Remember! The amount and quality of information you can find depends on whether a company is public or private. A company is public if they sell shares of stock on the stock market. Privately owned companies will likely have less info available than publicly traded companies, because they are not legally required to report their financial status.
Where to look for publicly traded companies:
SEARCH TIP: If you are researching a private company, and aren't having any luck, try researching one of its publicly traded competitors for an industry analysis.
Data and analysis on international and domestic stocks, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds.
The annual reports and financial data found here are valuable for getting an in-depth understanding of a company's performance, operations, and strategic directions.
News coverage of companies is a great way to learn about their activities and operations, controversies (such as lawsuits or labor issues) and social responsibility initiatives, and give outsider perspectives on the organization's products or services. Newspapers and magazines may also have insightful interviews with company executives.
SEARCH TIP:
Where is your company's headquarters located? Find news sources local to that area for more frequent and in-depth coverage of the company's activities. For example, if researching Target Corporation (headquartered in Minneapolis, MN) look for news coverage from local sources such as the StarTribune newspaper and Minnesota Public Radio.
Needing the history of a company? Its current financial state? A SWOT analysis? The databases below include all of that information and more!
Private and public U.S and international business data, industry news, facts and figures, executive contact information, and industry data.
Data and analysis on international and domestic stocks, mutual funds, and exchange traded funds.
Search to find manufacturers, distributors, and service providers.
Visiting a company website is a great way to learn more about the company's mission and values, products and services, and their activities. Public companies will have information like quarterly and annual reports and earnings call presentations available on their websites, usually on a page called Investor Relations.
Example:
The layout and organization of a company's Investor website will each be different. But all with have useful content to use in your research. Three things to start with:
A document that public corporations must provide annually to shareholders that describes their operations and financial conditions.
The earnings conference call is a way for companies to relay information to all interested parties, including institutional and individual investors, as well as buy- and sell-side analysts.
A press release is a piece of news or information that companies send out to inform the public about something noteworthy or of material significance. Press releases are often handled by a company's public relations (PR) department.
Example:
From the bestselling author of The Everything Store comes an unvarnished picture of Amazon's unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.
In Apple in China, journalist Patrick McGee draws on more than two hundred interviews with former executives and engineers, supplementing their stories with unreported meetings held by Steve Jobs, emails between top executives, and internal memos regarding threats from Chinese competition. The book highlights the unknown characters who were instrumental in Apple's ascent and who tried to forge a different path... Apple in China is the sometimes disturbing and always revelatory story of how an outspoken, proud company that once praised "rebels" and "troublemakers" - the company that encouraged us all to "Think Different" - devolved into passively cooperating with a belligerent regime that increasingly controls its fate.
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos - the Enron of Silicon Valley - by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.
Be Our Guest outlines proven Disney best practices and processes for generating customer loyalty and sound financial results. These principles can help your organization focus its vision and align its people and infrastructure into a cohesive strategy that delivers on the promise of exceptional customer satisfaction. So, come take a look behind the scenes. Learn about new and creative ways to energize your organization to strive for a higher level of success.
Build an iconic shopping experience that your customers love - and a work environment that your employees love being a part of - using this blueprint from Trader Joe's visionary founder, Joe Coulombe. Coulombe founded what would become Trader Joe's in the late 1960s and helped shape it into the quirky food chain it is today.
The inside story of the rise and fall of WeWork, showing how the excesses of its founder shaped a corporate culture unlike any other.
Part memoir, part history, Burn Book is a necessary chronicle of tech's most powerful players. This is the inside story we've all been waiting for about modern Silicon Valley and the biggest boom in wealth creation in the history of the world.
Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, shares lessons he learned in business and life which show how improving the happiness of those around you can increase your own and create success in your business.
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era - a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin. From the prize-winning and bestselling author of Say Nothing.
A fast-paced look at the corporate dysfunction - the ruthless cost-cutting, toxic workplaces, and cutthroat management - that contributed to one of the worst tragedies in modern aviation.
In The Founders, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal's turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today - fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer - were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal's success.
Simple but powerful advice on how and why to rethink your business structure in a time when traditional capitalism is no longer working for people or the planet. Vincent Stanley, Patagonia's director of philosophy, along with Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of Patagonia, draw on 50 years of experience at Patagonia to challenge all business owners and leaders to rethink their businesses in a time of cultural and climate chaos.
In this book, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that's because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way.
The National Football League is a towering, distinctly American colossus taking in $14 billion in annual revenue and provoking intense national debate over issues from player safety to political protest. Yet its current dominance obscures a surprising origin story. As it turns out, in the beginning most people found the very idea of professional football absurd. In The League, acclaimed author John Eisenberg reveals how the five men who built the NFL took an immense risk by investing in the sport in the 1920s and 1930s.
The definitive history of LEGO, based on unprecedented access to the company’s archives and rare interviews with the founding family who still owns the company.
The New York Times bestselling author Fawn Weaver unveils the hidden narrative behind one of America's most iconic whiskey brands. This book is a vibrant exploration set in the present day, delving into the life and legacy of Nearest Green, the African American distilling genius who played a pivotal role in the creation of the whiskey that bears Jack Daniel's name.
Award-winning reporter Sarah Frier reveals an inside, never-before-told, behind-the-scenes look at how Instagram defied the odds to become one of the most culturally defining apps of the decade.
Jessica reveals for the first time her inner monologue and most intimate struggles. Guided by the journals she's kept since age fifteen, and brimming with her unique humor and down-to-earth humanity, Open Book is as inspiring as it is entertaining. It shares the wisdom and inspirations she's learned and shows the real woman behind all the pop-culture clichés "chicken or fish," "Daisy Duke," "football jinx," "mom jeans," "sexual napalm" and more. Open Book is an opportunity to laugh and cry with a close friend, one that will inspire you to live your best, most authentic life, now that she is finally living hers.
In this definitive history, award-winning journalist Julie Satow not only pulls back the curtain on Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball and The Beatles’ first stateside visit-she also follows the money trail. The Plaza reveals how a handful of rich, dowager widows were the financial lifeline that saved the hotel during the Great Depression, and how, today, foreign money and anonymous shell companies have transformed iconic guest rooms into condominiums that shield ill-gotten gains-hollowing out parts of the hotel as well as the city around it.
Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reveals for the first time the unorthodox culture behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.
In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
The business triumphs of Bill Gates are widely known: the twenty-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a software company that became an industry giant and changed the way the world works and lives; the billionaire many times over who turned his attention to philanthropic pursuits to address climate change, global health, and U.S. education Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It's the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits.
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within Facebook to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth.
Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries.
Anderson Cooper chronicles the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty - his mother's family, the Vanderbilts.
With rare access to the inner sanctum of the New York Yankees, SNY analyst Andy Martino weaves two years of exclusive interviews with general manager Brian Cashman into a revelatory account of never-before-told stories about Derek Jeter, Aaron Judge, Alex Rodriguez, the complex front office, team ownership, and insights into the World Series wins and day-to-day running of the team that fans never get to see.