The synergy myth and other ailments of business today

by Harold Geneen

In the 1960s and '70s and American businessman named Harold Geneen transformed a hodgepodge of small companies into a $28 billion industrial empire called ITT. Now, at the age of eighty-seven and still turning unprofitable companies into profitable ones, this down-to-earth business giant shares his observations about the trouble with American companies - and what CEOs, boards of directors, managers, hired guns, shareholders, and every American citizen can do to fix it. With wit and directness, Geneen champions the old-fashioned values of hard work, honesty, risk-taking, common sense, and decisiveness. With equal fervor, he tears apart the concepts of "reengineering," "synergy" and other faddish management theories; bureaucracy; cynicism; excessive compensation packages for CEOs; the current panic about the budget deficit; derivatives; lawyers; corporations posing as "socially responsible citizens"; the federal government's antitrust activities; and more.