"Factory Man" a riveting read

Delighted to learn that Beth Macy's "Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local--and Helped Save an American Town" has been optioned as an HBO miniseries by Tom Hanks. The book, published in July 2014, is a formidable piece of corporate history, and it'll make for a superb workplace drama. It captures the "creeping small-town carnage created by acronyms like NAFTA and WTO and an impotent TAA, all of it forged by faraway people who had never bothered to see the full result of what globalization had wrought."

A reporter for the Roanoke Times, Macy chronicles John Bassett III in his battle to save his family's furniture manufacturing company, Vaughan-Bassett, from being swallowed up by cheap Chinese imports and the havoc they have wrought on American retailing. The man is a natural communicator--plainspoken, sharp, hardly a saint, spot-on whether you agree with him or not. Macy wisely gets him talking and then gets out of his way.

I confess that "Factory Man" didn't gain momentum for me until Chapter 10. The first 130 pages are packed with Bassett family history, almost so lurid as to be mistaken for a Faulkner novel. The internecine wars of various cousins aren't half as fascinating as the flat-out energy that JBIII expends--and the counter-energy of some in the industry who willingly give into globalization. I wish Macy had drawn more parallels to U.S. industries that lost out to cheap imports earlier, such as clothing and shoe making, but that might have doubled the book's length.

Macy is firmly on the side of the workers who are being displaced left and right. She sticks it to The New York Times's Thomas Friedman, author of The World Is Flat, noting that an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent is fine for Bethesda, MD, "where he lives in an 11,400-square-foot mansion with his heiress wife [.... But the 5.2 figure] comes nowhere close to capturing the truth of Martinsville and Henry County's double-digit unemployment and the problems that result, from the increasing need for food stamps and free school lunches and Medicaid to the rising rates of teen pregnancy and domestic violence." This is superb social history as well as business history (the two are intertwined far more often that we admit).

Here's one of my favorite passages, along with some representative quotes:
"...Rob [Bassett] reported back on the lack of safety measures in the Dongguan finishing rooms--no fans, no masks, nothing. Rob actually had a fondness for the smell of finishing material, but these fumes were so strong he had trouble catching his breath. 'How do they stand it?" he had asked the plant manager, choking as he spoke.
   "Spray two years and die," the manager said.
   At which point there would be twenty more lined up to take the fallen worker's place.

"More than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb 'fu bu guo san dai' (wealth doesn't make it past three generations) as they wonder how we became so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute." -- James McGregor, former Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China

"One of our biggest problems is turning the attitude around in this country, making people believe in us again. Does that mean we will never close a plant? If we're inefficient, we will close a plant. But I want to be able to say to everybody in my organization . . . to look them straight in the eye and tell them that I did everything in my power to save their job. I want a free and fair playing field, and I'm willing to fight for it. I am not gonna turn tail and run." -- John Bassett III

Kabletown: “About Us” Evaluation by Corporate History.net

Kabletown is a leading provider of cable entertainment with a tradition of commitment, service, and family values. The main Kabletown About Us page is here.

OVERALL GRADE: A plus

Every page on Kabletown’s site qualifies as an About Us page, and together they provide a near-perfect illustration of our Ten Commandments of About Us pages.

Commandment 1: Know thy audience. It’s as if Kabletown has read our minds: “If your ‘box is being weird’ or ‘the thing just keeps saying “boot” or ‘the DVR won't stop recording “Top Chef Masters” even though I hate it,’ we will be there.”

Commandment 2: Thou shalt not generalize. Mission statements are often full of noble abstractions that could apply to any company. But “Let Kabletown bring entertainment to you, because you bring entertainment to Kabletown” – that’s short and concise, and could never be mistaken for any other company’s operating principle.

Commandment 3: Reveal thy personality. The personality shines through from the opening explanation of the company’s name: Kabletown, with a “K” for Kindness and Keen interest in customers. We are profoundly reassured to know that the company is committed to “respond rapidly to the speed of change.” And could a company be more caring of its employees than to continue trying to resolve a flight mix-up that left 6 employees unintentionally “international”? For summarizing the management’s style, you can’t beat the quote from CEO Hank Hooper on the Our Company page: “If you're not part of something, you're just not apart of anything, darn it. And that's really nothing. Ain't that something? Ha!”

Commandment 4: Don’t take your own name in vain. Mergers and acquisitions rouse strong feelings. To present its own side of the story, What’s New? announces the acquisition by Kabletown of GE Sheinhardt NBC Universal. By the way, this page demonstrates an awe-inspiring command of the use of SEO terms: “This way, not only can we offer content in ways that content has never been offered before, but we can use the word ‘content’ almost 60% more than we used to in press releases. Our partnership with GE Sheinhardt NBC Universal will help us to better serve you, the consumer. Content.”

Commandment 5: Honor thy readers and their attention spans. The sole text on the Programming page is breathtakingly, titillatingly brief: “For an additional $12.99, Kabletown now offers you the highest quality in adult entertainment. You will be provided with our easy-to-follow channel guide designed especially for our male and female clients.”

Commandment 6: Honor thy visuals. As a reminder of Kabletown’s commitment to family programming, the header of every single page has a generously sized image of a family watching TV together. (From the expression on the adorable tyke’s face, we suspect it’s Celebrity Urologist.) On Our Company, that big thumbs-up inspires limitless trust. As for that maniacally cheerful employee on Careers ... how could anyone even think of stealing his lunch and forcing him to write inane website content?

Commandment 7: Keep navigation easy. Kabletown’s site has an elegantly simple structure: Main, News, Our Company, Careers, Programming. The pages have handy links between them. Perhaps there should be an additional submenu to help zealous visitors go directly to the TWINKS page (Television With Individuals, Naive, Kinky, Shaved).

Commandment 8: Remember to make yourself and your organization easily accessible. A minor glitch: the Contact link at the foot of the Kabletown page is linked to a subsidiary, NBC. Send us to The Office, please!

Commandment 9: Worship clarity. Gary does a great job, when he’s not in the hospital.

Commandment 10: Remember to keep holy the updates. Tut, tut, Kabletown. You were perfect so far, but why is there no coverage of the forthcoming merger of Kabletown with Time Warner Kable?

Commandment 11: Remember that blog entries are often time sensitive, and always check the date of the post.

Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). To talk about your About Us page, contact us!

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.

Walt Disney--Employer of the Year?

Why the fascination with Walt Disney? Earlier this year we had an off-off Broadway play about his last days, painting him as a sinister employer even in his final deterioration (that's to put it mildly--I sat in the front row and was sprayed by the blood the actor continually spat). Now in a lighter vein comes "Saving Mr. Banks," in which Walt convinces P. L. Travers to license the movie rights to her Mary Poppins series. It was made with the cooperation of Walt Disney's empire and filmed at the Disney Studios--corporate storytelling run amok.

A shelf of
Mary Poppins
books, courtesy
of Wikipedia

Did you ever wonder about the story behind the Mary Poppins movie? Neither did I. In fact, I've never read a Mary Poppins book nor seen the film. My childhood tastes ran to Nancy Drew, a young American gal of action, a great role model. But I love workplace dramas, and it's a holiday week, so off I went. Thank goodness Meryl Streep turned down the lead role, because Emma Thompson fits it like a silk stocking. 

The turning point scene rings false. After near-acceptance, Travers rejects the deal and flies in a huff back to London. Walt follows in haste, knocks on her door, and pleads his case in a my-childhood-was-worse-than-yours monolog. Research reveals this encounter to be pure fabrication. Fine; this film is not a documentary. But most likely Travers finally took the deal because she needed the money. 

Another puzzling point is the waste of a good actor, Paul Giametti, as Travers's chauffeur. At one point he confides to Travers that he has a daughter with a disability. Later she tells him he's the only American she likes, signs a book for the child, and gives him a tell-your-little-girl-to-buck-up lecture. That I can believe, but Giametti's role is sadly underdeveloped.

The film certainly notes that Travers loathed the animation segment of the film. It's why she flew home and almost walked away from the deal. But it doesn't mention that she refused to sell Disney the rights to any sequels. That omission is too bad. All it would have taken was a few words on the screen before the credits. It's not good corporate history if it doesn't deal with lessons learned. 

P.S. If you want a realistic picture of the Sherman brothers, the guys who wrote the music for the Mary Poppins film and many other Disney classics, check out the documentary on Netflix. Now there's an unvarnished glimpse at creativity. These men didn't like each other and grew farther apart as they aged, but they kept on composing together because they were productive work partners. Now there's a lesson learned.

1931 workplace drama still fresh

Bravo to the always-intrepid Mint Theater Company (@MintTheaterCo) for breathing new life into workplace drama circa 1931, George Kelly's "Philip Goes Forth." Timeless conflicts well-rendered: business vs. art, suburb vs. city, son vs. father. Interesting to reflect that Kelly won the Pulitzer Prize for playwriting in 1925 (for "Craig's Wife"), but he's best remembered today as the uncle of actress Grace Kelly, if he's remembered at all.

Play about publishing misses the mark

I so wanted to like "Stop.Reset," the new play by Regina Taylor at Signature Theatre. Best I can say is that it's a noble failure.

Playwright Regina Taylor.
Courtesy of Signature
Theatre.

This play promised to tackle subjects that matter to me deeply. It's set in an old-fashioned publishing company that's adrift in the sea change affecting printed books. Hey, I work in that business -- writing and publishing history books, specifically corporate histories -- and in many aspects of my life, “memory is my theme” (to quote the great Evelyn Waugh). Further, I'm kindly disposed to almost any kind of workplace drama.

Sadly, "Stop.Reset" is full of forced plot turns and generalities. They characters live in Chicago and are surprised that it's snowing. There's no hint of which great books or authors this house published; if they were as renowned as we're asked to believe, they'd at least have a solid backlist.  The so-called savior, "J" (gee, what might that stand for?), is as lost as the rest of this fictional bunch of characters. Applause at the preview I attended was ... polite.

Tip-offs for trouble were apparent upon walking in: the playwright is also the director, and the set was surrounded with visual projections to the point of clutter. By the end of the play, I felt sorry for the actors. They're excellent and they work so hard at an incoherent script. (A fond shout-out to Carl Lumbly, whom I've admired since his "Cagney and Lacey" days.) 

"Stop.Reset" reminded me of the ill-conceived play "Y2K" by Arthur Kopit in 2000 and an even sadder effort by Elaine May, "After the Night and the Music," in 2004. Both of these fine playwrights felt they had to write about technology, a subject they clearly weren't comfortable with. It was like making Tony Bennett sing rock-and-roll.

At any rate, it'll be interesting to see the reviews when "Stop.Reset" opens on September 8.

A Worklife Gem

Every so often you come upon a book that plunks you into a work life with stunning clarity. I lucked into such a volume while vacationing recently in Middlebury, Vermont. There in our room at the Swift House Inn was "46 Years of Pretty Straight Going: The Life of a Family Dairy Farm" by George Bellerose. The cover was extremely inviting; the design by Mason Singer first-class, showcasing beautiful duotone images photographed by Bellerose. But the text is what really drew me in. It's mainly an oral history. The author asks the right questions, records the answers accurately, and keeps himself out of the way. 

Larry Wyman as pictured in "46 Years of Pretty Straight Going."
Photo by George Bellerose,
courtesy of the Vermont Folklife Center.

Yes, I stayed up late every night until I finished "46 Years." For a corporate historian, this kind of personalized business history is more involving than any novel or mystery. What a life Larry and Grayson Wyman had during their 46 years of farming in Weybridge. Not an easy life--for the most part, not much different than a 19th century farming life--but a worthwhile one, despite all its personal and financial demands.

The ending is sad. It explains why family farms have been decimated, and why the Vermont I fell in love with during my teen years has gradually been depleted of all those cows that used to dot the landscape. (The New Jerseyan in me feels compelled to note that the Wymans grew up in the Garden State--in Chatham in the 1920s and 1930s. They always knew they wanted to farm, however, and they migrated to New England early on.)

Unfortunately the Vermont Folklife Center, which published the book, was closed the weekend of my trip. I would have liked to congratulate them in person for an incomparable achievement. I was delighted to read that various grants allowed the book to be donated to all public libraries in Vermont. In 100 years -- maybe as few as 25 years -- people will read this book to understand an almost vanished way of life. A review of the book by the Oral History Association is here.

Wall Street Women's History

At this year's Biographers International Organization conference, I was delighted to meet author Sheri J. Caplan -- an attorney by training and a writer by temperament. Her new book, Petticoats and Pinstripes: Portraits of Women in Wall Street’s History, came out today from Praeger. Like so many motivated authors, Sheri noted that she wrote the book that she herself wanted to read -- she just couldn't find a collection like this on the shelves. Impressively, she sold her work to Praeger without an agent. This is corporate storytelling raised to the broader level of industry narrative. Congratulations, Sheri!

This review captures the book's spirit: “The contribution of women to the growth of Wall Street and ultimately our capitalist system has been largely hidden, until now. From colonial times to the present, Caplan leads us through the adventures of the ‘she merchants’—women who pioneered in the male-dominated world of finance. Phenomenally well-researched, Petticoats and Pinstripes delves into the lives of very real women, from Abigail Adams to Abby Joseph Cohen, all of them groundbreakers, and their relationships with men and money.”—Lisa Endlich, Author, Goldman Sachs: The Culture of Success

This Disney Ain't Mickey Mouse

Workplace dramas are rarely as creepy as Lucas Hnath's A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney, playing at Manhattan's Soho Rep through June 9. I was grateful for open seating because I dashed down to the front row, sat on the right-hand side, and found myself within spitting distance of Larry Pine as Walt and Frank Wood as his punching-bag brother Roy. 

By creepy I mean fascinating. Was Walt really this slimy? Was Roy really such a patsy? Did Walt's daughter really refuse to name her child after Walt, which was his one pathetic wish?  (The daughter doesn't even have the honor of being named.) Did Walt's son-in-law really become heir to the empire? This is not the corporate history The Walt Disney Company would wish us to see, but neither has the Disney juggernaut suppressed it.

I love plays that make me come home and dig deeper for more information. Seek out A Public Reading if you crave a master class in acting or a plunge into the dark side of Mickey Mouse's creator. And should you call up any of the various Disney websites in your investigations, note the deft branding touch: Mickey's ears are the thumbnail icon.

J.C. Penney: “About Us” Evaluation by Corporate History.net

James Cash Penney (what a great name for a businessman!) bought his first store in 1907. The company has been publicly traded since 1929, and now operates over 1,100 J.C. Penney stores from its headquarters in Plano, Texas. In 2012 it had revenue of over $17 billion. The main About Us page is here.

OVERALL GRADE: E

By a remarkable coincidence, J.C. Penney has been in business 106 years, and their single About Us page has 106 words! We hope that the J.C. Penney site is about to undergo a major upgrade ... because what’s there now is sadly deficient. Given recent media hoopla over the firing of CEO Ron Johnson, we were hoping to find a website that stressed the company’s long heritage and presented this as a blip in the company’s illustrious history.

Personality: E

We are always happy to see the founder mentioned, particularly when the company still bears his name, and sure enough he is mentioned on the main About Us page: “More than a century ago, James Cash Penney founded his company on the principle of the Golden Rule: treat others the way you’d like to be treated – Fair and Square. His legacy continues to this day...”

And that’s it for history, corporate or otherwise. As befits its lack of content, the link to the About Us page is buried in the footer. Need we say that there’s no mention of when and where the original store was established, or how quickly it expanded, or the move from downtown to suburban malls, or remarkably early Internet sales? No mention of that big fat J.C. Penney catalogue, whose arrival was a major event for those who grew up far from either the neon lights of Broadway or suburban shopping malls?

There aren't even images of the old logos, which have a nostalgic value of their own, like those of John Deere that we mentioned in evaluating the John Deere About Us pages. And how about Annual Reports? In CorporateHistory.net's history of The Pep Boys, another retailer with the same general demographic, the timeline included thumbnails of each and every Annual Report. J.C. Penney could similarly showcase its annuals or catalog covers.

People will go a long way for nostalgia: reminding them of why they used to enjoy shopping at J.C. Penney would be a perfectly good way to draw customers back. Unfortunately we felt more nostalgia while reading the Answers.com page about J.C. Penney than we did on the company’s own site.

Products/Services: E

J.C. Penney has a long, rich history of selling tangible goods: their archives must be tremendous. There’s not a smidgen of that on the About Us page – not even photos of current products.

Accessibility: E

From the About Us page there’s nowhere to go but back: no navigation menus top or bottom. For contact information, we had to go to the footer of the home page, scan past offers of mobile updates, Twitter, Facebook, and an app, and click on the ambiguously labeled View All link. That finally took us to a page with various ways to contact the company, including a link to an online form (sent to an anonymous person).

TAKEAWAY

When it comes to corporate memory, Penney’s seems to have amnesia. Maybe the recently deposed CEO Ron Johnson wanted it that way, since he fostered the cool, uncluttered, Apple Store approach – but that strategy crashed and burned. Shoppers want the Penney’s they’ve known and loved, and they deserve to find that corporate culture on Penney’s About Us pages as well as in its stores.

So: Think of who you are and where you’ve been. Think of who you’re trying to reach. An About Us page is a facet of marketing; pages such as J.C. Penney’s are missed opportunities of mammoth size.

Does your Web site’s “About Us” section accurately convey your organization’s history and capabilities? Every two weeks we evaluate one example, grading it in three areas that are key to potential customers: Personality (Who are you?), Products/Services (What can you do for us?), and Accessibility (How can we reach you?). To talk about your About Us page, contact us!

Today’s example was chosen at random; CorporateHistory.net has no ties to this company.

History Lessons Lost on J.C. Penney

I've followed J.C Penney's recent corporate soap opera with some amusement. So Ron Johnson, the deposed CEO, was "the wizard of Apple." Did anyone truly think that minimalist-cool Apple stores were a realistic model for middlebrow Penney to emulate? But the bigger disconnect had to do with Johnson's embrace of everyday low pricing (EDLP). No more sales! Yes, and let's also ask Penney shoppers to crawl to the store on their knees. Did Penney's board seriously believe that longtime customers would change their behavior on a dime because the Wizard of Apple wanted them to? 

Any corporate history of a retail chain will tell you that the notion of EDLP has popped up for decades. Any corporate historian will tell you that EDLP has consistently failed. When I wrote a history of The Pep Boys--Manny, Moe & Jack, Inc., I interviewed former chairman and CEO Mitch Leibovitz. During his tenure he studied big box giants such as Home Depot and Walmart. So he created Pep Boys' own version in the 1990s, the Automotive Supercenter. At the same time he introduced EDLP. In fact, Pep Boys was the first automotive aftermarketer to do so. (I include the book cover here because it's always just plain fun to look at Manny, Moe, and Jack.)

No surprise: within months, the overexpansion forced The Pep Boys to scale back. And the pendulum swung from EDLP back to sale items. Macy's, which is almost a last-man-standing in American department store business history, went through the same empty yet costly exercise. Most American shoppers are addicted to sales. Indeed, Apple iBuyers may be the only ones who aren't. Meantime, Penney shareholders are the ones who suffer the fallout. When J.C. Penney writes its corporate history, let's hope they're honest about this Lesson Learned. 

Stay tuned for a review of J.C. Penney's corporate About Us pages in an upcoming blog post. 

Business History Hazards: Part 2

A colleague sent a link to a 40th anniversary video done by a business. "You'll like this," he said. I didn't. Why?
1. Too anonymous. I couldn't tell who made this business anniversary video. I had to look them up later on Google. Turns out that many companies have their name (it's a fairly common word). I narrowed it down to a large design agency. An agency that can't brand itself accurately doesn't inspire confidence.
2. Too cavalier. The video consists of rapid-fire clips from the last 40 "Best Picture" Academy Award Oscar (R) winners. Amazingly, it offered no credits at the end. I had to wonder whether the filmmaker had obtained permissions or licensing. I doubt it (would have cost a fortune). Fair use? They still should acknowledge their sources. Woody Allen is generally not amused to see people freely using pieces of "Annie Hall."
3. Too tasteless. The theme was 40, as in 40 cheers, 40 kisses, 40 tears, etc. The clips included 40 shots (as in gunshots) and 40 ka-booms. In light of recent tragic events, I'd have edited these out.
4. Too long! Six+ minutes. I hung in only to check the closing credits. See point #2.

I'm not identifying the filmmaker or providing the link here, since I'm not that much of a curmudgeon. It was posted on Vimeo, however, which hints that this video was not made public but was used at an internal event. Maybe it was a big hit as an event opener during a gala dinner. But we all know that anything posted on the Web will migrate.

Moral of the story: When celebrating a business anniversary, it makes sense to identify yourself and the materials you draw from. And why not tell your own corporate story? Or at least weave a bit of your particular workplace drama into the general mix?

From all of us at CorporateHistory.net ... Happy new year!

Part of an occasional series of cautionary and exemplary case studies

Light Reading on a Heavy Subject

Corporate communications wouldn't seem to be a likely subject for comic mystery writing. But Simon Brett's novel "Corporate Bodies" pulls it off brilliantly. Brett's mysteries featuring the hapless, B-list actor Charles Paris are my favorite airport reading. I can always count on him for an out-loud chuckle by page 3 and flat-out laughter by Chapter 2. Brett is the Oscar Wilde of a genre -- formula mystery -- that otherwise leaves me indifferent.

In short, "Corporate Bodies" finds Charles playing the role of a forklift driver in a corporate video for Delmoleen Foods. Forklifts lead to accidents, and that leads to murder, launching Charles into motion once again as an amateur sleuth. Brett skewers the excesses of corporate jargon-speak, as well he should. He brings the case to a blistering climax at a conference jam-packed with overwrought speeches. Charles's last-minute narration of a slide show (PowerPoint precursor) that goes devastatingly wrong had me gasping with laughter and rue.

I won't ruin the plot, and I'm not sure if this early 1990s volume is available for download ... but check your local library or bookstore, and treat yourself to some well-deserved light reading that may help you lighten up your own corporate history and speechwriting excesses. It's been a good reminder for me to write more plainly and to keep Ppt excesses to a minimum.

Media Biz Gyrations: Dave Astor's First-Person Account

Dave Astor’s book Comic (and Column) Confessional is an industry history with a twist. It expertly captures the gyrations of the print media business through the prism of its author’s career. Dave worked at Editor & Publisher magazine for 25 years, mainly covering the newspaper syndication beat. Syndication includes cartoons and columns, so his book is full of quotes by creators ranging from Dear Abby to Gary Larson of “The Far Side” comic fame. Fittingly, it embraces advice and absurdity in equal measure.

Dave and I were Rutgers College classmates and fellow reporters for the daily paper there (Dave became editor-in-chief). We hadn’t crossed paths since graduation day. He describes himself as painfully shy. His book, in part, is about how he got over “the esteem thing” (his phrase). I for one was glad to learn that he is essentially the same quiet, deep guy I knew back then.

In 2008 Dave was writing for E&P’s shrinking print edition. He was also cranking out upwards of six Web pieces a day and answering 1,000 emails a week. You can guess how the story ends: he is one of 20 employees laid off in a most ungracious but all too typical downsizing. He describes this workplace drama, and many others, with accuracy and barbed wit. I nodded my head often at observations like: “Newspapers made things worse for themselves by offering content that was often staid and boring—whether in print or on their Web sites.”

Yes! I believe that newspapers are (or were) the "first draft of history" and I always buy the local daily in every city to which my corporate history work takes me. So many papers have traded their vital "localness" for a surfeit of wire service news. Syndicated cartoonists and columnists are on the losing end, too.

Woven through the media history is a personal memoir which I found very affecting (you don’t need to have known Dave as a young man to be touched by it). Dave describes the death of his first daughter, which involved medical malpractice, with great tenderness and justified anger. We see him blossoming as a parent, raising a second daughter, surviving a divorce, and finding love and parenthood again in a second marriage. I particularly appreciate that he does not proselytize about the joys and sorrows of having kids; instead, he lets us experience it through his eyes, and he doesn't diss people who haven't had children.  

Today Dave blogs for the Huffington Post (unpaid; seems grossly unfair, but it’s his choice), writes a humor column for the Montclair Times (NJ), and does other freelance work. Comic (and Column) Confessional, published by Xenos Press, is available directly from Dave or on Amazon.

Oral History Usage at Its Best

Superb use of oral history! That's Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told, by Kenneth Turan and Joseph Papp (published by Doubleday in 2009). Despite ultimately being named as coauthor, the famously mercurial Papp blocked publication of this book in the last years of his life. Kenneth Turan persevered, having interviewed 160 theater pros from Colleen Dewhurst to Mike Nichols to Meryl Streep, and finally he was allowed by Papp's estate to assemble the book that tells the inside stories of New York's one and only Public Theater. It's a riveting business history if I ever read one.

The volume is beautifully organized: back story of the publication itself, brief Papp biog, early years of the venture, then separate chapters on seminal productions starting with "Hair" and taking us through "Aunt Dan and Lemon." Within each chapter we hear the voices of the playwrights, actors, and tech people who worked on the shows. It ends at 1985, which is when Papp froze the project.

But wow, can these folks talk. Dish. Spill. Example by Paul Sorvino, talking about the rehearsals for "That Championship Season," which often turned into brawls: "I had that arrogance of youth that thank god doesn't stay with you too long, if you have any brains at all ... I felt that way about my acting, and that may have bothered some [of the other actors] who were looking for their roles."

Turan captures the strength of the form in his Introduction: "A story like this, filled with alive, articulate not to mention theatrical people, turned out to be especially suited to the oral-history format. There is a vividness and immediacy about direct speech, a sense of life about individuals speaking for themselves, that makes oral history the most intrinsically dramatic of narrative mediums."

Pure catnip for theater nuts like me -- and a noteworthy use of oral history interviews that surpasses even such high-level gems as the Studs Terkel Working books.

Publishing notes and Marian the Grammarian nitpicks: It's a shame that Colleen Dewhurst's name is misspelled, and it's a minor tragedy that a book as good as this one is on remainder (you can find it in the Daedalus catalog).

Mad Men: It Never Goes Away

Perusing the The New York Times Sunday Review for February 12, I was amused by two observations about "Mad Men." First, Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia cofounder: "It's hilarious, you know, it's such a portrayal of a period in history which probably never was like that but matches our preconceptions." Then, three pages later, the suddenly ubiquitous Mimi Beardsley Alford, JFK's intern and self-proclaimed mistress: "God, I love 'Mad Men.' All of it is exactly what was going on."

Not that Ms. Alford ever actually worked in an ad agency, of course. Neither did Jimmy Wales, but I cast my "Mad Men" vote with him because all my old-time ad agency friends tell me that the Manhattan ad world in the 1960s was a whole lot more fun than "Mad Men" makes it out to be.

But if you want a credible workplace drama, get to the Mint Theater on West 43rd Street in Manhattan for "Rutherford and Son." Written almost 100 years ago, it's about a family business in industrial England. Particularly, it's about how the sons of the tycoon can't edge out from under his shadow. Meanwhile, the scion casts out his only daughter, who is smarter than them all. My corporate history work brings me in contact with many family businesses, and many of them (thankfully not all) still share these traits.

Kurt Vonnegut, Corporate Historian?!

Kurt Vonnegut hated greed but liked business. Learning that factoid was one of the many pleasures of reading And So It Goes—Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, the excellent new biography by Charles J. Shields. The author of Slaughterhouse-Five was nothing if not a contradictory man.

Son of an architect, Vonnegut grew up in a family of prosperous Indianapolis merchants. It’s common knowledge that he was a public relations man for General Electric’s Schenectady Works for years. What’s less well known is that he was ready to quit until GE put him in charge of being the liaison to Columbia University’s then-new oral history program. As part of it, Columbia wanted to preserve the memories of GE engineers and scientists who had helped launch radio.

Like any good corporate history author, Vonnegut started by compiling interviewee biographies and timelines. Shields reports that Vonnegut “was awed … he genuinely liked these men … Their success was deserved. They didn’t grouse about the company; they were grateful.” Vonnegut went so far as to describe them as “extremely interesting, admirable Americans.” He still quit the PR job—he’d always felt like the company’s “captive screwball”—but he happily drew on his GE experiences for his science fiction writing.

Years later, he used his business savvy to dig up the lowdown on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In an article for Esquire magazine, later collected in his book Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons, he noted that the Maharishi spoke to the American people “like a General Electric engineer.” Vonnegut nailed him as a benign salesman who, as Shields paraphrases, “was just pumping the handle of free enterprise as vigorously as the system allowed.”

The biography also reveals that antiwar Vonnegut consciously owned stock in a company that made napalm for bombs, and that he was hardly liberated where women were concerned…but I’ll leave you to discover the whole story for yourself. Just a quick P.S., though: If you worked in publishing during Vonnegut's heyday--I was lucky enough to work for his then-publisher, Dell/Delacorte, and to write promo copy for his books--you'll enjoy the biography even more.

Wondrous Workplace Dramas

Aaron "The West Wing" Sorkin, the perpetual poet laureate of the workplace drama, saves the day with his screenplay for "Moneyball" (co-scripted with Steven Zaillian). This baseball fan naturally laughed and cheered at the field scenes -- but also at the conference room confabs with the sour old Oakland A's scouts and at the inside looks at the locker room (hey, they're workplaces too).

Back in the early 1990s I was busy rooting for Robbie Alomar in Toronto, and thus knew little about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. It's been fun to catch up on which parts of "Moneyball" are fictionalized, and which parts draw directly from Michael Lewis's book.

On Broadway, "Man and Boy" is the workplace drama of choice. The Terence Rattigan plot about a corrupt financier is surprisingly modern, though the father-son relationship is a bit creaky. Maybe I'm just seeing it through 21st-century US eyes. I never miss a chance to marvel at Frank Langella artfully chewing the scenery. He is the American Laurence Olivier.

“Mad Men” Memoir Meta Musings

It’s a meta, meta, meta, meta world. Roger Sterling, the character played by the wonderful John Slattery, was composing his memoirs on last season’s “Mad Men.” Like any good 1960s male boss, he even spoke them into a Dictaphone. This week the book debuts as Sterling’s Gold: Wit & Wisdom of an Ad Man. The supposed gold dishes up program snippets rather than “real” memoirs. Clever, yet is it a missed opportunity?

Two real mad men come to mind, game changers both. Robert C. Townsend, the Avis CEO, created a brilliant book in 1970 that’s still in print, Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits. Short chapters hammered home pithy advice to fellow execs: “Call yourself up,” he urged. “Pretend you’re a customer. You’ll run into some real horror shows.” Townsend died 12 years ago. It’s only gotten worse, Bob. David Ogilvy’s trilogy, launched in 1963 by Confessions of an Advertising Man, was another touchstone. Ogilvy founded the agency that gave us the Man in the Hathaway Shirt (with his eye patch) and Schweppervescence. He was pompous, precise, prescient.

Too bad it took pioneering ad woman Mary Wells Lawrence until 2003 to publish her memoirs. By then the ad agency world had lost its fizz. But in its heyday the industry was fun, fun, fun—or so agency veterans say—and I wish “Mad Men” radiated even one-tenth of that spirit. The theme song is gloomier than a dirge, and is that figure plummeting downward in free fall a metaphor for the industry itself?