I read my fair share of business books. I try to avoid the business mogul puffographies, but I do tend to occasionally pick up the instructional guide types. You know, the ones where the big time consultants and professors write about their clients and set out all those roadmaps for achieving greatness. Given a career spent in companies that no longer exist, these books tend to have a strong element of "read it an weep" in them for me - oh, boo, hoo, if only we'd known the twelve simple steps that help struggling companies get off auto-pilot on the road to ruin and put them on the road to success - but I am always on the lookout for things lessons to apply.
My favorite business book, however, are always the ones that are laugh out loud funny and/or read like novels.
In fact, some of them are even laugh out loud funny novels. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by Harry Saint, is now almost twenty years old, but it's still one of the funniest books I've ever read that has business in its background. But the business books I've most enjoyed over time are Michael Lewis' hilarious Liar's Poker (a tell-all about Salomon Brothers), and Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burroughs and John Helyar, which was as thick and meaty as a Robertson Davies trilogy (and was also made into a TV movie as funny as anything I've ever seen).
The book is a bit too bittersweet to be laugh-out-loud funny, but I was pretty sure that I'd like Sweet and Low by Richard Cohen, and I did.
The book is a family memoir cum history lesson cum cautionary business tale about the artificial sweetener industry. Cohen admittedly has something of a non-sweetened axe to grind. His grandfather invented Sweet 'n' Low, and built a fairly successful business around it, but Cohen's mother and her children ended up being disinherited.
The book combines elements of the classic American immigrant success story with a classic dysfunctional family - so what's not to like. (Among other "goodies", Cohen's family is cut out of the will because his mother recommended the doctor who operated on the founding father just prior to his death - at the age of 89. So she was blamed for his death. And the person who was most directly responsible for Cohen's family's being cut out was a crazy aunt who hadn't left her bedroom in 30 years.)
From a business perspective, however, what's interesting is watching the business lessons come clear. First there's the decline that occured after the management was handed down father to (first) son to (first) son - the fire in the belly diluted with each generation. This, of course, doesn't have to happen, and there are certainly cases where son topped father. (You may hate his guts, or think he's a total buffoon, but Donald Trump comes to mind.) But I worked at Wang Labs and saw what a drag it was on the company that Dr. Wang's son Fred (first son) had been earmarked to replace his father as CEO. This made it very difficult to attract and keep strong senior management on board: the strong, ambitious ones wanted a shot at the top job that they weren't going to get. That's how John Chambers, who was an exec at Wang when I worked there, got away.
Then there's the business lesson around hiring people who are competent and excellent. Instead of putting competent, excellent people in key positions, the Sweet 'n' Low folks did things like promote a maintenance guy to the comptroller position. And hire a construction worker without even a high school diploma to serve as "VP of Government Relations." (This latter employee may or may not have been put in place by organized crime, which may or may not have controlled the operations at one point.) Not that you shouldn't promote from within, or give people chances - and not, as we've seen with Enron et al., that people with pedigree degrees can't end up doing corrupt things - but having insiders with little by way of professional skills, education, and credentials, made it all too easy for the Sweet 'n' Low-ers to slip into corrupt, crimial business practices.
Then there's the lesson about getting too wedded to your status quo. Rather than keep on bettering its product, Cumberland (the Sweet 'n' Low company) focused all of its energy on trying to keep the FDA from outright banning saccarhin (their key ingredient). While they focused on this, others entered the market with better products like NutraSweet and Splenda. Overall market growth has kept Cumberland alive, but their market share shrinks every year, and they're now pretty much just the low-cost provider of a product that a shrinking proportion of the market prefers the taste of.
Anyway, very interesting read, with great "characters". I'm just happy I don't have to be related to any of them.
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