John Brooks (2) (1920–1993)

Just like for a lot of people, it was the joint recommendation of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett that brought this out-of-print essay collection to my attention; "the best business book I've ever read" carries some weight from such luminaries. To cut to the chase, I didn't find this compilation of 1960s vintage New Yorker essays to be quite as peerless as Gates did - James Stewart's Disneywar is probably my current favorite general business work - yet they're still interesting and readable. show more No one would accuse Brooks of excessive devotion to brevity, many of them lack a "point" in the sense of an immediately digestible bit of wisdom, and there's no consistent theme, but Brooks' lively prose style and attention to detail make this a very worthwhile read.

From the very first story, you get a sense of what attracted Gates and Buffet to Brooks. He's great at taking a complex event and dramatizing the individual roles that the main actors play, while gently reminding the reader that ultimately the actions of human beings might never be perfectly comprehensible, let alone predictable. This limits his actionable value, in the bullet-point sense of "here's what you should do as a businessman", but also enhances his readability value, in the sense of reinforcing your appreciation for how the quirks of human psychology manifest themselves in various provinces of the commercial realm. All of the stories are fun:

- "The Fluctuation". There was a sudden market crash on May 28, 1962 for no obvious reasons that anyone could see. The modern analogue that jumps to mind is of course the Flash Crash, but as Brooks points out, there are innumerable historical examples stretching back as far as you care to look; Joseph de la Vega, quoted heavily, wrote a famous and just as relevant book about market peculiarities back in 1688. Mostly useful as a look at how gentlemanly the rituals of trading were back in the 60s, but of course you can't repeat prudent warnings about how "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" often enough.
- "The Fate of the Edsel". "Edsel" is now synonymous with "epic disaster" (the line lost a quarter of a billion dollars at the time), but the fact that there are so many contradictory theories to explain its failure should give the thoughtful historian pause: you can't accuse Ford of both over-reliance on research and also accuse them of failing to appreciate their target market (though some details like the thousands of potential names considered and then thrown away stand out as egregious waste). While its spectacular flameout still retains some element of mystery, Brooks eventually gets around to presenting one major plausible hypothesis - it wasn't a great car. Fair enough.
- "The Federal Income Tax". The concept of an income tax has always been controversial, and the execution even more so. Especially vexing is the question of deductions and loopholes, and where one shades into the other, and how self-perpetuating these can be. Brooks talks about some specific loopholes, like writing off social engagements as business expenses, but his closing sentences will probably be relevant forever: "The ideal income tax envisioned for the far future by many reformers would be characterized by a short and simple Code with comparatively low rates and with a minimum of exceptions to them. In its main structural features, this ideal tax would bear a marked resemblance to the 1913 income tax - the first ever to be put in effect in the United States in peacetime. So if the unattainable visions of today should eventually materialize, the income tax would be just about back where it started."
- "The Impacted Philosophers". There's a fine art to ordering your subordinates to commit illegal acts like price-fixing: you have to make sure that your orders are understood and obeyed, since if you fix your prices and your competitors don't you could lose money; but you can't leave an obvious and unambiguous record, because if you do you'll go to jail. If a VP encourages fraud in a forest but no one provably understood him, did he commit a crime? Brooks serves up a dryly hilarious account of the literal wink-and-a-nod subterfuge that GE and Westinghouse executives used to fix the market for electric equipment before the authorities caught on.
- "A Reasonable Amount of Time". Insider trading can be tricky to define, especially in the case of the mining industry, where even insiders literally on the ground can't always rely on what they hear. Texas Gulf Sulphur thought they were on the verge of striking it fabulously rich in the Ontario wilderness - how quickly and to what extent should their employees have been allowed to speculate on the basis of the latest reports? TGS comes out fairly well here, but what exactly is the dividing line between them and Enron?
- "Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox". This was a great smaller corporate profile, with lots of detail on Xerox's history, market position, products, challenges, and attitudes towards corporate social responsibility. Along the way Brooks makes a lot of good points about technology: "It may seem paradoxical that this growth [of office reproduction technology] coincided with the rise of the telephone, but perhaps it isn't. All the evidence suggests that communication between people by whatever means, far from simply accomplishing its purpose, invariably breeds the need for more." I'd love to see a compare/contrast of Xerox with Kodak or IBM, just down the road, especially given Xerox's pivotal contributions to personal computers a few years after this piece was written.
- "Making the Customers Whole". One of the differences between an everyday emergency and a systemic crisis in the markets is whether the Folks In Charge need to step in. That old adage of "if you owe the bank a thousand dollars it's your problem; if you owe a million it's their problem" gets magnified many times over in the world of commodities, where blown trading positions on a large enough scale can leave a rat's nest of hopelessly complicated and ruinously expensive deals that only coordinated action can untangle. This tale of a hapless brokerage, in over its head on soybean oil contracts [sic] during the JFK assassination confusion and rescued by the NYSE brings to mind Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed, as well as the sorry fate of Lehman Brothers.
- "The Last Great Corner". The turbulent life of Memphis grocery store baron Clarence Saunders, patriarch of the Piggly Wiggly chain, who tried to corner his own company's stock to show Wall Street he wouldn't be pushed around and ended up getting pushed himself by the SEC. The part about cornering strategies reminded me of Paul Krugman's "How Copper Came a-Cropper", which it of course anticipated; the SEC's role in frustrating Saunders' efforts would be a good discussion topic in a class on regulatory strategy. I find the supermarket industry pretty interesting, so the cursory overview of Piggly Wiggly's market position and corporate history wasn't as satisfactory from that perspective as the Xerox chapter was, and it made me appreciate the longer and more comprehensive company profile of A&P in Marc Levinson's excellent The Great A&P.
- "A Second Sort of Life". A capsule biography of David Lilienthal, director of the Tennessee Valley Authority and ardent New Dealer, who acquired a taste for business later in life and founded the Development and Resources Corporation that built TVA-ish projects all over the third world. Along the way he made himself some of the money that he wasn't able to as a public servant, which furnishes the main question of the piece. Brooks makes a big deal out of Lilienthal's public-to-private transition, which is an interesting question - the TVA, which my father worked at when I was born, was created over the determined opposition of private power interests and ended up being a huge success. Should the government be directly competing with industry, and if so on what terms? However, Brooks casts this as a purely abstract metaphysical debate, and without numbers it's less helpful than it could be. So, as in so many things, see the LCRA sections of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson series for a more detailed take on this perennial public-private debate. Brooks is right about the importance of keeping interesting journals though.
- "Stockholder Season". How activist should shareholders be, and how should companies deal with the masses of investors who've put up their money to earn some decent returns? This is a funny but lightweight look at some of the more colorful characters who appear at public shareholder meetings. One useful point he does touch on is that when it came to actual votes, corporate management usually got what they wanted; the "shareholder revolution" of the 1980s was still in the future.
- "One Free Bite". Non-compete agreements are either prudent protection of vital trade secrets, if you're an employer, or stifling limitations and tantamount to wage theft, if you're an employee. In this era of Silicon Valley wage theft scandals and the like, it seems like employers have more tools than non-compete clauses to restrain their employees, but the basic question of how free workers should be to use their skills independently of any particular company is still relevant.
- "In Defense of Sterling". This story could have used more macroeconomic research, even if it's far more dramatic and suspenseful than an account of currency valuation has any right to be. Brooks doesn't mention the famous trilemma of monetary policy (you can have independent monetary policy, free movement of capital, or fixed exchange rates, but not all three simultaneously) that is the whole basic for the British pound's valuation crisis of the mid-70s, instead profiling the heads of the world's monetary authorities as they moved heaven and earth to maintain the value of the pound against the speculators who thought it was over-valued given Britain's fiscal policies and trade balance. Brooks makes a rare outright (though perfectly respectable at the time) macroeconomics error in thinking that currency devaluation helped cause the Great Depression. It's notable that George Soros made tons of money on 1992's Black Wednesday by re-enacting this exact currency speculation strategy and forcing Britain to pull out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

In the literary sense, this is easily in the top rank of business books, just because Brooks makes it fun to read about currency crises, automobile marketing, and shareholder democracy. However, since we're all extremely busy CEOs from whom time is money, this might be more of a vacation read than a boardroom read, so keep that in mind the next time you're hanging out with Gates or Buffett. show less

Question: has anyone read a contemporary history book that is no longer contemporary?

I recently wrapped up "The Go-Go Years" by John Brooks, a look at the bull market of the 60s and subsequent crash in 1970. It's a jauntily written and entertaining read (and includes perhaps the best description of Ross Perot I've ever run across). If you have an interest in economics, the stock market or the 60s, I thoroughly recommend it. Bonus points if you want to compare to similar contemporary show more histories of more recent economics, such as Michael Lewis' "The Big Short."

But what makes it such an oddity to me is that it was published in 1973 and, boy howdy, is it a product of its time. There's slang that is lost on me, Nixon shows up repeatedly without any reference to his wrongdoing, there is constant references to the Protestant-Jewish split on Wall Street. On its own merits, it's a pretty good book. As a time capsule, especially to a time which is just outside my own memory, it's absolutely fascinating.

It's occurred to me that this type of book makes up a fairly large chunk of current book sales (even if most of that is political tripe), but it feels like these books disappear after a few months never to resurface. There's a fascinating prospect of literary anthropology contained out there, if you only know where to find it. show less

I tend to not gravitate towards non-fiction reads unless the topic fascinates me. I don't understand much of the machinations that go on on Wall Street but the business stories were enough to get me to check out an audiobook version from my local library. Originally published back in 1969, the book has recently been re-published by Open Road Media, so I was expected it to be somewhat dated in nature. From a historical perspective, the chapters about Ford and Xerox were fascinating and show more provided great insight into both companies. Topics that delved into accusations of disclosing corporate secrets and the Texas Gulf Sulphur case that established what continues to this day to be concerns regarding insider trading, this book really hits on a lot of topics that are still relevant today. I particularly like that Brooks, writing for The New Yorker magazine, wrote this chapters/articles with the average reader in mind. You don't have to be a corporate executive, banker or Wall Street stock broker to understand what Brooks is writing about. What struck a chord with me is how relevant, even today, these stories - written and published individually from 1959 to 1969 - are when looking at the world's continuing economic and financial crisis.

If I haven't convinced you to read this one, maybe two American business icons can. Bill Gates has recently posted on his blog gatesnotes, that this book, recommended to him by Warren Buffet back in 1991, is the best business book he has ever read. Now, two greats of American business can't both be wrong about this book, can they? ;-) show less

Doce historias relacionadas con la empresa y las finanzas. Doce historias bien contadas que, aun así, son muy distintas. Desde el fracaso de Ford al lanzar el modelo Edsel al ataque sistemático (uno de tantos) que sufrió la libra esterlina a primeros de los 60 y que acabó terminando con el patrón oro, el autor nos cuenta en largos, larguísimos artículos un montón de historias. Algunas son aburridas, no lo neguemos. El ascenso de Xerox o la historia de cómo un funcionario se show more convirtió en CEO de una empresa minera no están tan logrados como los antes mencionados o el curioso análisis económico-histórico-filosófico que le hace al código tributario del IRS (Internal Revenue Service, la Hacienda norteamericana).
Este libro se vende con la manida frase "El favorito de Bill Gates y Warren Buffett". Lo cierto es que son historias al estilo de Michael Lewis pero años antes de Michael Lewis (el libro está escrito alrededor de 1964). Estoy convencido de que Lewis ha leído a John Brooks y ha aprendido algunas cosas de estilo y estructura de él (aunque a mí Lewis me gusta mucho más).
En general una lectura no demasiado densa aunque no ligera. Puede ser interesante. Tres estrellas y media. show less