Showing results by publisher "Little, Brown Book Group" in Business & Careers

This account describes how a 28-year-old from Watford, Nick Leeson, plunged Barings Bank into ruin. In 1994, Leeson seemed to be making the company millions of pounds a week, but he explains how the cover-up of a colleague's small error led to the crash of Britain's oldest merchant bank.

What do you say when your new job is very different from what you agreed to? How do you tell your boss that your workload is too heavy or that you need more training? How do you deal with a colleague whose loud speakerphone calls are driving you insane? And how do you repair your reputation after getting drunk at the company holiday party? Ten years of writing a workplace advice column have taught Green that people tend to avoid difficult conversations in the office because we simply don't know what to say. But the stakes are just as high if we don't speak up, because problems that could be solved with a simple conversation can fester if they aren't addressed.

Throughout the 20th century, technology and economics drove a dominant logic: bigger was almost always better. It was smart to scale up - to take advantage of classic economies of scale. But in the unscaled economy, size and scale have become a liability. Today's most successful companies - Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Salesforce - have defied the traditional 'economies of scale' approach by renting scale instead of spending vast amounts of money building it. And a new generation of upstarts is using artificial intelligence to automate tasks that once required expensive investment.