THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY The Breakup of AT&T By Steve Coll Atheneum. 400 pp. $18.95 THROUGHOUT MOST OF THIS CENTURY, it was the behemoth of American business: the largest corporation in the world, the purveyor of goods and services virtually no one could do without, and, for better or worse, a monopoly of mammoth dimensions. In its early
“WHEREAS THROUGH the good hand of God many well devoted persons have beene and dayly are mooved and stirred up to give and bestowe sundry guiftes legacies landes and Revennewes for the advancement of all good literature artes and Sciences in Harvard College in Cambridge . . .” So it began, in 1650, with this corporate charter.
THERE IS plenty of greed, but not much glory, in Ken Auletta’s intricate account of the decline and fall of Lehman Brothers. Until it was auctioned off to American Express in 1984, Lehman Brothers was Wall Street’s oldest continuing partnership, and arguably the nation’s premier investment banking firm.
DeLOREAN By John Z. DeLorean with Ted Schwarz Zondervan Books. 349 pp. $17.95 HARD DRIVING My Years with John DeLorean By William Haddad Random House. 193 pp. $17.95 WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF John DeLorean? For nearly 20 years now, DeLorean has been driving at breakneck speed against the grain of Detroit’s automotive establishment, and nothing — abject failure included —
THE CHALLENGE OF HIDDEN PROFITS Reducing Corporate Bureaucracy And Waste By Mark Green and John F. Berry Morrow. 453 pp. $19.95. MAYBE THERE ARE A FEW FOLKS out there who still believe that big corporations actually are efficient, but the rest of us know otherwise. We know the truth. We’ve called the telephone company and gotten: 1) a busy
Poor Rupert Murdoch. For quite a while now, the Australian media tycoon has had something of a love-hate relationship with his competitors and critics. Murdoch, it seems, is just the kind of man they love to hate.
THE LIFE INSURANCE GAME By Ronald Kessler Holt, Rinehart and Winston 289 pp. $16.95 NO MATTER HOW — OR HOW LONG — you look at life insurance, the laws of averages are not encouraging. If you let an agent inside your home, the chances are 1 in 2 you will wind up buying a policy. The chances are 4 in 5 you will buy
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 They’ve been replaced by a new, and infinitely more respectable, breed of corporate executives.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.