‘93/’94 Year-End Review and Outlook : A Top-10 Guide Through the Flood of Business Books

Publishers continued to flood the bookstores in 1993 with books aimed at business people. Out of this free-market free-for-all, 10 titles line up as worthy selections for the thoughtful reader.

At the top of this year’s list has to be the latest work by our Plato of business management, Peter F. Drucker. His “Post-Capitalist Society” (HarperCollins, $25) recommends itself both for its insights and what is bound to be its ongoing influence on business theory and practice. Drucker says we are in the middle of a radical social change--from a capitalist nation-state kind of world to a supranational, knowledge-based, society of organizations. If you want to understand why everything seems so different lately, dig into this one.

A moving companion volume is “Workers: An Archeology of the Industrial Age” (Aperture, $100) by acclaimed photographer Sebastiao Salgado. In 350 searing photographs, Salgado reminds us of the back-breaking work underlying modern civilization. He treats his manual laborer subjects with a dignity and respect that is a tribute to the soul of work.

At the other end of the wage scale, but of equal interest as a timely retrospective, is “The Whiz Kids: The Founding Fathers of American Business--And the Legacy They Left Us,” by John A. Byrne, a senior writer at Business Week (Doubleday, $27.50). This is the truly amazing story of how 10 young upstarts, led by Col. Tex Thorton, rode into Detroit in 1945, fresh from their sweeping wartime reorganization of the Army Air Force.

They charmed the then-floundering Henry Ford into hiring them as a group and subsequently transformed American business into a number-crunching efficiency game. The postwar party lasted for 30 years, but then something went amiss. Time proved that financial controls were neither the answer to every problem nor the key to unlimited growth.

Robert S. McNamara went on to the Pentagon; ambushed by the Vietnam War, he turned his analytical skills to ultimately futile body counts. Thornton created one of the first U.S. conglomerates, Litton Industries, and lived long enough to see it languish under his steady diet of statistical analysis. The other guys had similar reversals of fortune. If the past is prologue, “The Whiz Kids” is a cautionary tale for today’s bottom-liners.

For plot, character and action suffused with a sense that what you do for a living has an awful lot to do with who you are, dip into Michael Dorris’ haunting new collection of stories, “Working Men” (Holt, $19.95). This is fiction, but the emotional issues relative to work and life are timeless.

Ever wonder why your company’s incentive program seems to work like a two-edged sword, driving some forward while cutting others off at the knees? Put those old pay-for-performance assumptions to the test by reading Alfie Kohn’s “Punished by Rewards: The Trouble With Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes” (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95). Kohn says that although three-quarters of American corporations rely on some sort of incentive program, most of the programs don’t work. Worse, they’re not even motivationally neutral, but instead do bad things to people. Concentrate instead, he says, on employee participation in decisions, teamwork and making the job itself worth doing.

Another title with an insidious bearing on the bottom line is “The President’s Health Security Plan,” by the White House Domestic Policy Council with a foreword by Hillary Rodham Clinton (Times Books, $8). It’s a beastly boring, complicated subject, but it’s too important to ignore. The debate will rage ad nauseam during much of 1994, and the stakes are high.

A pair of books dealing with recent villainy and vainglory in the financial markets prove unusually entertaining reading. Though self-serving and selective in remembrance, L. William Seidman’s Washington memoir, “Full Faith and Credit: The Great S&L; Debacle and Other Washington Sagas” (Times Books, $25), is worth several chuckles. A broader perspective on the banking, financial and real estate industries will be found in “Minding Mister Market: Ten Years on Wall Street with ‘Grant’s Interest Rate Observer,’ ” by James Grant (Farrar Straus Giroux, $27.50), a compendium of witty, well-written selections from the biweekly journal. Grant’s contrarian, common-sensical observations are wickedly acerbic, and his deadly eye has repeatedly drawn a beam on instances of misplaced optimism.

In a more melancholy vein is Ron Chernow’s “The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family” (Random House, $30). The Wall Street Journal reporter has written a masterly saga of this legendary German banking dynasty and its travails before and during World War II. One of the best books of the year, regardless of category.

To close on a more pedestrian note, some people love reference books, and there’s a delectable one out from Reference Press to add to the business book shelf. “Hoover’s Handbook of American Business, 1994” ($27.95) is the latest edition of what has become an annual effort by a group of obsessive list makers. Featuring profiles of more than 500 American businesses in its nearly 1,300 pages, the book’s information is sorted every which way (by sales, employees, products, region, profits, market value, growth, decline) and is a handy resource for just about anyone.