Barbarians at The Gate is a prominent book within the financial industry and a great book to read for a deeper look inside how the private equity world works. The book is an account of one most famous leveraged buyout cases in the history of private equity. The story is about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, Inc. by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., more commonly known as KKR, a tycoon in the private equity business in 1988. The book is written by two journalists of the wall street journal, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar and the chain of articles they wrote about during the entire longevity of the buyout process, through interviews with the key players in the deal. For anyone who is interested in the complex yet simple world of leveraged buyouts, the book is a must read to understand the nature of the deals and how anything goes and the characters and the psychology of people.
The chieftain of the book is Ross Johnson, the fiery, energetic and entertaining Chief Executive Officer of RJR Nabisco. The Canadian businessman got his start in General Electric as an accountant, after graduating from University of Manitoba in 1952, through a military scholarship. After General Electric, he moved on to T. Eaton Company where he was the Vice-President of merchandising. Shortly after, he was named president of Standard Brands Ltd. From there, Johnson began his reign to the top of the corporate ladder, by discussing a merger between his company and Nabisco with the than CEO of
In Larry Lankton’s text, “Beyond the Boundaries” we gradually enter an unknown world that is frightening yet filled with immense beauty for miles. Due to the copper mining industry, a gradual increase of working class men and their families start to migrate to the unknown world with unsteady emotion, yet hope for a prosperous new life. In “Beyond the Boundaries”, Lankton takes us on a journey on how the “world below” transformed the upper peninsula into a functional and accepted new part of the world.
Earlier in his career, Jim was a controversial figure among investors and financial analysts on Wall Street. They blamed Jim for being too generous towards Costco’s employees and not bringing immediate profit to the shareholders1. But after weathering the recession and retaining a return rate of over 10 percent, Jim Sinegal is now revered on Wall Street. His ideology of building a long-lasting company has been successful. Additionally, during the recession, unlike other CEO’s, Jim implemented policies that prevented lay-offs and, in the process, managed to keep Costco’s balance statement in the black. He used strategies such as establishing a strong identity for their private-label offerings. For example, after the economic meltdown, Kirkland Signatures (Costco’s private label) was able to provide customers with a low cost alternative while maintaining the quality they were accustomed to.
The documentary “Merchants of Doubt” directed by Robert Keener describes the unethical practices of manipulating scientific data to market unsafe products. It explains the use of public relations and media to divert the health risk involved in smoking in order to protect the industry. The documentary exposes how companies hire a third party, presented as credible scientific expert, to mislead people about the company’s unsafe products. Those people selling lies to cover for the company’s wrongdoing are called “merchants of doubt”. They create a sense of doubt in the veracity of the scientific data and results collected by the scientist. This strategy of creating doubt and confusion causes delay in government regulation. The documentary shows
The wise country store owner who shares personal stories of overcoming criticism and the odds stacked against him.
The universe doesn’t owe you, me, or anyone a thing, except for death. Though as kids most of us were led to believe that with enough effort and hard work were going to become whatever we wanted to be, we were going to have whatever our little hearts desired, and we were going to do whatever we wanted to do. However, as we grew up we realized that this is not the case. There are millions of people who did not become professional athletes, models, or billionaires, people who never got to have the mansions, cars, and fame that they always longed for, people who never got to travel the world, cure cancer, or fly into space. These are all mostly childlike dreams, which were probably imposed unto us by either our parents or society. There’s nothing wrong with children having these sort of improbable dreams, however, there comes a time where we can no longer be children. In the story Tandolfo the Great, written by Richard Bausch, we are introduced to Rodney Wilbury aka Tandolfo the Great, who is a suitable example to demonstrate what life can be like for those who are unable to grow out of their childlike mind sets. In this analysis I will be inspecting how Tandolfo the Great’s childish mind set, from his strong sense of entitlement to his inability to let go of the past events, has almost destroyed his life and how it can destroy anyone else’s.
Often heralded as the world’s greatest nation, the United States is also considered home to the world’s greatest authors. Reputable authors such as Fitzgerald, Twain, and Steinbeck remain relevant even through the washing waves of time. One such timeless author, Ray Bradbury, ventured the hazardous path of taboo to write of change. Through his novels of innocent youths evolving into children enlightened beyond their years, Bradbury utilizes the motif of time, innocence, and the philosophical movements of existentialism, transcendentalism, and romanticism to describe catastrophic events the American culture could face if existing destitute judgments continue to prevail. Ray Bradbury dared to reveal his voice.
Kurt Vonnegut followed many principles in his writings. He claimed that “people do not realize that they are happy” (PBS NOW Transcript). Feeling that people had the wrong view on war, he felt that he needed to get the facts straight. Vonnegut believed that art can come from awful situations, and that the truth is not always easy to look at. Kurt Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse – Five to tell of his experience in the bombing of Dresden, as a prisoner in war and the atrocities that occurred.
Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut takes places on two contrasting planets. One is Earth, where war tears apart families and minds, and the other is Tralfamadore, where supernatural alien beings share their extended knowledge of the world. Vonnegut uses the two planets, Earth and Tralfamadore, to show the contrasting ideas of chaos and order, and that human actions have limitations that render them helpless against a meaningless universe.
The literary element setting includes the time when the story happens and location where the story takes place. Some stories use variety of settings to initiate an interesting beginning. However, the 12 Angry Man has only one fixed setting – the jury room, which is not commonly used in a novel. The author, Reginald Rose, overcomes the limitation in setting by describing changes in weather, initiating different types of character and imitating the events of the murder.
“When a rule is enforced, the person who is supposed to have broken it may be seen as a special kind of person, one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group. He is regarded as an outsider.
Slaughterhouse-five strives to remember the tragedy of the bombing of Dresden. Kurt Vonnegut constructs his novel around a main character who becomes “unstuck in time” (23). Billy Pilgrim’s life is told out of order, which gives him a different perspective than the rest of the world. Billy lives through his memories, and revisits events in his life at random times and without warning. Vonnegut introduces Billy Pilgrim to the Tralfamadorian way of thinking about memory and time so that he can cope with being unstuck in time. The Tralfamadorian ideology is set up as an alternative to the human ideology of life. In the novel Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut constructs a reality where memory is unproductive through the Tralfamadorian
At the closure of the paper, recommendations are being presented not only to the portfolio manager but also to the AutoZone. Interestingly, how much of an impact can an interference of a corporate raider have on the growth of a company
Humans have always had a complicated relationship with non-human animals. This relationship has always benefitted the needs of humans, with little consideration for animals’ needs. Some animals are tortured for entertainment, some are butchered for food and others are taken from their habitat and family, and forced to be pets for humans. These are all examples of the ways humans have exploited animals for their own satisfaction. Hal Herzog’s essay “Animals Like Us” describes the complicated relationship that humans and animals have, and how difficult it is to determine what is ethical when dealing with animals. Jonathan Safran Foer makes a similar observation in his essay “The Fruits of Family Trees” of the ethical issues in the
Social stratification is a concept used within sociology that explains the divisions and social inequalities of large groups of people within a particular society. The Hunger Games (2012) is a film that demonstrates this through amplifying how the power of the rich members in a polarised society are taking control of the poor and separating them in different districts which create specific social rankings. This essay will use the perspective of conflict theory to examine how Australian society is also effected by social stratification and therefore divided in social classes which effects their access to social equalities.
“Little People, Big World” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” “The Bachelor” and “Survivor,” “The Biggest Loser” and “The Real World” “Miss America” and “American Idol”—it is difficult to watch American television in the first decade of the twenty-first century without encountering a freak. Britney Spears, called her 2009, forty-nine show tour through the US, Canada and the UK. Perhaps, more accurately, it is not so much that the circus goes on as that the circus has been revived in the American imagination. According to Robert Bogdan in his socio-historical study of the freak show in America, the popularity of the circus had run its course by the 1940s (60), attracting in its waning years a lower class of audience, such as new American immigrants, the rural poor and the urban working class (55). The exhibition of freaks had become morally incorrect. Strangely, at the turn of the twenty-first century, America is revealing a renewed fascination with freaks, a fascination that has not been so publicly apparent since the Victorian era when freak exhibits were all the rage, and not just for backward country folk waiting for the travelling circus to roll through town, but for sophisticated big city people who frequented P.T. Barnum’s famous American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street in New York City. This time around, it is middle America enjoying the circus on their wide-screen televisions in the privileged privacy of their dens and theater rooms. As the vast array of freaks in the