Thriller

This summer's best reads can be found on the business shelf

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Greed. Ambition. Backstage conniving. Who says a book about companies and competition has to be dull? Deals. Blunders. Political tricks. It's all on the shelf in your local business bookstore. Where better to look for summertime reading?

The day is long past when "business book" automatically meant a title like Strategic Planning and Management Handbook. The headlines in the financial pages these days trumpet all sorts of shakeups in the economic landscape: companies merged out of existence, strangled by competitors, blindsided by sudden changes. You don't have to be a veteran of the corporate wars to know that newspapers rarely get the whole story. That "retirement" of a chief executive officer? Probably not as bloodless as the smiling faces in the photo suggest. The announcement of a troubled company's turnaround? Maybe not as quick 'n' easy as the press releases would have you believe.

The new business books pick up where the papers leave off, picking apart the personalities and strategies that drove the action. Their working assumptions: every shakeup means that someone won big while someone else lost big; and if the outcome was worth a headline, the game itself probably involved conspiracy and intrigue worthy of Julius Caesar. The best of the new genre captures not only who did what to whom, but why. As every businessperson knows, the marketplace is a battleground of hopes and fears as well as profits and losses. As every novelist knows, it's emotions that keep readers turning the pages.

Of course, not every corporate saga lends itself to a suspenseful story. But there are plenty of recent titles that will entertain as well as inform. Some suggestions:

The Reckoning, by David Halberstam (William Morrow & Co., 1986). Halberstam's subject: the fall of the once-proud American auto industry and the rise of its once-humble Japanese counterpart. You haven't read about the decline of U.S. manufacturing until you've read this book, a tale of two companies told through the lives of the people who shaped them. Ford Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co., in Halberstam's account, are settings for blood feuds and blinding ambitions; the familiar story of Henry Ford II vs. Lee Iacocca is one bitter battle among many. But they are also repositories for the dreams and schemes of otherwise-anonymous managers and workers. That makes the two corporations compelling stand-ins not only for their industry but for their countries' disparate economies.

In reporting the book, Halberstam spent eight months in Japan, interviewing through interpreters. Once you read his account of Nissan, you'll never again assume that economic success was somehow built into Japanese culture. Twenty years ago Nissan built chintzy, unattractive, underpowered cars. U.S. operations manager Yutaka Katayama -- who, says Halberstam, "often wondered why anyone bothered to buy" one -- could only gaze in awe at the inroads that imports like Volkswagen were making in the mammoth American market. Slowly, Nissan engineers learned how to design better cars, workers learned how to make them, marketers learned how to sell them. Japan's eventual success, by this account, was no more mysterious than Avis's when the once-languishing car-rental company first took on giant Hertz. They tried harder.

Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman, by Ken Auletta (Warner Books paperback, 1986). Auletta's story is pure Wall Street soap, with avarice and power plays in lieu of sex and violence. Lehman Brothers chairman Peter C. Peterson appoints securities-trading whiz Lewis L. Glucksman president and co-chief executive. Glucksman, no slave to gratitude, repays Peterson by squeezing him out. Alas, the new king has his own mutinous generals, who greedily scheme to sell the firm out from under him. On May 11, 1984, the plot came to fruition. Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, as it was then known, was sold to Shearson/American Express (it's now Shearson/Lehman Brothers, an AmEx subsidiary). The price: roughly $380 million, most of it divided among Lehman's 72 partners.

Glucksman, his wounded pride assuaged by $15.6 million, took his money and ran. Other top partners -- some still in their thirties -- had to make do with $6 million to $10 million apiece. Auletta seems a little shocked that Lehmanites were so money-hungry as to sell out their partnership. Why does he think they became investment bankers in the first place? The real question isn't whether Lehman should have survived -- no one outside lower Manhattan is likely to care -- but why corporate America continues to provide these paper entrepreneurs with such big slices of the economic pie. Auletta doesn't address this issue, but his book makes you wonder what the answer is.

The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T, by Steve Coll (Atheneum, 1986). Former INC. writer Coll chronicles the drama behind the Justice Department's historic antitrust case against Ma Bell. He doesn't dwell much on the private lives of the participants; he just gives the play-by-play. But it's an engrossing contest, particularly because the outcome was constantly in doubt. In 1981, virtually every member of the new Reagan cabinet wanted to drop Justice's suit. But when attorney general William French Smith abstained from the case (for conflict-of-interest reasons), the decision fell to the new head of antitrust, one William Baxter. And Baxter was determined to pursue the case. For political reasons, no one else in the Administration could easily countermand him.

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