The World According To Me

What can you learn from a CEO's autobiography?

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Blame it on Iacocca. Ever since Bantam Books published the memoirs of the Chrysler Corp. chairman in 1984, every executive with a gold pen-and-pencil set has wanted to write The World According to Me. (Word that Iacocca is about to do another book will only intensify that interest.) Trouble is, even a quick reading of the current crop reveals a sad fact: these would-be Churchills utterly missed the reason for Iacocca's success. Chairman Lee's musings on the auto industry may or may not be cogent. What makes Iacocca work isn't the philosophizing; it's the bedrock appeal of the man's Walter Mitty-style life.

Here's a son of an Allentown, Pa., hot dog peddler who, through smarts and determination, becomes a major force at Ford Motor Co. At the height of his success he is KO'd by none other than Henry Ford II himself, who gives "Well, sometimes you just don't like somebody" as the reason. But then, in the best tradition of heroes everywhere, Lee dusts himself off and (with substantial help from Uncle Sam) proceeds to save Chrysler, Ford's ailing rival. Hollywood couldn't have scripted it any better.

It's just this sense of drama that's lacking from the other business autobiographies now on the shelves. Take Hammer (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1987), the autobiography of Occidental Petroleum Corp. chairman Armand Hammer. Hammer's life has scarcely been dull: in 1921, after the Russian Revolution, he provided the Soviets with badly needed medical supplies, and ever since has acted as a high-level intermediary between the United States and the USSR. But his story has no hint of tension, passion, or intrigue. The Russians won't accept U.S. medical help for Chernobyl's radiation victims? No problem. Hammer dashes off a quick note that persuades Mikhail Gorbachev to let the doctors in. The State Department can't free imprisoned journalist Nicholas Daniloff? Hammer huddles with Soviet Ambassador Dubinin and foreign minister Shevardnadze, and Daniloff is free.

Hammer's a business leader too, of course, but the business part of his life gets equally short shrift. When Hammer was in his twenties, has father's drug company suddenly faced overwhelming demand for tincture of ginger. Mixed with ginger ale, the tincture created "a powerful ginger-ale highball" -- a concoction, back in the days of Prohibition, that could lead to overnight commercial success. Hammer's job: locate a new supply. Two paragraphs later he has cornered the market, and he doesn't say how.

Boone, the autobiography of T. (for Thomas) Boone Pickens Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 1987), is as frustrating as Hammer. You'd think the man who terrified Gulf Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Unocal, among others, would have fascinating stories to tell. You'd we wrong. There is exactly one intriguing piece of information in the book's 304 pages. For all of Pickens's noble talk about launching takeovers for the good of small shareholders, he began his first raids because his company, Mesa Petroleum, had lost barrels of money drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. There's no quicker way to come up with cash, it turns out, than greenmail. Aside from that nugget, the reported $1.5 million his publisher paid Pickens produced a dry hole.

An Wang, chairman of the computer company that bears his name, got a lot less for his book, Lessons (Addison-Wesley, 1986) -- a pity, since he appears to be the only chief executive-scribe giving away his royalties. (The beneficiary: Wang Institute of Graduate Studies.) Never mind, he too disappoints. The saga of a Chinese immigrant who earns a Ph.D. in applied physics at Harvard, starts a company, and guides it onto the Fortune 500 ought to have made a great book. But Wang's detached style -- the written equivalent of a monotone -- makes him sound bored with his own story. Here's Wang on the death of his mother: "Just a few days after . . . I received far more devastating news. . . . My mother's health had declined during the past few years and now she was dead." If that's all the emotion generated by the death of one of the people to whom the book is dedicated, you can imagine Wang's discussion of how he helped develop magnetic memory cores.

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