Company stories and CEO memoirs

How Southwest Airlines built its low-cost model and its culture under Herb Kelleher.

Nucor's chief executive on flat structure, incentive pay and minimills

How Hollywood really makes money, mostly away from the box office.

Enlightened hospitality: put employees first, then guests, community and investors.

How LEGO nearly failed from overexpansion and how it recovered.

Nokia's chairman on selling the phone unit to Microsoft and buying Alcatel-Lucent.

Classic on the bet-the-company economics of airliner programs.

The parent company's quality turnaround against Japanese copiers.

Insider account by Xerox's CEO of the quality-driven turnaround.

The admiring contemporary account of Welch's restructuring.

The publishing-side reference on royalty streams and licensing income.

The contemporaneous dissent, twenty years ahead of the consensus.

Contemporary admiring account; useful as a record of what people believed.

The delivery method behind the fee.

The standard academic text on airline economics.

Nokia's emerging-market operating model at the turn

Insider account: the CEO from 1999-2009 on the operating model.

Insider account by the executive who launched Amazon Marketplace.

Insider-access management study of Lee Kun-hee's reforms

Fujifilm CEO memoir

Insider account: Alibaba's chief strategy officer on platform design.

Business-model analysis rather than a life.

Insider account: Immelt's defence of his sixteen years as CEO.

Insider account: Nooyi's memoir of twelve years as CEO.

Polemic treating Welch's GE as the template for shareholder primacy.

Investigative account of who pays for consulting advice.

Twelve New Yorker stories of business, from the Edsel's failure to the 1962 crash.

Insider account: a Kodak manager on turning around the film unit.

Detroit's early-1990s crisis and the GM boardroom coup.

US airlines after 1978 deregulation through Crandall, Lorenzo and Kelleher.

Greenberg's own memos; the cost culture Bear ran on before it broke.

Running General Electric from 1981 to 2001, as told on retiring.

Academic study of relational coordination and turnaround times.

How IBM was kept whole in 1993 and turned from hardware toward services.

Aldi's hard-discount method: radical simplicity as the way to keep costs low.

Michael Eisner's twenty years running Disney, from turnaround to shareholder revolt.

Insider account: former head of people on hiring and retention.

Insider account by the long-serving chief operating officer.

Full-scale biography by a Harvard business historian.

Consultant's distillation of Starbucks service principles.

How Detroit fell from postwar dominance to the 2009 bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler.

Insider management account from Southwest's long-serving president.

Fortune correspondent's inside look at the collapse.

Insider account: Lutz on product culture versus finance control.

Novel, but the standard introduction to how ship finance actually works.

The 2006-2010 turnaround told with close management access.

A decade working in hotels, from valet to front desk, and the hustles behind them.

Simplicity as Apple's operating principle, from the adman who worked with Jobs.

How the modern consulting partnership was invented and priced.

The best modern account of Honda's decentralized engineering culture.

How Google hired and managed smart creatives, people who can't be told what to do.

What Japanese companies that have lasted over a century have in common.

The secretly funded litigation that destroyed Gawker.

Running Disney and buying Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm and Fox to add creative talent.

Sell-side analysts comparing Boeing, GE, Honeywell and Danaher.

The Lemann-Telles-Sicupira management system, written for operators.

Amazon's operating mechanisms, from leadership principles to the six-page memo.