The second factor is how character affects business. In “Shoe Dog”, Nike’s former boss writes about the importance of being first into China to gain an advantage over its competitors. In 1988, when Mr Dell was 23 years old and Compaq was his biggest rival, he placed a billboard outside its headquarters in Houston, Texas, with an arrow pointing west towards Austin, where his own four-year-old company was based. Business, as Mr Knight puts it, is “war without the bullets”, fought one sale at a time, which someone inevitably has to lose. These are not win-win firms created to make the world a better place. The first trait the books celebrate is competitiveness. If nothing else they help expose what most self-styled business gurus get wrong. In a world of unreadable business books and overpriced business schools, it is worth taking CEO memoirs seriously. Moreover, for those interested in business, such accounts provide a ringside seat for observing some of the big dilemmas of recent decades: staying private or going public prioritising shareholders or stakeholders building hardware or software. It is also blessed with a villain from central casting: Carl Icahn, activist investor and publicity hound, whose sparring with Mr Dell gives the story its bite. The book is acidly funny, nail-biting and fast-paced.
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Its newest addition is “Play Nice but Win”, the story of how Michael Dell built the PC company named after him that would eventually change the way computers were made and sold. It has recently hit its stride with books by Phil Knight, who co-founded Nike, in 2016 and Stephen Schwarzman, co-creator of Blackstone, in 2019. That said, the genre has many things going for it-especially when the authors are founders of successful firms who, by definition, have mastered the art of telling a good story. And they can afford the best ghostwriters so it is hard to tell how much is their work anyway. There is no sex, drugs and only middle-of-the-road rock ’n’ roll. They are neither Hemingways nor Dostoevskys.
The authors are mostly white, male and middle-class.
So it is with trepidation that Schumpeter celebrates the flourishing of a genre at which most book-lovers would shudder: the CEO memoir. Your browser does not support the element.Įnjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.
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