What Makes Tycoons Tick

Since Dreiser and Frank Norris, the businessman in U.S. fiction has seldom been a hero; if he has not been a heel, he has at least been a target for satire. In Marquand's Point of No Return, the satire was gentle, in The Hucksters sharp. In many other "realistic" novels, the businessman was actually a caricature. On sale last week was a book that broke the tired old pattern. In Executive Suite (Houghton Mifflin: $3), Cameron Hawley has depicted businessmen who are neither heroes nor heels nor geniuses but, in the words of one of the characters, "a quite ordinary group of men, disconcertingly human . . . and . . . given to the man-on-the-street practice of basing decisions on hunch and intuition." With understanding and sympathy, Author Hawley manages to give a notably realistic and exciting picture of how the top men in a corporation operate.

Soul on a Balance Sheet. The story centers around a problem common to many a company: What happens when the top man dies? Avery Bullard is a driving, domineering boss who has pulled a small family-owned furniture company from the brink of bankruptcy and built it into the giant Tredway Corp., one of the biggest in the industry. He has done it with boundless energy, and at the expense of his marriage. Bullard is a believable if not always admirable tycoon; he lives "as if ... his soul would be measured on a balance sheet where there was no credit for love." But it was not money that he was after. Dollars, Bullard used to say, "were just a way of keeping score." The thing that kept him going was "his terrific pride in himself ... He was only happy when he was doing the impossible --and he did that only to satisfy his own pride . . ." When he dies unexpectedly, his associates realize as never before that, in many ways, he was a great man. Who could possibly fill his shoes?

Embroiled in the struggle for power in the Tredway Corp. are five vice presidents. They are Jesse Grimm, the up-from-the-bench production man who demands perfection from his machines but is "too quick to excuse the lack of it in his people"; Don Walling, the fair-haired boy of design and development who seems to "skitter about over the . . . surface" of a problem, gathering up unrelated facts, and then solves it with "a brilliant flash of pure creative imagination"; J. Walter Dudley, the sales boss, a "runner who [runs] without a goal" and thinks that if he runs hard, and makes enough friends, "everything [will be] all right"; Frederick Alderson, treasurer, a tired old company veteran and longtime confidant of the boss; and Loren Shaw, comptroller, who can squeeze profits from pennies, and is sure that the smallest thing may be decisive in the struggle for power ("If you went to another man's office instead of forcing him to come to yours, you openly acknowledged his superiority").

Why Not? The power play in Executive Suite is not merely between individuals but between two schools of business philosophy which have their proponents in every big U.S. corporation. The philosophy of one school, as expounded by Comptroller Shaw, is that the modern corporation is too big to be run by one production-minded man, but should be run by a committee, preferably headed by a "money man," with the emphasis on "safety." Since the great days of expansion are over, argues Shaw, the corporation must hang on to what it has. It is the money man who can best squeeze out the last penny of profit, notably by knowing all the tax angles. Says Shaw: "A new accounting procedure [for taxes] . . . will contribute more to our net earnings than the total profit we'll make from one of our smaller factories."

The other philosophy is that there are no static frontiers for business. To keep it ever expanding, a corporation needs the domination of a man like Avery Bullard, who is willing to devote his life to the corporation. In the end, the new president of the Tredway Corp. is a man out of the same mold as Bullard. Yet he realizes, which Bullard did not, that the presidency may turn him into a kind of machine with no soul beyond the corporation. Nevertheless, he can't resist the challenge of the job and the temptation of the ever-expanding frontier. Says he: "We talk about Tredway being a big company now. It isn't. . . We have about 3% of the total [market]--that's all, just 3% ... Suppose we get 15% of the total --and why not? . . . That's exactly what we are going to do."

Author Hawley, a businessman himself, got to know the ins & outs of corporate life in 25 years with Armstrong Cork Co. Born in South Dakota, he joined Armstrong in 1927 as an adman, worked up through sales and finance to become advertising director. A short-story writer for slick magazines on the side, Hawley quit Armstrong six months ago to write his first book. Some of his reviewers, he says, were baffled by Executive Suite: they were so accustomed to caricatured businessmen that they kept looking for the tongue in Hawley's cheek. Hawley is not discouraged; he is now working on another business novel, thinks that "it will take four novels to break down the feeling that any book about business must necessarily be satire."

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