| On Monday evening, my colleagues and I got the chance to celebrate our partner, Bill Cohan, upon the publication of his new and exquisite book, Power Failure, an extraordinary retelling of the rise and fall of General Electric. Puck’s headquarters in Chelsea doubles as a great party office. Our windows stretch nearly to the ceiling, and the poured concrete floors provide an understated elegance that harkens back to the neighborhood’s industrial roots. Starting at 4 p.m., we began moving out the furniture and turning our main conference room into an ersatz bar. We began stocking tables with hardcover copies of the book, and even anointed some outsize illustrations of Bill’s author photos upon our windows. What’s the point of a party if you can’t be a little kitsch?
Bill arrived early, the man of the hour, just as executive editor Ben Landy and his deputy, Danny Karel, were putting the finishing touches on Tara Palmeri’s fantastic piece of reportage, Is There Life After Pelosi?, which broke new ground on the Speaker’s legacy and succession planning. (Later this week, Tara would scoop the news of Pelosi’s fascinating move to the backbench.) As Bill arrived in the elevator banks to a life-sized cardboard cut out of former GE C.E.O. Jack Welch, he could hear Tara on speakerphone, working through the final edit. Bill laughed a hearty laugh, fully cognizant of the constant last-minute high-stakes decisions that go into great journalism, the plot that only the real insiders know.
My partners are busy folks, and not all of them could make it out to enjoy the evening. But some did travel far and wide: Dylan Byers and Peter Hamby happened to be in on reporting trips from L.A. Julia Ioffe, Eriq Gardner, and Tina Nguyen were up from D.C. Tara headed over after closing out her piece, too. Teddy Schleifer had scheduled some local business to coincide. They mingled among luminaries from politics, finance, and media. Bill’s wife, the publishing powerhouse Deb Futter, roamed with the proud smile of an elated book spouse.
I’d spent much of my quiet time during the previous week devouring Power Failure, which does an extraordinary job intertwining the various leitmotifs that made GE the biggest company in the world at the 20th century fin de siècle, and saw it delisted less than two decades later: Welch’s ego; various personality feuds; complex and unimaginable changes in consumer behavior, shifts in the insurance business, and the financial markets. And then there were pure black swan events. A narrative chill took over GE, which made the engines of the planes that flew into the World Trade Center, which the company also happened to re-insure. (Graydon Carter, the legendary former editor of Vanity Fair and proprietor of Air Mail, recalled during the evening that he was due to host a book party for Welch on September 12, 2001. Obviously, it never happened but Jack’s book did go on to become a big bestseller.)
Eventually, a succession drama that featured some of the most accomplished executives in business, including future Fortune 500 C.E.O.s, would take its inexorable toll on GE. Welch’s successor would have to undo some of his vaunted financial engineering after the collapse of 2008. And Welch, who had staked his reputation on the success of growing earnings every quarter, was hardly mute about his dissatisfaction. As I discussed on The Powers That Be with Peter, the rise and fall of GE is an important lesson that even our most prolific and impactful companies aren’t guaranteed to last forever. Bill ends his book in the present, with GE’s vivisection into three separate corporate entities. As I finished Power Failure, I felt its demise was inevitable and yet it didn’t have to be.
Earlier this week, we proudly published The Corporate Divorce of the Century, an adaptation from Bill’s book, focusing on a messy and underappreciated marital subplot that may have subverted Jack’s grand vision. After you give it a read, I wholeheartedly suggest toggling over to Amazon or the independent bookseller of your choice (I prefer Three Lives in the village or Square Books, in Oxford, Mississippi) and purchasing Power Failure. I guarantee you hours of stimulating and rapt entertainment, a helpful antidote as your relatives fight next week.
Have a great week, and happy Thanksgiving,
Jon |
