Description
With so much of the public's attention focused on current American business, there have never been such spellbinding dramas of the corporate world as there are today. Patricia O'Toole, a top reporter on business affairs, now turns her considerable talents to the stories behind The Wall Street Journal's riveting headlines, particularly those involving the corporate messiahs. Who are these "messiahs," hired to lead a corporation away from wrongdoing and back on a right and profitable path? Why is such an enormous dollar value put on their missions, whether they succeed or fail?
O'Toole gets the facts and interprets their meanings: how the storm broke between Fred Silverman and Jane Cahill Pfeiffer at NBC how Roy Ash was booted out of AM International and how Chrysler's Lee Iacocca and Sanford Sigoloff of the Wickes Companies succeeded where other corporate messiahs have failed. In a chapter called "The Long Good-bye" O'Toole tells why the chosen successors of the aging monarchs-the Paleys, the Geneens, the Hammers-always fail to measure up and why the search will go on.
While O'Toole describes how the corporate messiah falls up the ladder and into millions of dollars, she investigates other ills of American business. According to O'Toole, the corporate world needs fewer bottom-liners and more real leaders, less blind trust in technology and more faith in front-line workers. Here is a compelling and entertaining book on a debilitating weakness in the business world by "one of the best writers on corporate America."
ISBN:0688031102
