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Considering the human factor
Some years ago, I wrote a biography of a hero -- a Roman Catholic Pole who had risked his life to carry news of the Holocaust to the West in 1942. Writing that book purged me of whatever vestigial Marxism I had picked up in the course of my education. I came away more certain than ever that history is not, as Karl Marx held, a process of social forces leading to more or less inevitable conclusions. Human history is the result of the acts of individual human beings, whose acts of good and evil can change the world. Business history is full of individual agents of change who alter the way things are done. In examining their lives, it's often harder to come to definitive judgments than it is to judge other historical heroes and villains. Deeds that appeared scandalous in one business era can appear perfectly justified decades later, and vice-versa. This month, we look at new biographies of larger-than-life business figures who left their marks on eras from the early 18th century to our own time. |
REVIEWS BY E. THOMAS WOOD
Law's talent for counting cards, which earned him great winnings from the continent's gambling tables and grudging awe from losing bettors, serves as an accidental metaphor in this book. It symbolizes the impact Law had on the world's nascent financial markets after the Scottish fugitive charmed his way into the role of, in effect, chief financial officer for the French monarchy. Though he was not the first advocate of paper money in Europe, he was among the first to champion it as a solution to the economic constraints caused by strict reliance on precious-metal currency. Having shown the benefits of a financial system built on the "full faith and credit" of a sovereign government, he then went one step too far. Law got the monarchy to support him in a scheme to tap into the supposedly vast riches of the New World's Louisiana territories, selling shares to an eager public that came to believe the venture was a guaranteed winner. For the few who sold out early, it was just that. For the other half-million investors, it was a bubble doomed to burst. Panic in the streets, a series of gruesome robbery-murders blamed on desperate speculators, and a plague epidemic that killed 100,000 -- Law bore the blame for all these misfortunes, the latter being seen as a divine scourge brought on by his sins. Maybe by the time Law died in 1729 -- financially ruined, but at least not at the end of a rope -- he sensed vindication on the distant horizon. It has come in recent years, as scholars hail the "quantum leap in economic theory" of Law's monetary innovations. Credit Janet Gleeson for clearly arguing both sides of this improbable figure's historical case in a narrative that reads like anything but a book on economic theory.
John Law -- The Philanderer, Gambler, and Killer Who Invented Modern Finance By Janet Gleeson Simon & Schuster, $24 ISBN 0684872951
Nasaw masterfully shows how Hearst's manipulation of his public image throughout his lifetime has distorted historical perceptions of him. For instance, it has been widely believed that Hearst's demagoguery was largely responsible for starting the Spanish-American War. The fact is, Hearst wanted credit for starting the war, and was happy to take the blame for it. Yet his papers' screaming headlines about Spanish perfidies apparently had little or no influence on the American decision to enter the war. The Chief provides a telling glimpse of the media industry at one of its earliest moments of transition from civic trust to profit center. The biographer's accounts of Hearst's spendthrift ways and grand-scale revelry are entertaining, but it's sobering to encounter details like the fact that Hearst newspapers were forced to tout Hearst-backed films (a harbinger of today's "synergies" between, say, Disney and Disney-owned ABC television). The media mogul we come to know through Nasaw's book is an all-too-familiar figure on today's publishing scene, a conglomerate-builder who seems unburdened by any deep commitment to serving the public interest.
The Life of William Randolph Hearst By David Nasaw Houghton Mifflin, $35 ISBN 0395827590
Henriques faced tough tasks here -- making the reader care about a subject who has passed into obscurity, explaining actions that earned Evans many enemies, and addressing the motivations of an often-unsympathetic character -- but she has succeeded on all counts. Without resorting to amateur psychology, she suggests that a hardscrabble childhood and the early deaths of both parents may have hardened Evans' character. He could be ruthless in life as well as work, and the author poignantly details the sufferings of his family -- including father-son conflicts, a bitter divorce from his first wife, and the suicide of his second wife. Tom Evans was not a nice man. Come to think of it, there are not many biographies of nice businesspeople. Draw your own conclusions about the personal qualities shared by those who become truly transformative figures in business.
Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders By Diana B. Henriques Scribner, $27.50 ISBN 0684833999
McCaw had the odd and perhaps salutary experience of growing up in a fabulously wealthy household, seeing his family lose nearly everything, and then becoming a billionaire on his own. Along the way, he seems to have cultivated multiple personalities. He's a party animal at his Stanford fraternity -- even as he quietly becomes a player in the telecommunications industry. He's a deferential young business owner in a small town -- who secretly harbors grand ambitions and a brilliantly visionary commercial imagination. And he's a tough-minded corporate strategist -- who spends millions on an effort to return a captive whale (Keiko, who inspired the movie Free Willy) to the open sea. Corr, who managed to score a few interviews with his elusive subject before the door was shut on him, comes as close to explaining McCaw as anyone probably ever will. Money from Thin Air is an admirably clear explanation of what McCaw has accomplished, and it hints tantalizingly at a future of all-encompassing wireless connectivity that will change the way we live even more than cell phones already have changed it.
The Story of Craig McCaw, the Visionary Who Invented the Cell Phone Industry, and His Next Billion-Dollar Idea By O. Casey Corr Times Books, $25 ISBN 0812926978
Briefly noted: With the Asian financial crisis giving way to a slow but steady recovery, now may be the time to seek out new opportunities in Japan. Authors James Day Hodgson, Yoshihiro Sano and John L. Graham provide an insightful guide to doing so in Doing Business with the New Japan. Studded with real-life examples of cross-cultural missteps by U.S. firms, the book provides authoritative advice on how to avoid the same fate.
By James Day Hodgson, Yoshihiro Sano and John L. Graham Rowman & Littlefield, $27.95 ISBN 0847699285
A savvy handbook for the recent graduate is Pierre Mornell's Games Companies Play: The Job Hunter's Guide to Playing Smart and Winning Big in the High-Stakes Hiring Game. Mornell, who advises companies on hiring issues, jumps the fence here to share secrets that will help aspiring employees press the right buttons in resumes and interviews.
The Job Hunter's Guide to Playing Smart and Winning Big in the High-Stakes Hiring Game By Pierre Mornell Ten Speed Press, $24.95 ISBN 1580081835
Journalist E. Thomas Wood is product-development director for the Champs Elysees family of European language and culture publications.
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John Law lived a rogue life and died in disgrace. He also helped to create the modern financial system. The title of Janet Gleeson's engaging study of this unique figure conveys the ambiguity surrounding his legacy: Millionaire: John Law -- The Philanderer, Gambler, and Killer Who Invented Modern Finance. Millionaire tells the tale of a most unlikely adventurer. In 1694, at age 23, Scotsman John Law was sentenced to hang for stabbing a nobleman in a London duel; a quarter-century later in Paris, he fled a lynch mob. Between those two occasions, he became one of the most powerful men in Europe.
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Few Americans cast a longer shadow over the first half of the 20th century than William Randolph Hearst. In The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst, David Nasaw offers a fresh biography of this legendary newspaper publisher and power-broker, drawing on a wealth of newly available archival materials. If you have grown accustomed, as I have, to viewing Hearst's "yellow journalism" as a precursor of everything that's wrong with American public discourse today, this bio will not change your mind. But it does add layers of complexity to the portrait -- or self-portrait -- of Hearst that we have come to know.
New York Times reporter Diana B. Henriques is out to show that there's nothing new under the sun. In The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders, Henriques tells the life story of a business visionary who has been largely forgotten -- not for lack of historical impact, but precisely because the tactics he pioneered have become so widely used. Starting in the 1930s, Tom Evans descended on American companies like a jungle predator, pouncing on weak targets and making efficient use of each part of the corporate body. The result often looked like a dismemberment, as Evans fired unproductive executives, laid off workers, and sold assets -- but his goal was to make the surviving company stronger and more accountable to shareholders. In that effort, he had a half-century head start on the takeover artists who became big news in the 1980s, and he showed more scruples than some later raiders who were just out for quick bucks.
O. Casey Corr, a reporter for the Seattle Times, takes on a more appealing but also more enigmatic biography in Money from Thin Air: The Story of Craig McCaw, the Visionary Who Invented the Cell Phone Industry, and His Next Billion-Dollar Idea. Craig McCaw parlayed a small, near-bankrupt cable-TV operator into a cellular telephone empire that he sold to AT&T for over $11 billion in 1994. But the really cool thing about McCaw -- and about this biography -- is that he may only be starting to make his lasting mark on our times.