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Testosterone Inc.
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Testosterone Inc.

Tales of CEOs Gone Wild

Christopher Byron
Wiley, 2004
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Editorial Rating

7

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Eye Opening
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Recommendation

As author Christopher Byron analyzes the ambitions of four celebrity CEOs as manifestations of excess testosterone, he delivers an diverting voyeuristic caper. Byron gossips through the childhood brawls, brutish first marriages, boss-man bullying and late-night womanizing of four famous 1990s-bull market CEOs. He uses pop-psych suppositions to explain GE’s Jack Welch (who gets the most ink), Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Sunbeam’s "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap and Revlon’s Ron Perelman. What drove these headline-hugging CEOs to jeopardize their legacies with lavish lifestyles, high profile adultery, corporate looting and financial chicanery? "The answer lies not in the stars but in their skivvies," says Byron. He insists that insatiable, uncontrollable appetites for power, sex and money drove these men to victory and ruin, fueled by impoverished childhoods, poison parents and thirst for attention. Though Byron cites 90 interviews and some 15,000 documents - divorce filings, police records, court records, financial statements and SEC documents - none of those profiled agreed to an interview. But if his one-sided, unauthorized profiles may lack some essentials, such as fairness, objectivity and, perhaps, even contextual accuracy, they entertain with heavily-footnoted factoids, arrayed with verve, voyeurism and smarmy commentary. getAbstract offers this as nothing more than an entertaining, bitchy romp through the boom-to-bust roller coaster careers of four men who ruled recklessly with flashes of brilliance and then fell from the sky. It’s a swell read, but you may want to wash up afterward.

Summary

When Wall Street Was Wild

During the wild American bull market that closed the twentieth century, Wall Street society, like the people who shaped it, was brash, arrogant, extravagant, rebellious and revolutionary. Those who catapulted to corporate power in the 1980s and 1990s hit their stride precisely because they were demanding, unconventional, bullish and ruthlessly ambitious. Gone was the post World War II, consensus-loving Organization Man. Only those with fire in the gut got to rewrite the rules and establish the new corporate order.

Some of those celebrity CEOs found that power, wealth and fame could not sate their drives for public acceptance and self-respect. The result: many went too far, and were ultimately defeated by their unbridled appetites for women, money, power and glamour. What causes some men, at the apex of their power, to make mistakes that demote them to a life of ridicule? Testosterone. Little boys with poor social skills almost inevitably develop into wild teenagers who, if unchecked, become aggressive, oversexed, power-hungry men who dominate, revolutionize and, eventually, even destroy their organizations and relationships.

Since the...

About the Author

Christopher Byron is a Connecticut-based business and finance writer, whose work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Worth and New York magazines, among others. The author of the bestseller, Martha Inc., he writes a weekly business column for the New York Post. He also hosts a syndicated daily radio show, Wall Street Wakeup with Chris Byron.

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