Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street

by John Brooks

While the E-Car was on the drawing boards in Ford’s styling studio—situated, like its administrative offices, in the company’s barony of Dearborn, just outside Detroit—work on it progressed under the conditions of melodramatic, if ineffectual, secrecy that invariably attend such operations in the automobile business: locks on the studio doors that could be changed in fifteen minutes if a key should fall into enemy hands; a security force standing round-the-clock guard over the establishment; and a telescope to be trained at intervals on nearby high points of the terrain where peekers might be roosting. (All such precautions, however inspired, are doomed to fail, because none of them provide a defense against Detroit’s version of the Trojan horse—the job-jumping stylist, whose cheerful treachery makes it relatively easy for the rival companies to keep tabs on what the competition is up to. No one, of course, is better aware of this than the rivals themselves, but the cloak-and-dagger stuff is thought to pay for itself in publicity value.)

While the E-Car was on the drawing boards in Ford’s styling studio—situated, like its administrative offices, in the company’s barony of Dearborn, just outside Detroit—work on it progressed under the conditions of melodramatic, if ineffectual, secrecy that invariably attend such operations in the automobile business: locks on the studio doors that could be changed in fifteen minutes if a key should fall into enemy hands; a security force standing round-the-clock guard over the establishment; and a telescope to be trained at intervals on nearby high points of the terrain where peekers might be roosting. (All such precautions, however inspired, are doomed to fail, because none of them provide a defense against Detroit’s version of the Trojan horse—the job-jumping stylist, whose cheerful treachery makes it relatively easy for the rival companies to keep tabs on what the competition is up to. No one, of course, is better aware of this than the rivals themselves, but the cloak-and-dagger stuff is thought to pay for itself in publicity value.)

Business has its man-eating side, and part of the man-eating side is that it’s so absorbing. I found that the things you read—for instance, that acquiring money for its own sake can become an addiction if you’re not careful—are literally true.