Corporate-finance

This book should have been an short magazine article. The authors basically dissect one concept over and over and over: change is disruptive. There is very little useful information in this book. It points out all of the obvious and frequently-stated problems that come with change - productivity suffers, commitment is lost, etc., etc., etc., but gives no insight in how to fix the problems (unless you count these golden nuggets- "Keep your eye on the ball" and "Provide direction"). The one chapter that I hoped would shed some light on tactics - "Integration Project Management" - was pure fluff. It offered such pearls of wisdom as "It is helpful to look at the integration process as a logical sequence of steps designed to help bring the two organizations together." Not only is this a "Duh" statement, but it shows up in chapter 8! I would expect to read something like that in the introduction. And chapters 5 and 6 state that you should evaluate key talent in the aquired firm - but no where in these chapters does it tell you how to do it! I guess you have call up Pritchett & Associates (and fork over big $$) for the details. My only guess is that the authors kept the book generic on purpose so that companies would call and ask about their consulting services. My advice: save your money for a real book, and just call up Pritchett & Associates for their marketing literature.

As a project manager who picked up integrating a merger as one of his projects, I found this book to be very helpful. Mergers bring out confusion, tension and stress to all sides. This book focused on how to bridge these gaps through effective communication and project management.

Particularly, I found chapter 10 (General Guidelines for Merger/Acquisition Management) insightful and I used the checklists in this chapter in portions of our integration effort. What I felt this book missed were templates designed to immediately pick up and use in my everyday life.

I found the book is a quick read-I read it on one airplane trip. Many of the comments are very simple and fall into the category of common sense. However, in much of this common sense many of the problems of integrating two companies exist.

Despite the breathless headlines about the latest billion-dollar merger, most mergers don't work. In fact, more than half of all mergers fail, derailed by a common set of pitfalls. Companies merge without considering how they'll integrate after the deal; they don't communicate properly with their employees, and executives don't make decisions quickly enough to placate frightened workers. The executives who navigate mergers effectively are those who communicate well, deal with ambiguity and make decisions in times of instability. Author Price Pritchett offers an easily digested primer on the hazards of mergers, and lists hints for avoiding common problems. The authors provide plenty of concrete examples showing how such companies as Sony, Wells Fargo and the Chicago Sun-Times suffered from the dilemmas that accompany mergers. We ... recommend this comprehensive guide for managers on both sides of a business marriage. Caution: Read After the Merger before you merge.

An interesting read, though it has the feel of having been padded a bit, especially at the end when the author veers off into a mildly interesting but irrelevant mini-bio of the the son of the main character. I would rather she had spent more time clearly defining some of the financial shenanigans; I still am not clear on some very major points. I reread them several times, and perhaps they are just beyond me, but the rest of the book dragged because the author tried to build the story on what I thought were some shaky foundations. Perhaps if you're a stock-broket or banker it would be clearer. Also, the main actor in this drama, James Hazen Hyde, seems like such a pampered, spoiled child. Although Beard doesn't convert most of the sums involved into today's dollars, the one or two times that she does provides a basic formula; by that account, poor Mr. Hyde was worth approximately $50 million BEFORE his inheritance. Even if that figure is wrong by half, the letters he wrote to his mother wanting her to foot some of his bills are pretty pathetic. To be fair, this book probably suffered because I had only recently finished DAvid McCullough's THE GREAT BRIDGE.

If you followed Enron, Worldcom, the conspicuous consumptions of Donald Trump or any of the other seamier of capitalism's excesses over the last several decades, this book will show you that history was repeating itself. In fact, comparing the ostentatious displays of wealth and brutal no-holds-barred corporate infighting between then (1900) and now, our capitalists sound like mere echoes of men who defined the terms "Gilded Age" and "Robber Barons."

Patricia Beard, in "After the Ball" has used the events and people surrounding the Equitable Life Assurance Society to illustrate a bygone era of business and living at the top level of wealthy society. In addition to dissecting a nasty takeover corporate takeover attempt well, Ms. Beard writes in a way that holds the reader's attention.

The Equitable was one of the big three life insurance companies at the dawn of the 20th Century. Important to policy holders because life insurance was the only means of support available at the time if the man of the house died with dependants, it was important to Wall Street because the premiums sat in a vast cash pool and were available to finance much of our industrial growth of the period. The Equitable had been created by one man, Henry Hyde, who grew it from a store-front business to vast size in the forty years after the Civil War. Henry Hyde was a founder, a decisive man who knew his business, could make decisions and had the respect of his company officers as well as his fellows.

His son, James Hazen Hyde, had none of his father's characteristics and had not been schooled by his doting parent in the arts that would be necessary to run the Equitable when it was his turn. When Henry died, James, in his early twenties, was the product of money and society -- finishing schools in Paris, the best clubs, debutante balls, and the kingly sport of coach riding. In short, he was trained to compete in the world of Mrs. Astor, not Mr. Astor.

To compensate for these deficiencies, father Henry had established a trust for his son. A vice presidency with the Equitable and the tutelage of James Alexander, President of the company and the man entrusted by the founder to school young James until he could assume the Presidency himself.

Alexander had other ideas. Put off by James Hyde's public and ostentatious lifestyle (including the Hyde Ball, one of the most talked about and over the top dinner productions in an era of societal excess among his class), claiming that it did not befit a corporate leader who could keep the "sacred trust" of a life insurance company, and wanting control of a company he had contributed mightily to, Alexander organized a takeover fight among the board members. His goal was to strip James of control of the Board of Directors and to do it by using James' social prominence against him in a public as well as behind-the-scenes attack.

What ensued was a year long debacle that quickly spun out of control, as first the Alexander side and then the Hyde forces battled for advantage. The board members, financiers like Harriman, Ryan, Morgan, Frick and others backed the side that stood to gain them the greatest advantage in victory. Plans, compromise offers, press leaks, attacks intrigue and back stabbing came forward in a flurry as the fight became very public and enthralled ordinary people (over 100 front page stories in the NY Times in about a year's period). Regulators soon got involved, the NY Legislature, political bosses and any number of money-men, eyeing easy capital if they could assume control. President Theodore Roosevelt worried that the fight would harm the Equitable, dissolve commercial confidence and bring the economy to a grinding halt.

When it was over, neither side got what they wanted or expected, the NY Legislature was spurred into reforming insurance oversight, Charles Evans Hughes was launched on his path to the US Supreme Court and his run for the White House and the Gilded Age (from hindsight) set on a path toward memory.

Beard weaves this corporate intrigue with a biography of James Hazen Hyde. He is the archetypical society man of the Gilded Age, spending on livery, costumed balls, big houses, fast women, a sport very few could even afford to compete in and his love of French culture. She does a good job of entwining the two threads of her book, stumbling only when she sometimes over-lists what various guests were wearing to various parties and engagements. On the whole, she does a good job of painting a picture of life as James Hazen Hyde knew it, and demonstrating that he was both cut from too fine a cloth to effectively run a competitive business and that he wore that cloth too proudly, helping to make his lifestyle a large issue in the corporate meltdown that froze the Equitable as titans battled for control.

The author writes well and generally keeps the pace moving along swiftly. The story weaves many famous business and historical personalities (it was a much smaller world at the top then) into the saga of a now forgotten business drama that held the public in fascination. This is a good book for readers interested in business history as well as viewing the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy a hundred years ago.

James Hyde, the main character in Patricia Beard's "After the Ball," a fascinating chronicle of the Gilded Age, conceded, "I got too much power when I was young." Shortly after the turn of the century, Hyde appeared to be coasting to glory in charmed young adulthood affluence. In his twenties he owned a brownstone in New York, a house in Paris, a private railroad car, and a four hundred acre estate, The Oaks, on Long Island. Add to the aforementioned that he was Harvard-educated with all the right social connections, was matinee idol handsome, and was a vice president in the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and it becomes easy to see why many sought his company and others were just plain jealous.

Beard's intensely researched work strips the veneer off the visible top layer and reveals that life can be highly disconcerting at the top of society as well. The difference is the battles that are fought, which, considering the stakes, contain a ruthless intensity.

In the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, in which James Hyde's father Henry flourished after founding the billion dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society, commercial triumph resulted from truly being in the right place at the right time with the right product. While income disparities were vast, ordinary citizens seeking to make financial ends meet bought life insurance policies to provide their families with security in the face of often rocky existences. The resourceful elder Hyde tapped into this desire. He succeeded so handsomely that big name magnates such as E.H. Harriman and Henry Clay Frick would soon grace Equitable's board of directors.

Henry Hyde died May 2, 1999, a year after his son graduated from Harvard. Young James was convinced that one day he would follow in his father's footsteps after receiving the proper seasoning, and the person designated to provide that assistance was acting president James W. Alexander, a veteran who had worked his way up the Equitable ladder. He would be assisted, it was anticipated, by Gage Tarbell, Equitable's third vice president and head of sales.

The book's title relates to a grand New York ball young Hyde gave on January 31, 1905. At the time this appeared to be the latest stepping stone up the success ladder for the handsome, witty, urbane New York City executive and socialite. One of the evening's guests would be another young New York aristocrat who would marry a cousin less than one year later and ultimately surge to inernational greatness and an enduring place in world history, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In a contemporary framework it would appear that perhaps the gifted Hyde would succeed in New York society and beyond in the same manner as Franklin Roosevelt, but whereas the future president was just working his way into the city's and state's limelight with an ultimate focus well beyond those objectives, Henry Hyde's run of bad luck would bear an inverse relationship to the good fortunes of Roosevelt. Before long his company would be immersed in conflict. Alexander and Tarbell would turn on him, while Henry Clay Frick, who chaired an investigation into company activities, would so the same. E.H. Harriman was another formidable force pitted against young Hyde.

While Equitable fell into a comparable pattern of excess and wheeler-dealer activity characteristic of highly competitive New York corporate life, with its agents being provided with excessive advances and state law being violated by selling stocks to companies on whose boards they sat, directing animus against the youngest executive in the ranks appeared to be a case of absolving their own conduct through a designated scapegoat. In the process they also released pent-up jealousies against one of the dashing princes of New York society, who had dated Alice Roosevelt and visited with her and father Theodore in the White House. Hyde was also a friend of the period's most famous actress, Sarah Bernhardt.

Another highly publicized effort, the Armstrong Investigation, headed by Charles Evans Hughes, later to become Attorney General, Secretary of State and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, captured many headlines but resulted in no prosecutions. All the same, the damage was done and Hyde relocated to Paris.

A new phase of Hyde's life began in Paris, where he had earlier headed an Equitable office. In the manner of a seasoned aristocrat more characteristic of an ancient British family, Hyde ultimately married three times and cut a wide swath in Parisian society. His only son, Henry, had a large shadow to climb out from under, feeling initially dwarfed by his formidable father. Eventually he emerged from that shadow and achieved marks of distinction initially in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, in World War Two, then as a prominent New York-based international lawyer whose client list included prominent film director John Huston.

Patricia Beard is able to provide readers with such a fascinating front row seat in boardrooms, drawing rooms and ballrooms of the period due to her close friendship with the Hyde family. Henry served as godfather to one of her children. The book serves as both an interesting corporate chronicle of the times as well as providing social commentary wherein readers feel a part of the scene, rubbing elbows with the cream of international society.

The book begins with a three phase approach for advancing women that is basic to all successful initiatives. It explores some of the best practices of corporations to provide advice on women's advancement issues. It also briefly highlights the programs of numerous Catalyst award winners. The book is based on Catalyst's research reports, case histories, and best practices. This is an interesting tour de force of best practices. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder, Stern & Associates, author of Stern's SourceFinder: The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder, and Stern's Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder.

For those organizations which seek to establish and then sustain programs which optimize the talents of the women whom they employ, this is an immensely informative book. Of even greater value than the information provided are the specific suggestions it offers based on three decades of research on all manner of companies. Catalyst is a non-profit organization which "partners with U.S. corporations and professional firms that understand the critical power of women at work, that know that women's advancement is not a feel-good or even a do-good issue but a bottom-line practicality."

The Catalyst Award is given to those corporations which have achieved lasting, measurable results in this area. The book examines many of these corporations. For example: IBM, Avon Products, E.I. du Pont de Nemours, Eastman Kodak, Arthur Andersen, Motorola, American Airlines, Morrison & Foerster, McDonald's, J.C. Penney, Dow Chemical, Knight-Ridder, Texas Instruments, and Allstate. I hasten to point out that most (if not all) of the information and suggestions provided by the book are also relevant to small-to-midsize organizations and may indeed be of even greater value to them than to (let's say) "Fortune 100" companies.

Advancing Women in Business is divided as follows:

Part I. Changing the System

Part II.Best Practices

Part III. Resources: The Catalyst Award

"The Catalyst Approach" can maximize the value of a workforce by "capitalizing on the talents of women" only if all efforts are made within an "inclusive, problem-solving, comprehensive program." Specifically, first establish a strong foundation by connecting each initiative explicitly to a business rationale; next, build a fact base by gathering information that will create the baselines for evaluating each initiative's progress; finally, develop, pilot, and implement action plans whose initiatives achieve practical solutions tailored to the organization's environment. How? Several dozen corporations are examined which illustrate what the "Catalyst Approach" requires of those involved in its implementation. Specific strategies and tactics are discussed. Results are measured and evaluated. I rate this book so highly because I think it is very well written, because it provides a wealth of important information about "best practices from the corporate leaders", and because it includes a number of practical suggestions as to HOW to derive greatest benefit from that information.

Frankly, I had hoped that a gender-specific book such as this would not be relevant in the year 2000. Well, unfortunately, it is. I now hope that enough people buy it and enough organizations are guided by it so that one day very soon, my granddaughters will read it and then ask me "What's this all about? Was it really like that? That's ridiculous!" Yes it is.