and history primarily by means of statistics. It is because he adopted the method of filling in the statistical contours with detailed industrial history that "Business Cycles" comprises two large volumes. A Classic work.

Welcome to the new future of involvement. Forming groups is easier than it�s ever been: unpaid volunteers can build an encyclopaedia together in their spare time, mistreated customers can join forces to get their revenge on airlines and high street banks, and one man with a laptop can raise an army to help recover a stolen phone. The results of this new world of easy collaboration can be both good (young people defying an oppressive government with a guerrilla ice-cream eating protest) and bad (girls sharing advice for staying dangerously skinny) but it�s here and, as Clay Shirky shows, it�s affecting � well, everybody. For the first time, we have the tools to make group action truly a reality. And they�re going to change our whole world.

What happens when there is almost unlimited choice? When everything becomes available to everyone? And when the combined value of the millions of items that only sell in small quantities equals or even exceeds the value of a handful of best-sellers?In this ground-breaking book, Chris Anderson shows that the future of business does not lie in hits - the high-volume end of a traditional demand curve - but in what used to be regarded as misses - the endlessly long tail of that same curve. As our world is transformed by the Internet and the near infinite choice it offers consumers, so traditional business models are being overturned and new truths revealed about what consumers want and how they want to get it. Chris Anderson first explored the Long Tail in an article in Wired magazine that has become one of the most influential business essays of our time. Now, in this eagerly anticipated book, he takes a closer look at the new economics of the Internet age, showing where business is going and exploring the huge opportunities that exist: for new producers, new e-tailers, and new tastemakers. He demonstrates how long tail economics apply to industries ranging from the toy business to advertising to kitchen appliances. He sets down the rules for operating in a long tail economy. And he provides a glimpse of a future that's already here.

"This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?"What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell Douglas as the world's best commercial aircraft company -- what did Boeing have that McDonnell Douglas lacked?By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies.Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Lao Tzu's 'Tao Te Ching', or Book of the Way, is the classic manual on the art of living and one of the wonders of the world. In eighty-one brief chapters, the 'Tao Te Ching' llods at the basic predicatment of being alive and gives advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit. This book is about wisdom in action. It teaches how wo work for the good with the efforless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao (the basic principle of the universe) and applies equally to good government and sexual love, to childrearing, business, and ecology. The Tao Te Ching is the most widely traslated book in world literature, after the Bible. Yet the gemlike lucidity of the original has eluded most previous translations, and they have obscured some of its central ideas.