The Whiz Kids

by John A. Byrne

Book Overview

Analyzes America's post-World War II rise to economic power, and sudden decline, from a new angle: the ambitions and tragic errors of ten influential men destined to become architects of a new world... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385248040
• ISBN13: 9780385248044
• Release Date: August 1993
• Publisher: Doubleday Business
• Length: 581 Pages
• Weight: 2.17 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A Must Read for MBA-Finance

This is by far one of the best business books I've ever read (top ten). Anyone interested in: Ford Motor Company, the automobile industry, American business history, or the world of finance/accounting will enjoy this work. If you're a MBA-Finance the Whiz Kids does a great job of showing the development of modern financial analysis - its advantages as well as its shortcomings. It also deals with Robert McNamara's role during the Vietnam War and Tex Thorton's creation of Litton Industries. It's kinda long but I've read it cover to cover twice. A few of my friends have also read this one and they all really liked it.

Whiz Kids and the Holding Companies

This is a great read for today's corporate watchers (think Enron, Qwest, Tyco, WorldCom). After WWII, the early speadsheet types, geeks, nerds and whiz kids went on a roll in the 1950s and 1960s. They created holding companies (we call it today "synergy") like the electrical and railroad guys did a generation (30 years) earlier. The names were great: Teledyne, Litton, LTV, etc. The holding company or parent owned lots of divisions or profit centers. Think of it as a mutual fund, like the Sage of Omaha has today. Government contracts, the cold war, all helped them grow. They flew Braniff 707s and AA Convair 990s between LA and Dallas and NYC, drank martinis, dressed like the movie "Down with Love." They used computers to figure out market share and P & L, big IBM and Sperry Univacs. Like all parties it ended with Vietnam going south, Nixon taking away the punch bowl and the NYSE dropping. Like the 1920s, the 50-60s needed this book and many will be done, all the same as this one, on the Roaring dot.com 1990s, with the same nonsense: holding companies, synergy and over paid executives. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Don't lose humanity in IT world

I was pondering when I read this book. I have read this book for many times. Every time I got different feeling. From this book, you can feel the cheer, and the tear of them. These guys, we can call them "Blue Blood". They got the power of how to control this world, changing this world. The problem is, some of them, for example, Robert Mcnamara, was plug into the data, statistic data and lose humannity. That is why he loose in Vanem. That is also a lesson to all of us, who are at the edge of IT evolution. Don't be a robust, computer is only a tool, there is a lot of beautiful things outside this data matrix. Don't be slaved by it.Author did give a clearer picture of this ten guys. And intrigue me to know more about them. This is a rather interesting books, also a good lesson to those in "Internet" fever. Don't lose your humanity!!!

Lessons we would do well to heed

Just ten men -- all relatively young during the war -- were responsible for Corporate America's decline after the post-war boom? "Yes -- to an extent." is John Byrne's answer to that question in this unflinching look at how the "whiz kids" (originally called the "quiz kids" for reasons explained in the book) landed jobs at Ford Motor as a group and then proceeded to skillfully consolidate their power by using "new" numbers-based analytical methods to promote their agenda and dismiss others'. Eventually, as they occupied executive suites at Ford, several went into other business and government postions, spreading the "gospel" of "if it's not in the numbers, it's not real." As we now know, this "dispassionate" method's shortcomings become painfully evident when a field is open to increased competition (the auto industry) and/or faces an adversary who doesn't desire to "play by the rules" (the Viet Cong). Byrne takes the time to tell the story of all 10 men to varying degrees, and lays out a vivid picture of how we **will** fall short if we mindlessly follow management styles that have been around for so long that they are ingrained in some companies' cultures, but still are no more effective today then they were 30 years ago.