Subtitled “Tales of CEOs Gone Wild”, this book should really have had a different subtitle– maybe “Poorly Written Character Assassination” would have better captured the flavor. Bryon proposes to relate the career and personal mishaps of Jack Welch (GE), Dennis Kozlowski (Tyco), Al Dunlap (Sunbeam, among others), and Ron Perelman (Revlon and others). Unfortunately, he wastes most of the book on unsupported pop-psych theories (Welch was an aggressive CEO because his mom called him a “punk”), with the underlying theme being that an excess of testosterone caused all four of these men to eventually self-destruct. No one’s portrayed in a flattering light here, but Welch comes in for special treatment, despite the fact that he was the only one of these CEOs to actually accomplish any meaningful creation of lasting value. Byron’s writing is annoying as all get-out, too; he uses footnotes to excess to explain simple things (who’s Lilith?) that I suspect most readers would already know and makes sloppy errors (like talking about Welch’s “neck waddle”) that bespeak a lack of editing– which in turn makes me doubt the veracity of some of what he reports.
Not only do I not recommend this book, I’m sorry my local library spent the money to buy it. Awful.
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