Category: Career Memoir

So Far, So Good – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the book, “So Far, So Good– The First 94 Years” by Roy Neuberger, published in 1997. This is Neuberger’s autobiography. He was born in July 1903. His father was 52 at the time. He was nine when his mother died and thirteen when his father died. His sister Ruth was twelve years older than he was.

In the winter, he would ice skate on the flooded tennis courts of Columbia University in Manhattan. Neuberger inherited lots of money from his father, who had been a successful businessman. He dropped out of New York University after a year because he felt he wasn’t learning enough to justify staying to join the tennis team when permitted to– in sophomore year.

In October 1929, Neuberger worked to record stock transactions via pencil and paper for a clearinghouse. The market at that time was open for two hours on Saturday. The borrowing power allowed for a margin account in the late 1920’s was 1000% but at the time of release of Neuberger’s book, it was only 100%.

Neuberger & Berman– the investment-managing business started by the author in December 1940– bought a computer in 1967, costing $1.5 million. It needed sixty people to run it, but was worth the cost because in 1970, “… five of the ten largest Wall Street brokerage firms failed, in part because they couldn’t keep up with the volume of trading.” And the market closed at 3pm in those days.

Read the book to learn of how Neuberger, along with his contemporaries amassed tremendous wealth and privilege, and a giant collection of fine art.

Handsome Is

The Book of the Week is “Handsome Is” by Harriet Wasserman, published in 1997. It is a memoir of the intertwined careers of the author and Saul Bellow.

Wasserman was Bellow’s literary agent for twenty-five years. She first worked at Russell & Vokening, a literary agency in New York in the 1960’s. Bellow and Bernard Malamud were clients of her bosses, the managing partners. “They were representative of Male Jewish American Novelists at the time when MJANs were the high point of our culture.” In the early 1970’s, the then-big publisher Doubleday offered Bellow “… a two-book contract for two hundred thousand dollars and promised to get [him] a summer house in Spain.” Such were the times.

Wasserman described another aspect of the book industry in her generation. Malamud’s book “The Closing of the American Mind” became a runaway best-seller immediately because a TV, radio and newspaper blitz made it into a blockbuster. “Ten thousand books had been printed, three thousand were in the warehouse, and seven thousand were in the stores.” In 1987, another famous author, Allan Bloom appeared and promoted his book “More Die of Heartbreak” on the TV shows and networks, “…Evans and Novak, Open Mind, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN…” but the one show on which he appeared at his own insistence, was Oprah.

Read the book to learn of what became of Wasserman’s bosses– the reason she struck out on her own, how an auctioning off of the longhand notes and other preliminary materials of a Bellow novel fared, Bellow’s love life and families, Wasserman’s philosophy on representing an author who wants to retain separate agents for: a) his backlist and foreign rights, and b) his current works; and many other nostalgic scenes of a bygone era in publishing.

Fake

The Book of the Week is “Fake” by Kenneth Walton, published in 2006. This book’s author tells a suspenseful story about his 2003 eBay activities that were deemed a crime.

A friend who was well-versed in the business, sparked Walton’s passion for hunting for paintings at antique shops, thrift stores and flea markets, and reselling those paintings at a profit on the online auction site. However, as Walton honed his entrepreneurial skills, he got greedy and began to collude with his friend, using deception to make more money.

Read the book to learn of what happened when Walton found himself in serious trouble, and how he realized he could make money honestly through a different pursuit for which he had natural ability, and for which he developed a passion.

Call the Nurse – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook, “Call the Nurse” by Mary J. MacLeod, published in 2012. This is the career memoir of a nurse in The Hebrides, off of Scotland.

The author, her husband and two youngest kids moved from England to the island of “Papavray” (a pseudonym), about 20 miles long, on a lark in the early 1970’s. She describes the kinds of patients she treated, and the lives of the area’s inhabitants in detail.

She writes that people rarely grew gardens in the islands because difficulties such as bad weather, bad soil and hungry wildlife threatened the gardens’ existence. Potatoes were about the only crop worth growing. Tea and alcohol were drunk in large quantities.

Items of everyday living were scarce, so every few months, when she and her husband drove their Land Rover to the mainland, they had to shop on behalf of members of their community, which was like a small town. They were asked to pick up all kinds of household goods, chicken wire, appliances, a ladder, a puppy, etc.

Among other social events throughout the year, every summer, the people had a day-long sheep-shearing gathering. The culture was such that most of the men were “… sailors, fishermen, crofters, or working at the pier or the harbour.”

Enjoying the remoteness from civilization was an acquired taste. The weather was often wet and dangerous, and an airlift was necessary when MacLeod’s patients were suffering life-threatening conditions. Read the book to learn more about her experiences, good and bad.

A Political Education – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the book, “A Political Education” by Andre Schiffrin, published in 2007. The author, born in 1935 in France, discussed how his family survived WWII, and his career in American publishing.

Schiffrin followed his father, a prominent figure, into the industry. In the late 1940’s, “… there were 350 bookstores in New York City, ten times the number there are today.” The author received an American elitist Northeastern education, despite the religion he was perceived to be, and with which he himself identified (Jewish). In the early 1950’s, he was politically active in school– leading various organizations that spread their opinions and lodged protests in cooperation with other student groups internationally. Schiffrin opposed France’s colonialism in Algeria and Vietnam, and Soviet repression in Hungary.

The last third of the book contains the author’s lament over how, “In America, we gradually built a system of welfare for the large corporations…” Up until the 1970’s, in the industrialized nations of the world, the publishing business was used to making an annual profit of 3%. The philosophy of publishers was “…that the successful books should subsidize those that made less money”– like, ironically, with venture capitalism nowadays– because there will never be maximum profitability for every entity funded. Yes, the ultimate goal is to make money. Humans have a history of spawning unexpectedly wildly successful books and start-ups. But society benefits more than otherwise from a diversity of intellectual, experimental endeavors, even if they fail.

The atmosphere changed when corporate America got even more greedy. It was the usual story: When avaricious bean-counters take over a creative and/or intellectual realm, everything goes south. “Wall Street was looking for profits of 10 to 20 percent.” As can be surmised, it didn’t get them. This blogger thinks the author was naive in saying, “For the first time in history, ideas were judged not by their importance but by their profit potential.” Even in the 1970’s, there was nothing new under the sun.

Read the book to learn how the last three decades of Schiffrin’s working life saw radical political and cultural changes that adversely affected the book business in the United States. For instance, the major publishing companies practiced censorship due to American politics from the mid-twentieth century into the first years of the twenty-first. Schiffrin wrote that the Right wing felt entitled to control the Middle East. Communists and Islamists were interlopers; “… if things weren’t working out [with regard to America’s takeover], it had to be due to traitors and subversives at home.”

As an aside, this blogger was reminded of two books Mr. Schiffrin would have enjoyed: “Wasn’t That a Time?” by Robert Schrank and “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins.

Work is My Play

The Book of the Week is “Work Is My Play” by Wallace E. Johnson, published in 1973.  This is the career memoir of a lifelong workaholic.

The author discusses his passion for doing business. In the 1950’s, he co-founded Holiday Inn on the concept of offering an affordable place for families to stay while they were on a road trip, with accommodations and dining that were superior to those of Howard Johnson’s (no relation to the author), the only other option at the time.

The author fondly describes the opportunistic personality of one of his business partners with a memorable anecdote. The partner grabbed his wife before she had finished her lunchtime pie (she was used to that) in order to punctually attend a government auction of land parcels in an undeveloped area. He then proceeded to win the bid on every single parcel because he knew real estate prices would rise in the long term.

Read the book to learn how the author had fun working nonstop and making lots of money.

Four Seasons

The Book of the Week is “Four Seasons, The Story of a Business Philosophy” by Isadore Sharp, published in 2009. In the early 1950’s, in his early 20’s, the author worked with his father, a construction contractor. He served as construction manager, rental agent, salesman, and financier. He parlayed his experience into building hotels in later decades.

The first Four Seasons opened in Toronto in 1961. It was a motel. Because the location of the second Four Seasons (actually called “Inn on the Park”) was less than ideal– the Toronto section of North York– it had to offer a few unusual features and amenities, such as smoking and nonsmoking floors, a restaurant and a fitness center, in March 1963. The property manager got a famous sports trainer to run the fitness center. In 1966, the trainer was accused of pushing performance-enhancing drugs. “He later died of lung cancer, from smoking.”

In the late 1960’s, London already had five five-star hotels. But Sharp wanted to build another one anyway. He and his business partners “…signed an 84-year lease at 210,000 Pounds Sterling a year, to be renegotiated every 21 years. He insisted on having air conditioning, unlike the competition. The hotel, opened in January 1970, ended up costing 700,000 Pounds. The lease was modified to allow a renegotiation every fourteen years.

Over the course of four years prior to the building of the hotel, the author’s London contact engaged him in social interaction to make sure he was trustworthy. The foundation of business is trustworthy relationships. The author said of certain of his major investors and his brother-in-law, “There was complete trust. Once we shook hands on a deal, there was no need for lawyers and signed documents.”

The author established an investing policy due to skyrocketing inflation in the mid 1970’s: putting a ceiling on his share of ownership at a small percentage of equity. No more than $3-5 million per property. This was based on a simple calculation of the maximum hotel fees he would collect over the first five years; Four Seasons became a property manager, rather than a real estate developer.

The Four Seasons hotels offer high-end luxury, targeting exclusively wealthy Americans and business executives. As its culture has evolved, it has identified a set of values to which its employees adhere and by which it does business: respect, fairness, honesty and trust. Sharp sought to make it a companywide habit.

Sharp knew that employees whose jobs include direct guest interaction are the ones who directly generate most of the hotel’s revenue, and the experienced ones are “… storehouses of customer knowledge, role models for new hires and advisers for system improvement…”

The author claimed that hotels other than Four Seasons face the major competitive challenge of easily accessible reservations data due to technological advances. The Web “…put every week’s best hotel deal at every traveler’s fingertips, raising the specter of unusually lethal periodic price wars… We didn’t compete on price… we were the one hotel company that could take full advantage of the new [economy] without any problems.” Right.

The last quarter of the book was a brag-fest. Nevertheless, read the book to learn of Sharp’s unpleasant episodes with regard to: Sheraton in Vancouver, attempts to open hotels in Italy, India and Venezuela; political unrest in Indonesia, ownership of The Pierre Hotel, and much more.