Company Business

Company Business is a 1991 spy film, written and directed by Nicholas Meyer and starring Gene Hackman and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Plot

The film follows the exploits of Sam Boyd (Gene Hackman), a former operative for the CIA who is reactivated to escort Pyotr Ivanovich Grushenko (Mikhail Baryshnikov), a captured KGB mole, to a prisoner exchange in recently reunited Berlin. The exchange is actually a cover for a CIA plot to use drug cartel money to buy back Benjamin Sobel (Bob Sherman), a U-2 pilot who was shot down over the Soviet Union during the 1960s. The exchange goes wrong after Boyd recognizes the supposedly imprisoned Sobel as a man he saw two days before at Dulles Airport, and is subsequently told by Grushenko that it really is Sobel, who is now a KGB agent.

The two agents are forced to go on the run from both Boyd's own Company superiors (Kurtwood Smith and Terry O'Quinn) and the head of the KGB (Oleg Rudnik), who all wish to see the exchange completed for reasons that are both obvious and not so obvious. Their only hope may lie in Natasha Grimaud (Géraldine Danon), a mysterious French beauty from Grushenko's past.

Business

A business, also known as an enterprise, agency or a firm, is an entity involved in the provision of goods and/or services to consumers. Businesses are prevalent in capitalist economies, where most of them are privately owned and provide goods and services to customers in exchange for other goods, services, or money. Businesses may also be social not-for-profit enterprises or state-owned public enterprises targeted for specific social and economic objectives. A business owned by multiple individuals may be formed as an incorporated company or jointly organised as a partnership. Countries have different laws that may ascribe different rights to the various business entities.

Business can refer to a particular organization or to an entire market sector, e.g. "the music business". Compound forms such as agribusiness represent subsets of the word's broader meaning, which encompasses all activity by suppliers of goods and services. The goal is for sales to be more than expenditures resulting in a profit.

Company

A company is an association or collection of individuals, whether natural persons, legal persons, or a mixture of both. Company members share a common purpose and unite in order to focus their various talents and organize their collectively available skills or resources to achieve specific, declared goals. Companies take various forms such as:

A company or association of persons can be created at law as legal person so that the company in itself can accept Limited liability for civil responsibility and taxation incurred as members perform (or fail) to discharge their duty within the publicly declared "birth certificate" or published policy.

Because companies are legal persons, they also may associate and register themselves as companies – often known as a corporate group. When the company closes it may need a "death certificate" to avoid further legal obligations.

Steve Blank

Steve Blank (born 1953) is a Silicon Valley serial-entrepreneur and academician who is based in Pescadero, California.

Blank is recognized for developing the Customer Development methodology, which launched the Lean Startup movement. Blank is also the co-founder of E.piphany.

Blank has spent over thirty years within the high technology industry. He has founded or worked within eight startup companies, four of which have gone public.

Blank's Google Tech talk, The Secret History of Silicon Valley, offers a widely regarded insider's perspective on the emerging Silicon Valley's start-up innovation. Blank has published three books: The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost and The Startup Owner's Manual.

Blank teaches and writes about Customer Development and is a consulting associate professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford. He currently lectures at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, Columbia University and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Together with the Entrepreneurship Center at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), he created a version of Lean Launchpad for Life Sciences and Healthcare which he taught there in the fall 2013.