Skip navigation
Charles Schwab
Book

Charles Schwab

How One Company Beat Wall Street and Reinvented the Brokerage Industry

Wiley, 2002 more...

auto-generated audio
auto-generated audio

Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Background
  • Engaging
  • Inspiring

Recommendation

Business writer John Kador describes the evolution of Charles Schwab & Company, a former discount brokerage blessed with the ability to transform itself through four different incarnations. Kador emphasizes Schwab’s commitment to integrity and customer service, a code that enabled it to prevail despite upheavals and threats. While the book focuses on the company, the running portrait of Chuck Schwab gives it a personal core. Kador highlights Schwab’s concern with exercising his values and leading a highly principled business amid an often shady industry he saw as corrupted by greed. Kador’s engaging narrative style is designed to inform and entertain general investors, executives and managers. At times, the discussion of Chuck Schwab and his company sounds almost too laudatory, as if the book is an in-house publicity piece. getAbstract.com recommends that readers should take all that sugar with a grain of salt, given this otherwise compelling dish.

Take-Aways

  • Charles R. Schwab founded Charles Schwab & Company in 1975 to be different from other brokerage houses, which he felt took advantage of their average customers.
  • Schwab was committed to a set of values that prioritized customers’ interests.
  • Initially all Schwab employees had to agree to these basic values: put customers first and avoid conflict of interest, investment advice and sales.

About the Author

John Kador is the author of four books, including the business bestseller Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy (with Amir Hartman and John Sifonis). He is also a freelance writer for a number of business publications, and he has written for CEOs, including Charles B. Wang, Chairman of Computer Associates International, Inc.