Book review
Abstract
Although it wasn't written as a business management book per se, Alec
Klein's popular work, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the
Collapse of AOL Time Warner, is a primer in corporate bad behavior and
greed with financial disasterâ€"for someâ€"as the result. The lessons that
emerge from the book, while not based on in-depth survey research, are
nonetheless valuable as a study in contrasts between the old and new
paradigms in American business. Both companies had been successful in its
own field, Time Warner in entertainment and AOL in the new, accessible
technologies. Time Warner's success had stood the test of time; AOL's
hadn't, but its success over a short period was extreme. The agreement to
merge the two companies was kept secret; the obvious question is why: who
was embarrassed' And why' These are questions that might profitably be
answered by a researcher with after-the-fact access to people involved and
documents pertinent to the merger. But even shortly after the collapse of
the merged company, a single researcher concluded that the mergerâ€"and the
resulting collapseâ€"was attributable to the slipshod way the attorneys for
both companies investigated the business facts and cultures of the other
company. Klein did a lot of anecdotal research, arriving at the conclusion
that it is counterproductive, in business, to act as merger maven David
Colburn did by "jetting to topless bars in San Francisco for ostensible
team-building exercises and snorting cocaine in the open during a post-
football-game traffic jam." (Young, 2003) The lessons in this book must be
gleaned from the anecdotes, but they are instructive.
Appraisal
In the current business climate, this was a b...