Life at the Top
Mitgang, Herbert
BOOKS Life at the Top THE BIG BOYS by Ralph Nader and William Taylor Pantheon Books. 571 pp. $22.95. THE DEFENSE GAME by Richard Stubbing with Richard A. Mendel Bessie/Harper &...
...He worked in the budget office of the White House from 1962 to 1981, then left the Government to become a professor of public policy at Duke University...
...445 pp...
...The Big Boys is one of his most surprising because it examines the corporate style of nine chief executives or leading principals of American companies...
...It is just twenty years since Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, the book that resulted in a revolution in automobile safety...
...others shuddered at the thought of meeting Nader or his associate so the authors asked their questions at stockholders' meetings...
...Here is William McGowan, chairman of MCI Communications, competing against AT&T, talking to Nader about public images and, specifically, about Lee Iacocca of Chrysler: "I think Iacocca has done very well for Chrysler, but I think his motivation was to prove to Henry Ford that he made a mistake...
...Some of the CEOs appear as remarkable entrepreneurs with a large vision...
...Six of the nine sat still for long interviews...
...The Big Boys breaks new ground for the consumer advocate, but at heart it remains pure Nader...
...But there is always a sign, whenever you see a guy go on television...
...Once a CEO decides he'll go on television, you don't have a CEO any more— you have a personality, and somebody has to satisfy that personality...
...by Herbert Mitgang Style is at the heart of these two impressive studies of life at the top...
...The Big Boys is a model of journalistic candor about sources and those in quasi-public roles who prefer not to be heard publicly...
...Others make the reader wonder how they survived without a sense of corporate, let alone national, responsibility...
...Anyone who wants to learn about corporate power by talking to most union leaders should expect to be disappointed in today's United States...
...Well, maybe I shouldn't be bothered by somebody's motivation...
...another appears remote...
...Although resisted by Detroit, the book led to mandatory Government regulations that caused the country to buckle up and save thousands of lives every year...
...But ridding the Defense Department of these inefficiencies" will require "creative, attentive, and active leadership...
...Much of it is technical but it is obvious that with the help of Richard Mendel, a writer and researcher, he brings an insider's knowledge of the byzantine Department of Defense budget...
...The author calls for a curb on Defense Department spending...
...Through the eyes of the executives and the documents Nader and his associate, William Taylor, have obtained, a rare picture emerges of how big business functions in calm and crisis...
...Herbert Mitgang is an associate editor of The New York Times...
...One of them ventures into America's corporate suites and the other into the Pentagon's corridors of power...
...21.50...
...BOOKS Life at the Top THE BIG BOYS by Ralph Nader and William Taylor Pantheon Books...
...They represent a variety of approaches...
...the labels he affixes to their names are not, in every case, flattering— the least so for Reagan's man at the Pentagon...
...Both books—The Big Boys, by Ralph Nader and William Taylor, and The Defense Game, by Richard A. Stubbing with Richard A. Mendel—address themselves to the matter of style as it is practiced in the rarefied office air, far above the crowd, where only a relatively small number of men (no women are included in these roles) dwell and survive...
...Among the companies represented are General Motors, Dow Chemical, Lazard Freres, Northrop Corporation, Control Data Corporation, and MCI Communications...
...Here, Stubbing gets down to individuals: five Secretaries of Defense and their styles...
...Since then, the consumer advocate has written a score of books in different fields...
...They can be linked because so many of the Fortune 500 chief executives and Defense Department civilian leaders find themselves exchanging desks regularly and doing business with one another, coming and going...
...fiction writers usually undertake the theme of high-level leadership from the ground up and the outside looking in, faces pressed against windows of opportunity that are hard to imagine...
...Not many novelists attempt to do so...
...In The Defense Game, the author succeeds in making the job sound near-impossible and a role for a man—or a woman—for all seasons...
...Here we call it Potomac fever...
...Then, sounding like the Ralph Nader of Unsafe at Any Speed again, he poses a polemical question near the end of his powerful book: "America's leading business executives must face up to a fundamental question: Are they and like-minded peers capable of catapulting the power they deploy every day to areas of statesmanship and leadership beyond their routine mane uverings...
...He calls Robert S. McNamara "the manager," Melvin R. Laird "the politician," James R. Schlesinger "the intellectual," Harold Brown "the scientist," and Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger "the fundraiser...
...The second half of the book turns to the civilian leaders of the Defense Department...
...Billions of dollars are being poured annually into the extraordinarily large domestic basic structure and into a number of other wasteful spending practices in the soft underbelly of defense," he writes...
...another regards himself as the personification of his company...
...One CEO is a hands-on leader...
...Nader says that "the worst excesses of inhibition were not found among the corporate leadership, but in the upper ranks of labor unions...
...one seems publicity-shy...
...THE DEFENSE GAME by Richard Stubbing with Richard A. Mendel Bessie/Harper & Row...
...The first part covers the roles of the Defense Department, Congress, the weapons-acquisition cycle, the purchasing of goods and services, the Pentagon payroll, and manpower requirements...
...In addition, Government records supplemented more than 650 interviews conducted for their book...
...In The Defense Game, Richard Stubbing divides his book into two halves...
...There are some outspoken observations in The Big Boys...
...The major private companies and the Government department with a huge part of the Federal budget require leaders able to think mega-thoughts about how to handle billions of dollars and command thousands of men and women...
Vol. 50 • December 1986 • No. 12
