Friday, January 25, 2002

Remora

Limited Inc can't remember - was it T.S. Eliot who said that every strong writer creates the tradition he follows? By which he meant that literature is not sequential, even if its chronology, by mundane necessity, is. A writer picks out, from the vantage point of those instincts found in his prose, those of his predecessors who tended towards him. Blake thought the same thing - Milton dreamed of Blake, and then Blake dreamed of Milton. Mixing memory and desire indeed.

Well, the same can be said for �. economic history. When bubbles are blowing, the historians turn a revisionist eye on previously dissed speculators. In the nineties, there was an outpouring of sympathy for, of all people, J.P. Morgan. So cultured! So right, so often! This acquisitive weasel, this man whose name was rightly cursed by every farmer and Pullman porter in the 1890s, the classic photograph of whom, stick raised, WC Fields proboscis burning, pig like eyes shining with malice and outrage, was muckraking enough. There's a nice review of the Strouse bio in the TNR which takes the reasonable tack that the rich are rare, and that their interests might not be the interests of their servants and others not so gifted with the Midas touch. Upstairs is not downstairs. For Strouse, and for her readers no doubt, dear Pierpont turns out to be less ogre than Clinton Democrat avant la letter, managing us into the tiered prosperity we so knew and loved during the boom and boomer years.

It has been the same story with the flood of dreary CEO autobiographies, a nineties genre to which any decent man would prefer seventies porn. This mass of self congratulation culminated with Jack Welch's this year. These CEOs believe their ghostwriters and pr men - they believe that leadership is a secret, yes, that it exist behind door number one in their ever so sharp minds. To read them, one would think that they all possess the magnetism of Rasputin, and the chess playing skills of Morphy. The deluded leading the manic - isn't this what irrational exuberance is all about? Give your leadership stock options and watch your accounting standards become all mysterious. Because the thing is - when you depend on those options, you are going to make the prices jump come hell or high water. And then you can refer fondly to those numbers in your book - proof positive that your secret skills were ace!

Jack Beatty has a little review in the Atlantic of a book about an earlier kind of titan - guys who made their money leading corporations that made things. Not financial innovators of Morgan's type. Yes, I know, curious as that sounds in our asset-lite corporate era. Curious as that sounds when the punchline is - you are in the business of selling information. This earlier group was a nasty bunch. Some of them were clearly bonkers. But they were all much more interesting than a dozen Jack Welches. Their very cruelty was spacious.

Here's a beautiful story about Henry Ford.



"Henry Ford persecuted initiative. Returning from a trip to Europe he discovered that his engineers had made small improvements to the Model T. "It was a better, smoother-riding vehicle, and his associates hoped to surprise and please him," David Halberstam writes in The Reckoning.

Ford walked around it several times. Finally he approached the left-hand door and ripped it off. Then he ripped off the other door. Then he bashed the windshield. Then he threw out the back seat and bashed the roof of the car with his shoe. During all this time he said nothing. There was no doubt whose car the T was and no doubt who was the only man permitted to change it."

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