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Barbarians at the Gate
Aug. 30th, 2011 11:08 pmTitle: Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
Authors: Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Genre: Business history
In simple terms, this book is about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco (the at the time recent union of RJ Reynolds, the tobacco company behind Camel, and Nabisco). What it is actually about is what happens when greed, boredom, the need to "shake things up," and cockiness mix together in the CEO of one the biggest corporations in the world. And Ross Johnson, the CEO of RJR Nabisco, is a corker. (At one point, when asked about his agreement to gain almost $2 billion to divide between seven directors in the buyout, he refereed to it as "monopoly money.")
This book is the business history. When I worked on business books, every proposal that crossed our desks compared itself to Barbarians at the Gate. It's easy to see why--once you peel back the business veneer, this reads like Roman history. Only in modern times, you can't assassinate your rivals when you make a coup, so they hang around, ready to bite you in the ass later.
This book has some flaws: For one, it's long (544 pages). It was written in the eight months after it happened, so it's clear everything they found out went in the book. Every time a new player shows up, we get a full background, even if their part in the debacle amounts to nothing. Which leads me to two--there are approximately a billionty people in this book, many with similar names (Ross Johnson, Jim Robinson, Edward Robinson, George Roberts...). It's like a Russian novel. There's a dramatis personae in the front of the book that I found myself flipping to a lot, and still it's easy to lose track of exactly why x person is important. But since it's real life, that's kind of unavoidable.
But for all that, and for all that it's a business history so is talking about businessy things, I think this is a fantastic book to read for anyone who wants to write political machinations. Me, I suck at that stuff. Love reading it; can't come up with it. This book is a smorgasbord of manipulation and backbiting, with plenty of hubris and excess thrown in. So if you have any stomach for business books at all, definitely recommended.
(Also, the edition I read came out twenty years after the book was initially published, so has an afterword that gives a longer perspective on how the deal ultimately affected everyone. And, interestingly, it seems like the book (and HBO movie) is one of the biggest legacies. Some of the people involved say that a week doesn't go past when someone doesn't ask them about the book. Or call them barbarians.)
Authors: Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Genre: Business history
In simple terms, this book is about the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco (the at the time recent union of RJ Reynolds, the tobacco company behind Camel, and Nabisco). What it is actually about is what happens when greed, boredom, the need to "shake things up," and cockiness mix together in the CEO of one the biggest corporations in the world. And Ross Johnson, the CEO of RJR Nabisco, is a corker. (At one point, when asked about his agreement to gain almost $2 billion to divide between seven directors in the buyout, he refereed to it as "monopoly money.")
This book is the business history. When I worked on business books, every proposal that crossed our desks compared itself to Barbarians at the Gate. It's easy to see why--once you peel back the business veneer, this reads like Roman history. Only in modern times, you can't assassinate your rivals when you make a coup, so they hang around, ready to bite you in the ass later.
This book has some flaws: For one, it's long (544 pages). It was written in the eight months after it happened, so it's clear everything they found out went in the book. Every time a new player shows up, we get a full background, even if their part in the debacle amounts to nothing. Which leads me to two--there are approximately a billionty people in this book, many with similar names (Ross Johnson, Jim Robinson, Edward Robinson, George Roberts...). It's like a Russian novel. There's a dramatis personae in the front of the book that I found myself flipping to a lot, and still it's easy to lose track of exactly why x person is important. But since it's real life, that's kind of unavoidable.
But for all that, and for all that it's a business history so is talking about businessy things, I think this is a fantastic book to read for anyone who wants to write political machinations. Me, I suck at that stuff. Love reading it; can't come up with it. This book is a smorgasbord of manipulation and backbiting, with plenty of hubris and excess thrown in. So if you have any stomach for business books at all, definitely recommended.
(Also, the edition I read came out twenty years after the book was initially published, so has an afterword that gives a longer perspective on how the deal ultimately affected everyone. And, interestingly, it seems like the book (and HBO movie) is one of the biggest legacies. Some of the people involved say that a week doesn't go past when someone doesn't ask them about the book. Or call them barbarians.)