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TAMING THE OCTOPUS: The Long Battle for the Soul of the Corporation
Author: Kyle Edward Williams
Publisher: Norton
Pages: 290
Price: $29.99
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BEHIND THE STARTUP: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality
Author: Benjamin Shestakofsky
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages: 311
Price: $29.95
THE WOLVES OF K STREET: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government
Author: Brody and Luke Mullins
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 612
Price: $34.99
It’s been 14 years since Goldman Sachs was vilified as a “vampire squid” by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone. “Organised greed always defeats disorganised democracy,” he concluded then. Yet organised greed lives on, a seemingly intractable aspect of human nature, as three new business books make clear.
The age-old swing of the pendulum between greed, excess and regulation is the subject of Taming the Octopus by Kyle Edward Williams. Inevitably, greed and scandal breed regulation, which in turn provokes proponents of the free market to decry government overreach. Consider the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from more speculative investment banking during the Great Depression only to be relaxed by the Clinton administration more than six decades later.
In Williams’s telling, the free-marketers may engage in tactical retreats but always re-emerge, perhaps because they can fall back on the rigorous logic of economics, divorced from the messiness of the real world. Williams, a historian and editor, offers
a brisk and even-handed overview of corporate regulation. He isn’t the first — and surely won’t be the last — to conclude that “the corporate octopus is an institution incapable of being tamed.”
Behind the Startup by Benjamin Shestakofsky, began life as a PhD thesis with the premise that its author would go to work at a San Francisco start-up and write about it, on condition that he not name the company or its employees. The start-up, which he calls AllDone, aims to be the Amazon of service providers, matching customers with mostly small, local businesses.
Readers willing to wade through the book’s sometimes academic prose will find a real-life The Office, Silicon Valley version, alternately comical and poignant, with satellite operations in the Philippines and Las Vegas.
The San Francisco location is AllDone’s nerve centre, filled with software engineers and highly educated tech bros (mostly men) whose “first guiding principle,” according to the company’s introductory email: “Play to win: We’re a professional sports
team, not a family.” That intensely competitive environment is in stark contrast to the nurturing “family” culture in the fast-growing Philippines hub, where human labour is cheaper than using artificial intelligence.
Las Vegas was the base for the company’s call centre, where contractors (nearly all women) fielded customer questions and complaints and, as in the Philippines, worked for low pay with no benefits. It appeared to be a tough job. As one supervisor commented, callers were “pissed off and they want someone to yell at.” She advised a rattled employee: “Deep breath in, deep breath out! Go to your happy place!”
Despite efforts to foster the same warm familial feelings and gratitude as in the Philippines, the Las Vegas workers “failed to meet performance objectives, violated managerial directives, squabbled with each other and openly expressed dissatisfaction with managers in San Francisco,” Shestakofsky observes. The Las Vegas operation was eventually shut, its functions moved to Salt Lake City.
AllDone has emerged as a “unicorn”. Its founders and the company’s venture capitalist investors are enormously rich, at least on paper — unlike its work force. Many readers will no doubt find these discrepancies troubling, as does the sociologist in Shestakofsky. “Among the most glaring social problems associated with venture capitalism is its role in reproducing vast disparities in wealth,” he writes. “Venture capitalism is designed to further enrich the wealthiest among us.”
The Wolves of K Street by the journalists and brothers Brody and Luke Mullins, is less about how lobbying shapes policy than about the machinations of its often colourful practitioners. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that an industry based on access, personal connections, influence and money would attract a rogues’ gallery of strivers and opportunists for whom conflicts of interest are cultivated rather than shunned.
These include: Tony Podesta (investigated but never charged as part of the inquiry by the special counsel Robert S Mueller III into Donald Trump’s ties to Russia); Paul Manafort (convicted of multiple felonies connected to his lobbying for Ukraine before being pardoned by Trump); and Roger Stone (also convicted of felonies related to the Mueller investigation before Trump commuted his prison sentence).
Many of the tales they recount received extensive news coverage, but the authors bring them to life with considerable narrative skill and novelistic detail. Podesta, for example, was so obsessed with collecting expensive art that he stayed in Turin, Italy, for an art fair even as his once powerful lobbying firm imploded.
After reading about these lobbyists’ lavish spending, self-indulgence and outright frauds, their ensuing downfalls (in most cases) come as a not-so-guilty pleasure.
The Mullins brothers sought comment from Courtovich, who is still plying his trade on Capitol Hill despite brushes with scandal and repeated run-ins with the police at his South Carolina beach retreat. His written response consisted of profanities unprintable here.
The reviewer has been a reporter and business columnist for The Times©2024 The New York Times News Service
