What Are Managers Made Of?
CORPORATE MESSIAH
The Hiring and Firing of Million-Dollar Managers
By Patricia O’Toole
Morrow. 308 pp. $15.95
THE BIG TIME
By Glenn Kaplan
Congdon & Weed. 369 pp. Paperback. $8.95
HOW TO SELECT AND USE AN EXECUTIVE SEARCH FIRM
By A. Robert Taylor
McGraw-Hill. 143 pp. $24.95
SUPERACHIEVERS: Portraits of Success
By Gerhard Gschwandtner
Prentice-Hall. 227 pp. $15.95
USED TO BE THAT MANAGERS were for baseball, not business. In the old days, American industry and finance were ruled by titans, czars, moguls, and robber barons. There are, sadly enough, few villains of this ilk in business anymore. They’ve been replaced by a new, and infinitely more respectable, breed of corporate executives. These managers scrutinize the balance sheet, tend to the bottom line, and, increasingly, see themselves as members of the Me Generation’s million-dollar club.
These days, in fact, Big Business actually has its heroes; no doubt there are kids who would rather grow up to be Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca than president of the United States. The new reverence for corporations and their leaders, coupled with the commercial success of books like In Search of Excellence and The One-Minute Manager, seems to have many publishers scraping the bottom of the business barrel. In this batch of four new business books, however, there’s one compelling exception.
Patricia O’Toole has taken on the formidable assignment of figuring out what’s gone wrong at the uppermost echelons of America’s executive elite, where success is measured not in simple salaries but in compensation packages with guaranteed bonuses, stock appreciation rights, and “golden parachutes.”
The stories O’Toole tells have drama and denouements: how Warren Hirsh, canned after serving only eight weeks as president of Puritan Fashions (manufacturer of Calvin Klein jeans), still cleared $1 million; how Roy Ash, after bringing a Midas-touch-in-reverse to AM International (Addressograph-Multigraph in the pre-Ash days), scored an $842,500 profit on Wall Street the day his firing was announced; and how Archie McCardell, lured away from Xerox to resuscitate an ailing International Harvester, managed, despite a multimillion-dollar contract, to lose money himself every day he went to work.
O’Toole paints the big picture with considerable skill: She’s gone to great lengths to weave in context, and her analysis, as caustic as it sometimes is, seems razor-sharp. “In searching for explanations of many succession decisions, especially those made by entrepreneurs who have built a company from the ground up,” she writes, “one must look far and wide to find cases where logic has been pressed into service.” O’Toole’s artful exploration of America’s corporate culture even takes a few cues from leading anthropologists: She likens a strategy employed by some chief executives, grooming several potential successors as a means of conserving power, to the behavior of elderly baboons in the African savanna.
Corporate Messiah, O’Toole’s first book, is an engaging and insightful look at some of the misguided techniques practiced by top management. Her diagnosis of what ails corporate America is on the mark, and all the more powerful because of chapters that explore why some chief executives, including Chrysler’s Iacocca, have been able to engineer genuine turnarounds.
Yet readers on the lower rungs of the corporate ladder might pause for a moment to consider one of the messages implicit in O’Toole’s book: There may be good reason to wonder whether the view from the top is always the best.
Glenn Kaplan’s methodical survey of work in the fast lane — presumably aimed at those who aspire to the prestige, power and perks held by big-business folk — may leave some readers looking for the next exit ramp. If some of the people Kaplan interviewed are the best and the brightest business has to offer, little wonder that America’s competitive edge is getting duller by the day. “My objective was — and still is — to be an important person,” says one investment banker on the way up. “Relationships are the most important thing I do,” says a top-dollar TV producer. “I spent more than $300,000 of my company’s money just to get myself noticed,” says a consumer-products marketing whiz.
Kaplan manages to pack in lots of practical information for career-seekers, and his portraits of more than a dozen corporate cultures — from Wall Street to Hollywood — are creditable. His eyebrows, however, are not raised often enough. An unnamed oil company executive tells how moving into a new office — with two windows (not just one), a gadget- packed telephone and spiffier furniture — meant all the difference in pecking order. “I found myself assuming a new level of authority,” the oilman says. Then there’s the story of John Sculley, the former president of Pepsi USA, who started out with a do-nothing job in the market-research department. To keep himself occupied, Sculley read Pepsi’s marketing files — every one of them. “After about a year of this,” Sculley noted, “I was getting kind of discouraged.” Are these routes to the top hunky-dory or haywire? Kaplan doesn’t say.
Aspirants to The Big Time may find themselves wondering why they’re even reading this book. Want to be a hot-shot TV producer? “I haven’t the vaguest idea how to get into this business,” counsels a CBS executive. Want to be a hot-shot record producer? “You can’t get into the business today,” one says. “I don’t know how anyone could go about trying.”
Kaplan himself takes a crack at the toughest question of all, but the result is hardly insightful or illuminating. “If there is any such thing as the ‘secret of success,'” he writes, “it is this: One must know specifically how things work in a given business and what will be expected.” That’s not even a surprise, much less a secret.
A. Robert Taylor has weighed in with a slim but expensive entry on executive search firms, an industry that has, in itself, become big business: The author says that more than 600 such firms operate nationwide, with the big ten billing more than $10 million annually. Executive search firms operate in the uppermost strata of the business world; comparing them to “headhunters” or employment agencies, Taylor suggests between the lines, would be like comparing a Wall Street investment banker to the corner loan shark.
The tales in this book — “a search firm in the U.S.A. was retained by a European company to fill the President and Chief Operating Officer . . . position of its U.S. subsidiary” — are, through their absence of names and dearth of detail, yawn-inspiring. And Taylor’s writing, which sometimes borders on bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, doesn’t help. “In addition to the personality and behavior of your organization and its executives, the structure and operating policies should be carefully reviewed,” the author advises. “Such important subjects as matrix and centralization versus decentralization need to be fully covered.”
Managers confronted with an “executive vacancy problem” (the phrase Taylor favors) may find some helpful guidance in this book. More often than not, however, they’ll find lists of questions to answer themselves, rather than wisdom and warnings from an author with some 30 years of experience in the “human resources management field.” Taylor’s irksome on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach should earn his book a spot in the do-it-yourself department.
Gerhard Gschwandtner has taken a look at 12 “Superachievers,” from President Ronald Reagan to cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash, and assembled their “Super-Ideas” for success in a not-so-super book. This effort is innocent enough, all right — there are nice tidbits here and there — but those who read this self-help lesson plan are likely to hunger for something more substantial. The “in-depth” profiles promised on the jacket generally amount to one-page biographies followed by transcripts of Q-and-A sessions with the Superachiever subjects. The Qs leave much to be desired, as do most of the As.
There are moments of humor here, sometimes at the expense of the author (or perhaps the copy editor, if there was one). “Remember,” Gschwandtner writes, “if you have your plan for success only in your head, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.”
Gschwandtner’s book, like so many others on the inspirational/motivational shelf, reduces the essence of success to “key ideas,” “action plans,” checklists, quizzes, and the like. What’s missing, of course, is some recognition that shortcuts and gimmicks do not always work. This book itself is good enough proof of that.
This review originally appeared in the September 16, 1984 edition of The Washington Post Book World.
Bill Hogan