Upending Beliefs
When ILR Press Editorial Director Frances Benson asked the marketing department to email Malcolm Gladwell proofs of a manuscript she was editing, she hoped he might reply with a blurb for the back cover.
Benson was pleasantly surprised when the author of bestsellers such as The Tipping Point and Outliers used the book, instead, as the basis for a January cover story in The New Yorker.
From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero is one of 15 books published in 2009 by the ILR Press (http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_listsearch.taf?imprint=An%20ILR%20Press%20Book) and its first translation project.
Book authors Michel Villette, a sociologist, and Catherine Vuillermot, a business historian, question the popularly-held successful-entrepreneur-as-visionary concept.
In examining the careers of 32 top global executives, they found that the business world's most successful entrepreneurs aren't big risk takers. They are, in fact, very good at minimizing risk.
What's more, the authors say, success is what makes innovation possible, not the other way around.
John Van Maanen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School, said in a review that Predators flips "conventional and scholarly wisdom as to how fortunes are made, kept, and justified on its head."
Gladwell, in his story, asks "Would we so revere risk taking if we realized that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are actually doing no such thing?"
Predators was recommended to Benson by several people at the University of Pennsylvania, where Villette was a visiting scholar in 2006.
"Translations are generally tricky and time consuming, and this was no exception," Benson said. "But the book is fascinating and well worth the trouble."
"It offers a critical perspective that is extremely relevant as many of us have been shocked to the core by the revelation of recent business practices," she said.
The book has been successful in France, where it was originally published in 2005, and a Chinese translation is expected this year, Benson said.
In the forward of the ILR-published Predators, John R. Kimberly, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, writes that the authors "use the lens of social science as a vehicle for unpacking the roots of extraordinary success in business, for analyzing how success was achieved … how their wealth was built, and the common threads that characterize the roots of success across geographies, across industries and across time."
In an era marked with business scandals – Bernie Madoff being "the ultimate predator" – the books helps readers weigh good and bad, then arrive at their own conclusions, Kimberly writes.
"How do we balance predation and social welfare, business initiative that can result in economic growth and unbridled exploitation of "opportunity" in service of personal gain or the need for innovation with the need for stability?"
"Villette and Vuillermot do not have answers, but they frame the questions, both explicitly and implicitly, in a most interesting and provocative way. The rest they leave to us."
ILR Press publishes books in a range of subjects, from the culture and politics of health care work to problems of globalization to labor poster art. Titles published in 2009 can be seen here: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/news/upload/ILR-Press-Catalog_forweb.pdf.