The Leadership Secrets of Colin Powell: Oren Harari

• Filed under: Business

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Even before the events of last fall, Powell was well regarded by the military and civilians around the world. Now, as secretary of state during the war against terrorism, Powell’s intelligence and skills as manager, negotiator and leader are even more visible. Harari, a management professor and consultant, met Powell several years ago, but wrote this book without his cooperation. The author has used Powell’s own words, from his autobiography and presentations, to create a primer of Powell’s leadership secrets. The book reads much like an introductory textbook, explaining key phrases, quotes, anecdotes and principles. Powell’s style is somewhat unusual for a military leader. He believes in listening, not just to superiors, but to the people who serve under him; he pushes people to ask hard questions and to approach problems in creative ways; he is solution-oriented and wants answers to problems to be original, not simply tried-and-true methods. While a book by Powell himself on his leadership style would obviously have great appeal, Harari has done an admirable job of distilling the essence of Powell’s leadership style. The chapter summaries (”Powell’s Principles”) are especially clear (e.g., “Hire on talent and values, rather than resumes”; “Don’t clock hours for hours’ sake”). This is a solid if basic book about leadership that should interest a wide range of readers, especially less experienced managers. Agent, Lynn Johnston.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Prior to September 11, Colin Powell was considered “odd man out” in the Bush administration and had even begun to receive criticism in certain media outlets. After the attacks, Powell stepped up and, with his calm demeanor, played a key leadership role as he has done on many previous occasions. Several biographies have been written about Powell, but this book centers on his personal leadership philosophy and is organized into 17 chapters of “leadership secrets,” each one summarized into three or four of “Powell’s Principles.” Some of his principles are surprising, considering his conservative inclination: he likes to challenge authority and promote a clash of ideas, and he maintains an open-door policy because he believes that the higher one goes up the hierarchy, the more important it is to stay in touch with real people and real data. A key Powell trait is flexibility in action, as he does not believe in formulaic solutions but lets the situation dictate the strategy. He is, above all, a people person and seeks out those with optimism and drive. This is a “battle-tested” leadership book, and although the author has shown how to apply these principles in the corporate venue, you don’t have to be a CEO to benefit from the words and wisdom of Colin Powell. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
–This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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The Halliburton Agenda: The Politics of Oil and Money: Dan Briody

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

Despite their shared preference for keeping a low profile, Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton, his former employer, gained notoriety in the aftermath of the war in Iraq thanks to a series of lucrative government contracts awarded to Halliburton, for which they never had to bid. Business journalist Dan Briody sheds light on the history of the company and demonstrates how its present-day relationship with influential politicians is not anomalous but part of a time-honored yet ethically suspect tradition of doing business. Briody introduces Erle Halliburton, who was born into poverty but found great financial success with innovative oil well technology. And while Halliburton avoided getting close to elected officials or pursuing government contracts, the Brown brothers of Texas-based Brown & Root made the nurturing of “pet politicians” a top priority as they grew their construction business into one of the most powerful in the nation. The Halliburton Agenda details the mutually beneficial relationship the Browns shared with an up and coming Lyndon Johnson as money and influence flowed freely between the two. Halliburton acquired Brown & Root in 1962 and with it, Briody contends, plenty of questionable business practices that continue to this day. Dick Cheney looms ominously on the book’s cover but he doesn’t appear much in the book until fairly late in the Halliburton story. Still, because Cheney’s early-1990s’ appointment to the job of CEO (after no private sector experience) and departure to be Vice President in 2000 coincided with an upsurge in Halliburton revenues and controversies, there’s plenty of material to examine. While many have questioned what sway corporations have in the George W. Bush administration, Briody’s extended look at Halliburton’s corporate culture and history provides enlightening perspective. –John Moe
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.

From Publishers Weekly
Following hard on the heels of The Iron Triangle, an examination of international consultants the Carlyle Group, Briody turns his considerable investigative skills to the rise of the Halliburton Corp., its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root and the transformation of the U.S. military establishment. With a blunt matter-of-fact tone, Briody describes the rise of the two companies from the dusty oil fields of west Texas to the marbled corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Briody contends that Halliburton and KBR have literally bought politicians, manipulated the contracting process and ridden the current wave of small wars to record profits. Small, detailed moments of intense private pressure and unscrupulous backroom deal-making dominate this story. While Briody seethes with indignation, there is a grudging respect for the skill with which the executives and politicians ply their trade and a bitter resignation at the reality of the ways of government contracting. Central to the Pentagon’s post–Cold War strategy is outsourcing nonmilitary tasks to private contractors. One of the chief architects of this plan was Dick Cheney, defense secretary for the first President Bush. Briody argues that with Cheney now vice-president and Halliburton awarded a huge no-bid contract to reconstruct Iraq’s oil fields, public outrage has grown. As the controversy simmers, Briody raises an important question: with Americans and Iraqis dying by the day, have military matters become so efficient and profitable for companies like Halliburton that war itself is easier to wage? At times the book is repetitive and has the feel of being rushed to press, but this urgency lends the book a certain gravity. Briody has his own agenda—brilliantly illuminating the increasingly crucial nexus of public need, private profit and war making.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.

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The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank, And Their Borrowers (Cornell Studies in Money): Ngaire Woods

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

“The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy.”–from the Introduction

The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizers. But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with. Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economics, law, and politics.

The Globalizers focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene. After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundation at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century. She traces the impact of the Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa. Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.

From the Back Cover
“No other book provides such an elegant introduction to the principal lending operations of both the IMF and the World Bank. With exceptional clarity and grace, Ngaire Woods strikes a balance between analysis and constructive criticism. Her portrait of the contemporary evolution of the policies and practices of the IMF and World Bank seamlessly integrates an impressive range of research and journalistic coverage.”–Louis W. Pauly, Director, Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, author of Who Elected the Bankers?: Surveillance and Control in the World Economy

”The Globalizers is an outstanding study of the relationships among the IMF, the World Bank, and their clients. Ngaire Woods presents rich empirical stories and strong analytical insights into the role and mission of these institutions and their relationships. This is a book for those with genuinely open minds about this most complex of subjects.”-Richard Higgott, University of Warwick, coeditor of Global Governance

“In the new global economy, do the IMF and the World Bank matter anymore? If so, why? Here is vital reading for scholars and practitioners of aid and development on what these institutions do and are meant to do, in addition to what’s wrong and what’s right about them today. Ngaire Woods is a careful scholar, calling on history, economics, politics, and law, as well as her own extensive interviews, to build a balanced yet compelling case for their reconstitution and revitalization. Anyone interested in what globalization is about should not miss her riveting tales of these global institutions’ troubles and small victories in Mexico, Russia, and Africa.”–Nancy Birdsall, President, Center for Global Development

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Leadership Through the Ages: Rudolph W. Giuliani, Ken Kurson

• Filed under: Recommended

From Publishers Weekly
This highly anticipated book from New York’s once controversial, now beloved former mayor opens with a gripping account of Giuliani’s immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks, including a narrow escape from the original crisis command headquarters, and closes with the efforts to address the aftermath during his remaining four months in office. But, he argues, he did not suddenly become a great leader on September 11, and “had been doing [my] best to take on challenges my whole career.” The bulk of the book draws on his experiences as a corporate lawyer and U.S. attorney and then as mayor. The leadership principles he champions preparation, accountability and strong self-definition chief among them come as no surprise, but the stories he uses as examples are filled with vivid scenes and organized with a veteran trial lawyer’s flair for maximum effect. Apart from a few childhood anecdotes, he shies away from his personal life and recalls his abandoned Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton only as one factor in his decisions about dealing with prostate cancer. Throughout, he displays the hands-on management that marked his administration, including his willingness to respond swiftly and in person to crises, to prove that he could be relied on when the city needed him most. While some critics found his style too aggressive, he has an effective counterargument: “Before September 11, there were those who said we were being overly concerned [about security],” he observes. “We didn’t hear that afterwards..
-,” he observes. “We didn’t hear that afterwards.”
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“An entertaining read…marked by an obvious passion for the city he led.” — Business Week

“Effective management advice from the master. Giuliani shows again why his admirers number in the millions.” — People

“Leadership shines…There is a useful lesson here.” — Financial Times (London)

“Lively yet practical…crisp and authoritative.” — Bookpage

“The level of devotion to his job comes through on every page.” — The Palm Beach Post

“Written with the bluntness and unsentimental bravado that people have come to expect from the former mayor of New York.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution

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Greenspan’s Fraud: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy: Ravi Batra

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In 1987, Alan Greenspan was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Batra had a bestseller predicting a depression deeper than the Great Depression, lasting from 1990 to 1996. Batra’s second book, two years later, predicting the crash of 1990 did less well, and his books predicting disaster in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999 found fewer readers, lucid as they were. Batra did correctly predict a stock market downturn in 2000, but erred by blaming the Y2K computer bug and forecasting high inflation and deep, long lasting negative growth. Now Batra has switched from predicting the future to criticizing the past. Readers expecting sensational charges will be disappointed. “This is not fraud in the legal sense,” the author reassures us. Instead, Greenspan has “seriously afflicted the finances of millions of families.” Batra faults Greenspan’s views on social security, minimum wage, taxes and the trade deficit. As always, his economic arguments are expressed elegantly. Missing is a direct link to Greenspan, who had only a peripheral advisory role in these issues (his job is setting interest rates, financial policy and bank regulation) and voices only highly modulated views when he does give opinions. The misplaced focus weakens the sound economic arguments, and the title is sensationalized at best. 100,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo. (May 9)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
It is hard to decide who has the bigger ego, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan or prolific author and professor Batra, who has written, among other books, The Great Depression of 1990 (1987). Batra takes great glee in demonstrating, step by step, how Greenspan has committed all kinds of fraud, starting with Social Security on through the trade deficit. When it comes to Social Security, the author claims, Greenspan has been operating a three-part ploy: raise an alarm about the deficit, ask workers for yet more sacrifices, then spend the extra monies on various government programs. Laissez-faire reigns supreme; the principle of an economy untouched by government holds sway. What’s more, Batra includes charts detailing events pivotal to the chairman’s fraud. His statistics are impressive, such as the fact that the bottom 20 percent of the country (or 56 million people) live on 3.6 percent of the national income. So are his visions of an economic democracy, including stability, fair and efficient treatment, and a far better standard of living for all; however, Batra’s emotional presentation lessens his book’s effectiveness. Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyl Group: Dan Briody

• Filed under: Recommended

Editorial Reviews

Review
“…strongly recommended to anyone who enjoys a good conspiracy theory.” (The Spectator, 21^st January 2006)

A TRUSTED adviser to the Pentagon stands to make $725,000 for advising a company seeking a deal that the government opposes on national security grounds. When the country is at war, no less.
This very recent tale, of Richard N. Perle, who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a voluntary citizens advisory body, but thought nothing wrong of his arrangement, shows that few topics could be more timely than the web of government, business and military interests that lobbyists and bureaucrats call the iron triangle.
Now a first-time author, Dan Briody, has come along with “The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group” (Wiley, $24.95), which aspires to tell the ultimate tale of private interests trampling on public trust. Carlyle is the Washington buyout firm that has made the most of its unusual political connections to complete some rarified deals. As the author warns in his preface, “the scandal here is not what’s illegal but what’s legal.”
The firm and the world in which it operates have been the subjects of previous profiles, most memorably a 1993 article by Michael Lewis in The New Republic. He called Carlyle the “neat solut ion f or people who don’t have a lot to sell besides their access, but who don’t want to appear to be selling their access.” Mr. Briody himself wrote about the firm in December 2001 in Red Herring magazine.
And therein lies the problem. The book is one-stop shopping for anyone who wants a laundry list of accusations against Carlyle since its inception in 1987. But in the year or so that the author was researching and writing the book, he did not unearth enough hard proof of self-dealing to sustain 210 pages. It feels padded, even without the 50 pages of addenda.
Clearly, with a Bush back in the White House, Mr. Briody and his publisher must have been expecting that Carlyle’s connections to the Bush family would sell the book. But even if Carlyle’s deals eventually enrich the current president and his father, the former president, that does not mean that their every action was for that reason.
Readers might also ask if it is surprising that a firm like Carlyle, which has long made its living in the military industry, would be making big money now that the country is obsessed with security. A book of this ambition ought to be able to weed out apparent conflicts of interest from actual ones and coincidences from conspiracies.
The chapters in which the author comes closest to finding conflicts involve instances in which public officials awarded contracts, gave favorable treatment or turned over public money to Carlyle before leaving office. Then, in a blink, they turn up working for the firm or companies associated with it.
Certainly, permissive laws that rely on former politicians’ own sense of shame about capitalizing on connections have helped buoy Carlyle’s fortunes. As of June 2002, the firm had $13.5 billion “under management,” as they say on Wall Street.
What makes Carlyle so utterly different is its pedigree. It was started by Stephen L. Norris, a former tax whiz for Marriott, and David M. Rubenstein, a onetime aide to President Jimmy Carter. What brought them together initially was a tax break that let Eskimos sell their business losses to outsiders for cash. The two teamed up to broker those tax breaks, earning $10 million in fees and costing the government $1 billion in taxes from profitable companies.
In September 1988, Carlyle started hiring a string of other Washington insiders, starting with Frederic V. Malek, a former aide to President Richard M. Nixon who also had undeniable connections to the Bush family, Saudi royals and others worth knowing, the author writes.
The all-star cast grew to include Frank C. Carlucci, a former defense secretary and former deputy director of the C.I.A., and John Major, the former British prime minister.
It even hired a former oil man to serve on the board of one of its companies. That director, George W. Bush, is now president.
CARLYLE’S purchase of a company called Vinnell in 1992 confirms the author’s worst suspicions. He argues that it illustrates the perils of the iron triangle “in one neat utterly secretive package.” Vinnell trained foreign armies, and the book quotes an unidentified former board member as saying the company was a front for the C.I.A. But much of the intrigue that is recounted here happened before Carlyle bought the company. It sold the unit to TRW in 1997.
Certainly, the stakes grew when James A. Baker III joined Carlyle in 1993. Here was a man — chief of staff for two presidents, Mr. Reagan and the elder Mr. Bush, as well as a former Treasury secretary and a former secretary of state — who could provide influence globally the way Mr. Carlucci, with his 32 corporate board seats, had done at home.
One of Mr. Briody’s more fascinating revelations is at the end of the book, and one only wishes he had made more of it. He argues that because state pension funds plow money into Carlyle, bigwigs inside the Beltway aren’t the only people who stand to become rich. That also explains, perhaps, why the public does not have much incentive to shut the crony capitalists down. (The New York Times, Sunday, April 13, 2003)

“…Undoubtedly, the story of the Carlyle Group is fascinating…a book worth reading…” (Professional Investor, June 2003)

“…useful reading for anybody interested in American politics today…” (Economist, 28 June 2003)

“…conspiracy theorists will love this investigation in to the Carlyle Group…” (EN Magazine, July 2003)

Economist, 28 June 2003
“…useful reading for anybody interested in American politics today…”

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