Cambridge Business Association
Ayn Rand and Business
Book

Ayn Rand and Business

Donna Greiner and Theodore Kinni
Thomson Texere, 2001
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Editorial Rating

7

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  • Innovative

Recommendation

Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism celebrates the underlying principles of capitalism: reason, independence and just plain selfishness. Donna Greiner and Theodore Kinni lay out the fundamentals of Objectivism and attempt to describe how you can integrate its beliefs into your life and your business. The book is written in the spirit of Rand’s own outlook: It is anchored in practicality, well organized and goal-oriented. Even so, some executives might lose patience with the philosophic nature of the work. We advise such readers to move on. However, getAbstract.com recommends this book to intellectually curious readers in search of a moral, ethical, or even philosophic foundation for their business life.

Summary

Origins of Objectivism

Objectivism was developed in the writings of Ayn Rand, who expressed her philosophy through novels like her well known, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand saw the study of philosophy as a quest to identify the essential beliefs needed for life. Her core principles concern concepts like rationalism, purpose, the virtues of freedom, individualism, independence and capitalism. Since 1936, her books have sold over 20 million copies, and continue to sell about 400,000 copies a year, according to the Ayn Rand Institute, which has continued her work.

Rand was born in 1905 in Russia, as Alisa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, the daughter of a shopkeeper in St. Petersburg. During the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Red Army seized her father’s pharmacy, and at age 12 she developed an antipathy to communism that helped guide the development of her future beliefs in support of freedom and capitalism. When she enrolled in the University of Petrograd in 1921, she majored in history and minored in philosophy, and in 1924, she learned about screenwriting at the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography in Leningrad. In 1926, she headed to Chicago where her mother...

About the Authors

Donna Greiner and Theodore Kinni founded The Business Reader, a corporate bookseller. They have authored seven books exploring management, creativity, customer retention and management. Kinni was a Contributing Editor at Industry Week, Quality Digest, and Workforce Training News. He is a columnist at MWorld, the Web site of the American Management Association.

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