CEO biographies are almost uniformly terrible. The “uniformly” matters because it means you can’t even rely on different ones being interestingly terrible. They all tend to be ghost-written homages to the author’s toughness. Whatever lessons are shared are cliches. These cliches may even be true in some cases, but the author has only lived one life. Who knows if the same will work for you?
But there’s an exception. It’s a biography written by one CEO, and it’s heartfelt. He tells his story plainly and honestly. It’s a memoir, not a guidebook. And for that, it shines still in my memory even though it’s been twelve years since I read it.
Swimming Across by Andrew S. Grove is a great book. Everyone can read it. It has nothing to do with founding Intel and everything to do with a mother and her young son escaping Hungary as the Nazis took over their country and home. It’s thrilling and terrifying. Though Intel is hardly mentioned, my mind did the job of hanging the fate of the company in the balance. It’s a great example of how knowing the end to a story can actually enhance dramatic tension.
I don’t know or care whether Swimming Across is great literature or not. It is too compelling a story to worry about such matters. The book occupies a strange place in the marketplace of ideas. It engages in self-disclosure ordinarily only found in fiction. Indeed, when reading, one almost has to remind oneself that everything written actually happened, and indeed happened to the author.
I’m not surprised the book didn’t do better. The people who cared about Andrew Grove cared about Intel. They wanted Only the Paranoid Survive and High Output Management. If Swimming Across taught anything about Intel, its lessons were far too subtle for me to comprehend.
Swimming Across ought to have been labeled a classic. It deserves a review written by a better writer than me. It deserved to be brought up in the refugee debate. I hope for the Littlest Bath to read it alongside Anne Frank to see how capriciously tragedy visited one but not the other.
Ultimately, though, we always knew we would end here. Andrew Grove died yesterday, possibly from Parkinson’s disease. I thank him for his gifts to us.
Very nice and well put Vikram.Report
Thank you!Report
Ya know @vikram-bath from all my years working in bookstores, there is only one business book I would (and have) recomend: How to Become CEO by Jeffery Fox. Just a short little book, filled with the little things that people forget, like don’t go to company picnics, as it gives people time to kvetch, or show up before everone else by 15 minutes and leave 45 minutes after everyone, for the extra productivity without distraction, and to show everyone that you are dedicated. Worth checking out.Report
I’ve now wish-listed it. Though it sounds more personal than my usual diet. I.e. the unit of interest is the individual worker rather than the company.
The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig would be my pick among more practitioner-directed books.Report
Have you read “Sloan Rules” about Alfred Sloan, the head of GM? It’s a biography and not an autobiography–and it’s a work of history–but in my opinion it does a very good job of mixing the personal with the company and the choices Sloan made.Report
Nope, I read My Years With General Motors, his autobiography (obviously, I guess).
I’ll add that too to the heap of stuff to read.Report
Nice review. The moral I would provisionally take is that the genre from which it departs is basically crap, and the genre to which it points, historical biography or even just popular history, is presumptively compelling (since authors have the entirety of the history of humanity from which to choose their topics). It just so happens that this author, who happened to rise to CEO of a famous company, had a compelling story from history occur in his own family, and he told it well. Here’s to good popular history writing.Report