If you feel like you’re staring at the economy from an ever-deeper hole, it’s time to look at someone else’s story. And since we’re in the gutter, why not look at the stars?
Like David Ogilvy, who grew up poor, dropped out of college, came to America in steerage class and still 
managed to reinvent the advertising business. A new biography, The King of Madison Avenue, was written by a former colleague of Ogilvy, but reviewer Richard Pachter, in The Man Who Made Advertising, says the book is “far from a fawning tale; the author incisively compares (Ogilvy’s) work and influence with predecessors and peers such as Bill Bernbach, Rosser Reeves and others. Ogilvy often comes up short and vacillated between adoration and disdain of many of his fellow admen during his lifetime.” Pachter says the book’s main shortcoming is a lack of examples of Ogilvy’s groundbreaking work. Overall, though he says “Roman does a masterful job of conveying the colorful personality of Ogilvy.”
These are bad news times, but few executives have ever had to deal with a worse news cycle than John D. Rockefeller after Ida Tarbell took him on.Steve Weinberg’s Taking on the Trust is a biography of bo
th Rockefeller and Tarbell. Reviewer Nell Minow says Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company “transformed our notion of leadership in the private sector. Explicitly premised on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man,” The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) laid the foundation for current notions of corporate and political leadership and the impact that leaders have on their organizations and the larger economy and culture.”
Those who want to see how Rockefeller wound up laughing all the way to the bank should read Ron Chernow’s outstanding biography, Titan.
Minow, in Setting the Bar, otherwise seems more interested in the lessons politicians have for business leaders. Writing about the best biographies and memoirs of 2008, she bypasses books like The Snowball, a biography of Warren Buffett, T. Boone Pickens’ The First Billion Is the Hardest, Call Me Ted, Ted Turner’s co-written memoir, or The House of Mondavi, by Julia Flynn Siler. Instead, she adores 
California politician Willie Brown’s memoir, Basic Brown, calling it “invaluable for anyone trying to steer any large organization of disparate people who hold even more disparate interests.”
She contrasts Brown with the Jacob Weisberg biography of George W. Bush, The Bush Tragedy. “The book is a cautionary tale about the difference between the qualities that get someone a job and those that it takes to do the job,” says Minow.
As if to restore her sense of dignity, she then gives a nod to former John F. Kennedy aide Ted Sorenson’s Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, which she calls “a cross between a gripping spy novel and a Harvard Business School case study.”
She says anyone who ever has to give a speech should read the chapter on speechwriting, and calls the chapter on Kennedy’s foreign policy “essential guidance for anyone who is responsible for directing a large organization beset by ambitious competitors — or who wants to be.”
