George Anders
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About George Anders
I write about dreamers, doers and rascals in whatever settings the changing media landscape can offer. Look for my articles and essays these days at LinkedIn and Quora.com. Other writing homes over the years have included The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg View and Fast Company magazine.
My professional work includes writing five hardcover books, including the New York Times bestseller "Perfect Enough," as well as several e-books. In 1997, I shared in the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. In 2018 I received an honorary doctorate from Washington & Jefferson College.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago. As an adult, I lived in New York City, London, Cambridge MA and Washington DC before settling in northern California. I'm a slow but stubborn hiker. Adventures over the years include trekking in Nepal, Peru and New Zealand, as well as reaching the top of Mt. Whitney, Mt. Fuji and Cerro Chirripo. Favorite writers include Thomas Boswell for sports; Kirstin Downey for biographies; Matt Levine for financial commentary and Gretchen McCulloch for slyly decoding our Internet habits.
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Titles By George Anders
This is the full-length e-book edition. It includes not only the entire, original text of Merchants of Debt -- but also a new preface and closing chapter. This additional material covers KKR's international expansion, its decision to go public in 2010, and the successes and stumbles of recent deals such as Hospital Corp. of America and TXU/Energy Futures. This edition amounts to about 380 pages; its 15-chapter table of contents appears below. Also available is a condensed e-book edition that spans seven chapters, or about 130 pages.
The author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, draws on extensive access to KKR founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts, as well as the perspectives of lenders, chief executives and rank-and-file workers associated with the buyout business. Merchants of Debt first appeared in hardcover in 1992. Both e-book editions include substantial updates as of 2013.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1 Courting CEOs
2 The Growing Allure of Debt
3 In Pursuit of Profits
4 How to Talk to Banks
5 The Enchanting World of Drexel
6 The Takeover Minstrels
7 The Mentor's Fall
8 Ruling an Industrial Empire
9 The Discipline of Debt
10 Cashing Out
11 "We Don't Have Any Friends"
12 Credit Crunch
13 Fear, Humbling, and Survival
14 Debt Is Out, Equity Is In
15 KKR Today
Appendix: KKR's Early Buyouts
Acknowledgements
Did you take the right classes in college? Will your major help you get the right job offers? For more than a decade, the national spotlight has focused on science and engineering as the only reliable choice for finding a successful post-grad career. Our destinies have been reduced to a caricature: learn to write computer code or end up behind a counter, pouring coffee. Quietly, though, a different path to success has been taking shape.
In You Can Do Anything, George Anders explains the remarkable power of a liberal arts education - and the ways it can open the door to thousands of cutting-edge jobs every week.
The key insight: curiosity, creativity, and empathy aren't unruly traits that must be reined in. You can be yourself, as an English major, and thrive in sales. You can segue from anthropology into the booming new field of user research; from classics into management consulting, and from philosophy into high-stakes investing. At any stage of your career, you can bring a humanist's grace to our rapidly evolving high-tech future. And if you know how to attack the job market, your opportunities will be vast.
In this book, you will learn why resume-writing is fading in importance and why "telling your story" is taking its place. You will learn how to create jobs that don't exist yet, and to translate your campus achievements into a new style of expression that will make employers' eyes light up. You will discover why people who start in eccentric first jobs - and then make their own luck - so often race ahead of peers whose post-college hunt focuses only on security and starting pay. You will be ready for anything.
Anyone who recruits talent faces the same basic challenge, whether we work for a big company, a new start-up, a Hollywood studio, a hospital, or the Green Berets. We all wonder how to tell the really outstanding prospects from the ones who look great on paper but then fail on the job. Or, equally important, how to spot the ones who don't look so good on paper but might still deliver extraordinary performance.
Over the past few decades, technology has made recruiting in all fields vastly more sophisticated. Gut instincts have yielded to benchmarks. If we want elaborate dossiers on candidates, we can gather facts (and video) by the gigabyte. And yet the results are just as spotty as they were in the age of the rotary phone.
George Anders sought out the world's savviest talent judges to see what they do differently from the rest of us. He reveals how the U.S. Army finds soldiers with the character to be in Special Forces without asking them to fire a single bullet. He takes us to an elite basketball tournament in South Carolina, where the best scouts watch the game in a radically different way from the casual fan. He talks to researchers who are reinventing the process of hiring Fortune 500 CEOs.
Drawing on the best advice of these and other talent masters, Anders reveals powerful ideas you can apply to your own hiring. For instance:
- Don't ignore "the jagged résumé"-people whose background appears to teeter on the edge between success and failure. Such people can do spectacular work in the right settings, where their strengths dramatically outweigh their flaws.
- Look extra hard for "talent that whispers"- the obscure, out-of-the- way candidates who most scouting systems overlook.
- Be careful with "talent that shouts"-the spectacular but brash candidates who might have trouble with loyalty, motivation, and team spirit.
Each field that Anders explores has its own lingo, customs, and history. But the specific stories fit together into a bigger mosaic. In any field, there's an art to clearing away the clutter and focusing on what matters most. It's not necessarily hard, but it requires the courage to take a different approach in pursuit of the rare find.
This is the condensed e-book edition, amounting to about 130 pages. This edition's seven-chapter table of contents appears below. Also available is a full-length e-book edition of about 380 pages, which replicates and updates the original hardcover edition of Merchants of Debt. The full-length edition consists of 15 chapters, extra examples, sourcing notes and a detailed scorecard of KKR's early buyouts.
The author, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, draws on extensive access to KKR founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts, as well as the perspectives of lenders, chief executives and rank-and-file workers associated with the buyout business. Merchants of Debt first appeared in hardcover in 1992. Both e-book editions include substantial updates as of 2013.
Table of Contents
1 Courting CEOs
2 The Growing Allure of Debt
3 The Takeover Minstrels
4 Ruling an Industrial Empire
5 Cashing Out
6 Fear, Humbling and Survival
7 KKR Today
Becoming a Rare Find will show you how to approach job hunting in ways that play to your strengths. If you are a natural project manager, then develop a project plan. If you like marketing, build a marketing campaign that centers on reasons why employers should want you. Whatever approach you settle on--and no matter what job you want--you will get a better chance to "show your fire." You will escape the clutter of job-posting stampedes, where the odds of winning even a barista's job can be slimmer than the chances of getting into Harvard. You will start finding jobs through the "hidden market," where they are sometimes never announced, and you will discover the value of small companies with big ambitions. Finally, you will learn how to rearrange your social media profiles so that when great employers look for talent, they will find you.
The HMO system is supposed to stop greedy doctors and hospitals from viewing patients as sources of profit. But Health Against Wealth reveals that when you are confronting a medical emergency, the HMO system's cost-saving rules can jeopardize your life. This book, said the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is a "chilling portrait of the many ways in which HMOs can be hazardous to your health."