Great Expectations;

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FEW EXECUTIVES WITH EVEN MODest egos could resist the temptation when Iacocca: An Autobiography reached the number one spot on best-seller lists in 1984. If a man who needed a $1.2-billion federal loan guarantee to turn around his company could become an executive man of letters, why couldn't they?

More than 30 executives will try this year. And just in time, too: as the "excellence" books wither, here come the corporate chieftains to tell their own stories, helped out in most cases by collaborators. For around $20, you'll be able to read how Tom Monaghan baked Domino's Pizza Inc. into a billion-dollar company. Or how An Wang, a Chinese immigrant, computed Wang Laboratories Inc. onto the Fortune 500. Or how David Thomas turned that all-American fare, bargers and fries, into Wendy's Corp.

The Horatio Alger tales are outnumbered by the memoirs of the big-business moguls. Will T. Boone Pickens drop hints of upcoming raids? Will Donald Trump reveal how skyscrapers and third-string quarterbacks fare under tax reform's new depreciation rules? Will Henry Ford II, Hugh Hefner, William S. Paley, J. Paul Getty, Rupert Murdoch, David Mahoney, and William M. Agee justify their big advances? They're all taking a run at the Chrysler chairman.

They stand little chance of overtaking Iacocca, who has seen 2.6 million hardcover copies of his book printed. "Being a wellknown business executive is no guarantee the book will sell," says Stuart Applebaum, a vice-president of Bantam Books Inc. But some executives will go to great lengths to try. Victor Kiam, president of Remington Products Inc., is spending more than $1 million of his own money on radio and television advertising for his book, Going For it!

Kiam will have to sell considerably more than half a million copies just to earn a modest return on his investment. Readers may want to keep that in mind as they read Kiam's account of his own business prowess.