To the Victors Go the Pages to Tell Their Side of the Story

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By the early 1990s, Michael Bloomberg had reached the top of his world. Barely a decade after his firing from Salomon Brothers, he had built a financial media empire worth nearly $1 billion, his name stamped across computer terminals from New York to Shanghai.


But Bloomberg, acclaimed as a new-media visionary, had more on his mind: wisdom to share, stories to tell and scores to settle. So the founder of Bloomberg L.P. did what countless other executives before and after have done: He wrote a book.


“Bloomberg by Bloomberg,” published in 1997, helped shape the entrepreneur’s place in business history, as well as lay the groundwork for his successful New York mayoral run even as critics panned it as little more than a self-aggrandizing press release, though some praised its mix of anecdotes and swagger.


It also was typical for a chief executive.


“I have never read a memoir by a CEO that I found particularly illuminating, including the two that I wrote,” said Tony Schwartz, a former business ghostwriter who collaborated with Donald Trump and Michael Eisner on their tomes. “Because CEOs are by their nature doers and typically allergic to introspection, they’re left with recounting their achievements, buttressed by typically thin lessons they’ve drawn along the way.”


Corporate leaders, including former General Electric chief executive Jack Welch, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, have all sat down with ghostwriters to put their thoughts on leadership, business triumphs and life into writing.


And while the books don’t set the publishing world on fire, they have a ready audience of business readers who anticipate the offerings. Welch’s current title, “Winning,” is No. 4 on The New York Times hardcover advice bestseller list.


Having made a fortune in business, executives such as Trump and Bloomberg have little use for modest book advances. Rather, many are eager to put their own spin on history and to share their lessons with others.


“Certainly there is narcissism going on,” said Dennis Palumbo, a Los Angeles writer and psychotherapist. “Certainly, successful people would want the world to know how they did it. It may be some way to repudiate what their family thought of them when they were younger that they were a bum.”



Leaving legacy


Bloomberg’s book was typical of the genre: loads of ego tempered by bits of self-reflection and lot of anecdotes that chronicle his rise from obscurity and his professional challenges.


“Once you decide to write about yourself, you’re probably under greater scrutiny than you expected to be,” said Matthew Winkler, Bloomberg’s co-author and editor-in-chief at Bloomberg News. “On the other hand, what you’ve learned is worth knowing and worth telling to other people. You also have the advantage of getting to tell your own story.”


The genre of CEO memoir took off after former Chrysler chairman Lee Iacocca’s 1984 bestseller “Iacocca: An Autobiography” rocketed to the top of bestseller lists and helped cement Iacocca’s status as one of the nation’s most successful turnaround artists.


Only have a few have won wide praise; the late Washington Post Co. chairwoman Katharine Graham’s “Personal History,” published in 1997, won a Pulitzer Prize in biography. The difference couldn’t have been more glaring: Graham avoided name-dropping and platitudes in favor of a deeply personal and moving life story.


Schwartz may be one of the genre’s most successful practitioners, having ghostwritten Trump’s 1987 bestseller “Trump: The Art of the Deal” and Eisner’s 1998 “Work in Progress.”


Now the head of a leadership foundation called The Energy Project, Schwartz, interviewed by e-mail, said that in retrospect he is not proud of how what he accomplished as a ghostwriter.


“There is no reasonable way to curb a CEO’s instinct to become self-indulgent, because the act of writing a memoir mid-career is by its nature self-indulgent at a minimum, and more often grandiose. In that respect, ghostwriters are enablers,” he wrote.


Not all writers share that dire assessment.


Janet Lowe, a former San Diego Tribune business editor who has written books about Welch and billionaires Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, said that regardless of the ego involved, many memoirs are worthwhile if only because the authors lead extraordinary lives.


Microsoft chairman Bill Gates’ “Business @ the Speed of Thought: Succeeding in the Digital Economy” may not have been great literature, she said, but Gates’ story of building a global computing empire is worth reading. “Whether you like Bill Gates or not, he has done something meaningful and changed the world,” said Lowe. “I’ve read really, really excellent books that were ghostwritten for CEOs.”



The process


Chief executives who want to leave a legacy in writing follow the same path as other would-be writers, said Peter Rubie, a New York literary agent who has worked with business leaders and other nonfiction authors.


They often pick from a stable of ghostwriters, usually former business journalists who are familiar with the worlds in which their subjects travel.


Then, the pair submits a proposal to a literary agent who tries to find a publisher for the work.


Rubie said well-known chief executives have a much better shot at getting published. It also helps to have a book that captures the zeitgeist, such as Gates’ work during the peak of Internet hype.


“Publishing, and especially business publishing, is always looking for someone who can come along and give the latest skinny on whatever,” Rubie said. “The three questions that always come up are: ‘What do you have to offer that’s new,’ ‘Why this book and why now,’ and ‘How many copies of this book can you help sell?'”


With a publishing deal in hand, the chief executive sits down with the ghostwriter, tells stories and pontificates about business, politics or any subject deemed worthy. Winkler said he spent hundreds of hours with Bloomberg over two years, meeting at least once a week, piquing the entrepreneur’s memory about specific episodes in his life and trying to capture his speaking style.


Winkler said he wrote the book, often using Bloomberg’s own words, and there were no clashes on what to include or how to tell the more sensitive parts of the story. “It was a command performance for me. The voice was his. That was the style that was going to be most appreciated,” he said.


In recent years, publishing companies have supplemented chief executive memoirs with audio versions and even videos based on the written autobiography or memoir. But the printed work remains the cornerstone of the multimedia approach.


Rubie said the chief executive memoir genre has lost some of its commercial appeal as Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay and other business leaders have had their reputations tarnished amid corporate scandals. Still, Welch and a few other household names can be counted on to sell books.


“People want to buy known quantities even though the known quantities might not tell you anything you need to know,” Rubie said. “The irony is, most of these people probably only read two books a year and one of them is Tom Clancy. I’m being cruel, I know.”

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