Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great - Hardcover

Dunlap, Albert J.; Mahaney, John (Editor); Andelman, Bob

3.46

94 ratings by Goodreads

9780812928372: Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812928377 ISBN 13: 9780812928372

Publisher: Crown Business, 1996

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Al Dunlap is an original: an outspoken, irascible executive with an incredible track record of injecting new life into tired companies. The business media have coined a new verb--"to dunlap"--when describing a fast company turnaround. In April 1994 he became CEO and chairman of Scott Paper, which had lost $277 million in 1993, was on credit watch for excessive debt, and whose stock had been comatose for seven years. In a mere nineteen months, Scott had record earnings, the stock had increased in value by $6.5 billion (over 200 percent), and Dunlap merged Scott with Kimberly-Clark in a stock swap that valued Scott at $9 billion and created the second largest consumer-products company in the United States.

Mean Business combines Dunlap's colorful personal history--his working-class background, employment, friendship with such people as Sir James Goldsmith and George Soros, his views on why too many executives think of themselves as corporate royalty--and his provocative ideas on management and leadership. His specific, tested program on how to evaluate and choose a management team, get the lowest costs from suppliers, improve the balance sheet, and develop a real strategy make this an invaluable book.

The controversy about corporate performance and how to achieve it is near the boiling point, as executives face the hard fact of business life: What is good or even excellent today won't be satisfactory tomorrow. Mean Business is absolutely essential for both companies in trouble as well as those at the top of their game.

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Review:

Al Dunlap, whose corporate behavior has earned him nicknames like The Shredder, took over as CEO of Scott Paper when the venerable paper goods manufacturer was on the brink of death. His ultimately successful efforts at corporate resuscitation are recounted in his typically colorful and exhilarating manner in Mean Business: How I Save Bad Companies and Make Good Companies Great, written with Bob Andelman.

About the Author:

Albert J. Dunlap grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, the son of a union steward. He graduated from West Point and after completing his military service began a thirty-five-year career in business that took him to seventeen states, Europe, and Australia. He has held important positions at many companies, including Sterling Pulp and Paper, American Can, Lily-Tulip, Diamond International, Crown-Zellerbach, Consolidated Press Holdings of Australia, and Scott Paper. He lives in Boca Raton, Florida, with his wife, Judy.

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