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

by John Brooks

Illogical as it might seem, this last assumption becomes comprehensible in the light of the fact that, for a time, when some executives orally conveyed, or reconveyed, the order, they were apparently in the habit of accompanying it with an unmistakable wink.

“the people who were advocating the Devil were able to sell me better than the philosophers that were selling the Lord.”

In his book The Heart of Japan, Alexander Campbell reports that a large Japanese electrical concern has drawn up a list of seven company commandments (for example, “Be courteous and sincere!”), and that each morning, in each of its thirty factories, the workers are required to stand at attention and recite these in unison, and then to sing the company song (“For ever-increasing production/Love your work, give your all!”).

Senator Hart permitted himself to comment, “You can communicate until you are dead and gone, but if the point you are communicating about, even though it be a law of the land, strikes your audience as something that is just a folklore … you will never sell the package.”

Vinson refused to take a lie-detector test, at first explaining that he was acting on advice of counsel and against his personal inclination, and later, after hearing how the four other men had fared, arguing that if the machine had not pronounced them liars, it couldn’t be any good.

“Actually, the breakdown is between the person and himself. If you’re not able to communicate successfully between yourself and yourself, how are you supposed to make it with the strangers outside?”

On August 22nd, the New York auction firm of Adrian H. Muller & Son, which dealt in so many next-to-worthless stocks that its salesroom was often called “the securities graveyard,”

In “Big Business,” Lilienthal argues that not only the productive and distributive superiority of the United States but also its national security depends on industrial bigness; that we now have adequate public safeguards against abuses of big business, or know well enough how to fashion them as required; that big business does not tend to destroy small business, as is often supposed, but, rather, tends to promote it; and, finally, that a big-business society does not suppress individualism, as most intellectuals believe, but actually tends to encourage it by reducing poverty, disease, and physical insecurity and increasing the opportunities for leisure and travel. Fighting words, in short, from an old New Dealer.

But the immediate reaction to his article was general indifference, and Lilienthal, temporarily stymied and considerably disillusioned, once more settled down to the humbler problems of private business.

The beginning of better costs. The catalyst idea. The drive and energy and imagination: the nights and days (in the lab until 2 A.M. night after night) and finally the beginning of a new business.… It is quite a story.

“How did Dave handle these problems? Well, he had his troubles—after all, he was starting a second sort of life—but he handled them just about as well as they can be handled.

“I don’t think money makes much difference, as long as you have enough.”

Even though the courts have repeatedly ruled that a director does not have to follow stockholder instructions, any more than a congressman has to follow the instructions of his constituents, stockholders nevertheless do elect directors, on the logical, if not exactly democratic, basis of one share, one vote.

and then painted a picture of a bright telephonic future in which “picture phones” will be commonplace and light beams will carry messages.

(Tax-exempt applause.)

I had no trouble deducing why he did this. There were unmistakable signs that he, unlike any other corporate chairman I had seen in action, was enjoying every minute of the goings on. Through most of the meeting, and especially when the professional stockholders had the floor, Mr. McCormack wore the dreamy smile of a wholly bemused spectator.

it occurred to me that if there had been no professional stockholders at them I would probably have learned almost as much as I did about the companies’ affairs but that I would have learned a good deal less about their chief executives’ personalities.

and, for another, he had been turned down not long before by the company authorities when he asked for air-conditioning or filtering to keep dust out of the plant area allocated to space-suit work.

THE need for the protection of trade secrets was fully recognized in the Middle Ages, when they were so jealously guarded by the craft guilds that the guilds’ employees were rigorously prevented from changing jobs. Laissez-faire industrial society, since it emphasizes the principle that the individual is entitled to rise in the world by taking the best opportunity he is offered, has been far more lenient about job-jumping,

processes

neoprene

First, should a man be formally restrained from revealing trade secrets when he has not yet committed any such act, and when it is not clear that he intends to? And, secondly, should a man be prevented from taking a job

simply because the job presents him with unique temptations to break the law?

for the good reason that it was the only text on the subject available in the Summit County law library, where both sides did the bulk of their research.)

appeared to be paralyzed by fear of the imminent election.

there were angry references to speculative activity by “the gnomes of Zurich”—Zurich being singled out because Switzerland, whose banking laws rigidly protect the anonymity of depositors,

and when they asked about it he replied that he had just been through the most completely satisfying day of his entire working career.

“It was a successful bear squeeze,” Coombs told me with a certain grim relish, which was easy to sympathize with; I found myself musing that for a banker

to rout his opponents, to smite them hip and thigh and drive them to cover, and not for personal or institutional profit but, rather, for the public good, must be a source of rare, unalloyed satisfaction.

The scene seemed to me to epitomize one of the two faces of central banking—the cold and hostile face, suggesting men in arrogant secrecy making decisions that affect all the rest of us but that we can neither influence nor even comprehend, rather than the more congenial face of elegant and learned men of affairs beneficently saving faltering currencies over their truffles and wine at Basel.

On Thursday, March 14th, panic was added to chaos. London gold dealers, in describing the day’s action, used the un-British words “stampede,” “catastrophe,” and “nightmare.”

The bewildered American public, largely unaware of the gold pool’s existence, probably first sensed the general shape of things when it learned on Friday morning that Queen Elizabeth II had met with her Ministers on the crisis between midnight and 1 A.M.

“That day in November, here at the bank, when a courier brought me the top-secret British document informing us of the decision to devalue, I felt physically sick. Sterling would not be the same. It would never again command the same amount of faith around the world.”