Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” isn’t a self-help guide, corporate charter or memoir. The Facebook chief operating officer claims it’s not a feminist manifesto, either. It’s more of an amalgamation of all these genres. It ranges from intensely personal and insightful to didactic and methodical. Quoted research into how women measure themselves in the workplace and at home underpins a central Sandberg proposition – that women need to be more ambitious and men more accommodating.

Of course, she is no ordinary working mother, or ordinary business leader. The overachiever in school and one-time McKinsey consultant joined Facebook in the early days and is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s one reason her volume has stirred such a debate. But this is not a you-can-be-like-me book. Rather, Sandberg says she is dispensing the advice she wished she had received.

It isn’t really a question of work-life balance. Sallie Krawcheck, among the highest-profile women to make it big on Wall Street, is on record saying there’s often no such balance for someone aiming high in their career. Sandberg surely wouldn’t disagree. She didn’t compromise her career goals much, if at all, for some unattainable idea of having it all. Rather it’s a question of the barriers that still exist even after making that choice.

One of her main points is that women are too uncomfortable with ambition. They don’t want to be called “bossy,” a term usually reserved for women and never a compliment. They are, she says, often uncomfortable with success, and she is a case study. When Forbes magazine ranked her the fifth most powerful woman in the world, she told well-wishers this was absurd. An assistant pulled her aside to remind her that a simple “thank you” was more appropriate.

Sandberg cites studies of both medical and law students that suggest that women think they have performed less well than men on tests, even when they have actually outperformed. Meanwhile men are often hired on potential while women are chosen on past performance. She calls for a more aggressive approach from women, and for more female networking. She made the same point speaking at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women summit.

She gives some practical advice, including a taboo-breaking call to put the job before the concerns of pregnancy. “Don’t leave before you leave,” she tells women who might let future children distract them from professional ambition. After all, the cost of childcare should be weighed against future earning power, which will be higher if women keep on pushing.

This discussion is in the second half of Sandberg’s non-manifesto, which focuses on marriage and motherhood. She offers a contemporary sort of romantic vision, with a male hero who is a true partner and accepts the sacrifices needed for his spouse’s meaningful career.

It’s perhaps easier in Silicon Valley, where reinvented lives and businesses are more common than in some other places. Sandberg’s husband relocated his outfit – Survey Monkey – to San Francisco from Portland, Oregon to accommodate her career. Yet it still took Sandberg one failed marriage and about another 10 years to find her exceptional partner. Women have traditionally made such sacrifices routinely, but willing men remain scarce.

“Lean In” ends with a section called “Let’s Keep Talking.” This calls on women to organize their own peer groups to support each other’s careers, creating a dialogue and a network of women armed with the knowledge that they are not alone. A community that provides connections to match the old boys’ network could indeed provide a lever that might bring more women into positions of influence in business and elsewhere.

The debate inspired by Sandberg’s book may do its part, too. One participant, coincidentally or not, is Erin Callan, the former Lehman Brothers finance chief who has kept herself, more or less, secluded from the media since the firm’s collapse in 2008. Writing in the New York Times last weekend, she talked about the consequences of having devoted her life to a job that essentially evaporated.

It’s a different take from Sandberg’s. But the more women and men, famous or not, who weigh in and think about it, the more there’s a community for others to lean on – or lean into – and awareness among both sexes. Building that understanding might be the most practical legacy of Sandberg’s book.

The New York Film Festival features some of Hollywood’s hottest new hits. But the slate of indie and foreign productions screened at the 50th annual Big Apple movie jubilee are also showcasing the investment model that is reshaping the industry.

The highly anticipated mystery “Flight,” starring Denzel Washington, will bring the curtain down on Sunday on the three-week event where other blockbusters like Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” and Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” made their debut. The economics of such pricey, Tinseltown fare remain big gambles for the studios behind them. It is smaller-budget productions like the Portuguese-language drama “The Last Time I Saw Macao” that are providing less risky opportunities more often for film financiers.

Funding is spreading quickly beyond Hollywood. According to IHS Screen Digest, total investment in global movies was roughly flat at around $22.5 billion in 2010. But a 46 percent increase in Asia helped offset the 13 percent decline in North America. The shift is long overdue. Global box office receipts overtook the United States and Canada long ago. They represented three-quarters of the nearly $43 billion of ticket sales last year.

Before the crisis struck, banks and hedge funds were piling into U.S. show business, relying on the Monte Carlo theory that one big success would more than pay for a dozen flops. But the source of funds dried up and the number of films released by the major U.S. studios shrank between 2006 and 2010 by about a third.

The model is being altered and adapted in Europe. StudioCanal, a division of the French Canal Plus, recently teamed up with Anton Capital and others to deploy 500 million euros to co-finance 100 international films over three years. This structure greatly diversifies the pool of investment, applies it to largely different film oeuvres and tries to capitalize on the new financial order.

The business of making movies is increasingly an international collaboration, even for big-budget efforts. “Life of Pi,” for example, was a novel written by a Canadian author, turned into a film made by a Taiwanese director, backed by a U.S. studio and shot in India. Given the audience trends, it only makes sense that the global money and production should also follow.

Erin Duffy’s “Bond Girl” does little to shed light on the mechanisms behind the financial collapse in 2008, although it does uphold the copious clichés about the years of excess leading to the downfall. Snapshots of sexual harassment, over-indulgence and trigger-happy traders are all par for the course in this oft-told “Devil Wears Prada” version of a female analyst’s first years on Wall Street.

While at first glorifying the world of Cromwell Pierce, the imagined mega-bank where the protagonist, Alex, is lucky enough to land a job as an analyst in her first year out of college, the young ingénue quickly becomes disillusioned by the demands of her job, even as rewards in the form of cash bonuses come in quickly. At the office Christmas party, after getting in a spat with a managing director over whether she is desirable enough for a bathroom quickie, she quickly learns the fastest way to the top for women who are at the bottom of the Wall Street pecking order.

Office life is portrayed as a mix of the mundane – juggling Starbucks orders for her desk – with the absurd – cabbing up to Harlem to pick up a $1,000 wheel of cheese – combined with sexual overtures: getting groped by portfolio managers who flash their corporate cards with gusto. Harassment is an accepted form of hazing.

Alex, though, is far from a feminist heroine. She is all too happy to play up her physical attributes in the hope of achieving higher status. It is hardly surprising that she finds that her fate is tied to male bosses who promote her through initiation rituals she passes with aplomb, although they are unrelated to her performance on the job. Her predicaments are often deplorable, but her response is to play right into the system she purports to dismiss.

Indeed, Duffy plays into every stereotype of the Wall Street femme fatale: all they care about is expensive shoes and handbags, they’d rather work for males that hit on them than women who have previously been in their own fancy shoes, and they’re pretty much willing to tolerate the male-dominated alpha culture as long as it results in a decent bonus at the end of the year. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a character whose tough days in the office end with tears in a chauffeured town car and sorrows drowned in wine delivered to her West Village apartment.

Oh yes, there is the financial crisis of 2008 and the expected tale of redemption: disillusionment followed by an epiphany and reprioritizing. But Alex’s new and better life is almost as shallow as her old, if less testosterone-driven: she resolves to chronicle all of her misadventures. Presumably, we are the lucky audience who gets to read the manuscript.

Duffy has written a “Fifty Shades of Grey” lite, another story of female fantasy and domination in a post-women’s-liberation world. The protagonist purports to be an evolved modern-day working gal, but under the façade she turns out to be a scared girl who runs into the arms of the nearest alpha male in sight.

A childish approach to life can be profitable. It has certainly worked well for the founders and backers of Facebook, as Katherine Losse demonstrates in “The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network.” The engaging and pithy book is a memoir of the author’s five years at the company, before it developed a slick corporate persona.

She describes the office shenanigans of Facebook’s Ivy League wonder whiz kids: games of hide and seek, all night hackathons and serial IM flirtations. It was a collection of ageing Peter Pans: “I came to realize it was the identity of a 19-year-old boy, forever youthful and reckless, unmonitored and unstoppable, that the boys were so anxious about losing. They were worried, perhaps, about growing up. Facebook culture, by another name, then, might be fear of adulthood, a desire to put off commitment, responsibility and the difficult work of relating in real life in real terms, forever.”

The sexual tension was also adolescent, more like “Mad Men” than the film of “The Social Network.” Male supervisors continuously berated their female employees just because they felt threatened. Female employees were encouraged to wear t-shirts depicting founder Mark Zuckerberg’s profile on his birthday in a symbol of idolatry and subservience.

The success of Facebook gives the employees the means for more self-indulgence, and they took advantage – trips to Palm Spring’s lush Coachella music festival, Las Vegas’s swank resorts and Palo Alto’s abundant poolside patios. In Losse’s view, the travel didn’t broaden the mind. The company became more inbred and the employees more indoctrinated in the cult of Facebook. The employees’ immaturity may have fit in with the aspirations of the predominantly young early customers, but there was something ironic about the closed culture in a company which was opening up possibilities of communication for its users.

Sheryl Sandberg’s entrance onto the scene marks the turning point in Losse’s narrative. Her example and sympathetic ear encouraged female employees, but the arrival of a high-powered hire, snatched away from Google, was a sign that leadership would be more professional and firmly from the top. “She enunciated precisely, so as to make every thought seem like a decision, like the matter was always closed and the conversation had always already reached its resolution.”

Zuckerberg remained the aloof wizard behind the curtain. Losse first met him after she had been working at the company for nearly three years, when she was promoted from customer service to be his ghost writer. Describing his approach as both standoffish and insular all at once, she describes their first encounter: “Whenever he looked at me directly, which was rare, it was either with blankness or a slight smirk and some acknowledgement that we were in on some joke. I wasn’t sure what the joke was, if it even existed.”

The closer contact with Zuckerberg did not make Losse more loyal. She left Facebook over two years before the initial public offering, worrying the company was losing its way. “By 2009, everything that happened at work seemed to prompt the feeling that, in Facebook’s perpetual nostalgia for its own early culture, we were losing our utopia.”

If there is such a cultural contradiction, it didn’t trip the company up before the IPO, even if the offering seemed to be managed by a slightly inebriated teenage boy at the wheel of a hot rod. But investors might want to take Losse’s book as a warning. Companies which rely on a cult of reckless youth often don’t age well.

Few companies have grown from an idea to a nearly $17 billion company as swiftly as Groupon, the daily deals website. Frank Sennett’s new book, “Groupon’s Biggest Deal Ever,” gives a blow-by-blow account of the startup’s rapid ascent, including its founder’s audacious rejection of a $6 billion takeover bid by Google two years ago. What Sennett’s book fails to deliver, however, is an insight into how Groupon can sustain its position.

To investors today, of course, that’s the fundamental question. Since its debut in November, the stock has plummeted, trading this week below the valuation Google put on the company a few years earlier. While Sennett does not explain how durable the firm Andrew Mason built may be, he does effectively draw first-hand accounts of the inner workings of the firm and its executives.

In its earlier days, Groupon’s harshest critic appears to have been the CEO himself. He chose to display his Forbes cover bearing his picture with the headline “The Next Web Phenom” at the very entrance of Groupon headquarters in Chicago. But what looks a pretty arrogant move, upon closer inspection, is one of self-effacement. The cover is surrounded by other magazines lauding other doomed tech startups that came and went before Groupon, including Netscape, Napster and MySpace. This wall of shame served as a stark reminder to employees of how quickly the tide can turn for even the most brilliant of ideas.

Measured solely by monetary gain, Groupon was an unbelievable success, as Sennett dutifully calculates. It was the quickest firm to achieve $1 billion in sales and the second quickest (behind Yahoo) to gain a $1 billion valuation. And the company itself grew exponentially from catering to merchants and customers in Chicago to being active in 46 countries accounting for 90 percent of the world’s GDP. Its headcount went from two hundred to 9,000 in three years.

Groupon faced massive scrutiny leading up to its November 2011 IPO, including a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into both the company’s books and CEO Andrew Mason’s notoriously frank communication, which included company emails that used humor to deflect media skepticism. In one such email that piqued the SEC, Mason urges his staff to prepare to birth an IPO baby – a breed for which there are no epidurals.

Mason’s quirks aside, Sennett argues throughout the book that the founder is a genius with a business sense so astute he alone led Groupon to greatness through a singular vision and dogged work ethic. Despite Mason’s “aww shucks” interview demeanor and self-deprecating jokes, Sennett describes his moves throughout the process of taking the company public and fending off billion-dollar offers as calculated and measured. In this respect, the book is more a hagiography than a company profile.

While Sennett, who is a Chicago native and editor of Time Out Chicago, has an obvious soft spot for the Chicago-based business and its chief, he can muster some skepticism. For instance, he notes the staying power of the company depends on maintaining strong, long-term relationships with local merchants and customers. He also highlights the challenge the company faces in forging a customer base largely drawn from local merchants.

Beyond Groupon’s ability to expand into such diverse categories as travel while continuing to acquire potential rivals, the company’s fate really depends on future consumer preferences. At the moment, the $6 billion rejection of Google looks to have been a mistake. If Sennett’s optimism for his subject is not misplaced, investors today could look at Groupon shares as something of, well, a coupon.