From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero - Softcover

Villette, Michel; Vuillermot, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080147566X ISBN 13: 9780801475665

Publisher: ILR Press, 2009

Synopsis

In the popular imagination, the business media, and the schools of business and management that train new generations of entrepreneurs and executives, achieving extraordinary success in business is attributed to far-sighted individuals who have taken bold risks, provided innovative leadership, and introduced new products, services, or ideas superior to those of the competition. Amid the growing skepticism about the means by which vast amounts of wealth are accumulated and its consequences, however, this belief is long overdue for reevaluation. In From Predators to Icons, Michel Villette, a sociologist, and Catherine Vuillermot, a business historian, examine the careers of thirty-two of today's wealthiest global executives―including Warren Buffett, Ingvar Kamprad, Bernard Arnault, Jim Clark, and Richard Branson―in order to challenge the conventional explanations for their extreme success and come to a better understanding of modern business practices.

In contrast to the familiar image of the entrepreneur as a visionary with a plan, Villette and Vuillermot instead discover a far less dramatic process of improvised adaptations gradually assembled into a coherent course of conduct. And rather than being risk-takers, those who are most successful in business are risk-minimizers. Huge gains, these case studies reveal, are most reliably obtained in circumstances where the entrepreneur has established careful provisions for risk reduction. As for the view that innovation makes success possible, the authors find that because innovation is an expensive process that takes a long time to produce profits, innovators first of all require capital; success makes innovation possible. The necessary resources, they show, are most often derived from what they provocatively term "predation": ruthlessly taking advantage of imperfections, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities within the market or among competitors. Finally, From Predator to Icon considers the "practical ethics" implemented during the phase in which capital is most rapidly accumulated, as well as the social consequences of these activities.

Drawing on interviews with some of their subjects and, crucially, close readings of the authorized biographies and other hagiographic accounts of these figures, which eliminates the bias of malicious interpretations, Villette and Vuillermot provide revelatory insights about the creation and maintenance of business wealth that will be profitably read by both the captains and the critics of contemporary capitalism.

About this title

About the Author

Michel Villette is Professor of Sociology, AgroParisTech and EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Paris. He is the author of several books in French. Catherine Vuillermot is Assistant Professor of Business History at L'Université de Franche Comté. John R. Kimberly is the Henry Bower Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and Professor of Management, Health Care Systems, and Sociology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. George Holoch previously translated Smoke & Mirrors, Inc. for Cornell.

Review

"Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot provide a powerful and iconoclastic close read of the careers of spectacularly wealthy businessmen that stands both conventional and scholarly wisdom as to how fortunes are made, kept, and justified on its head. Meticulously detailed and tightly focused on situation, context and action, this is provocative sociology of the sort that Machiavelli, C. Wright Mills, and Pierre Bourdieu would approve. Theories of entrepreneurship, leadership, growth, innovation (and more) come up far short in this indelicate but sharp and highly suggestive account of how to succeed―dramatically so―in business."

(John Van Maanen, M.I.T.)

Edition details

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 080147566X
• ISBN 13: 9780801475665
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272