From John Stuart Mill to Bill Gates,
the waning of the cultured capitalist
"Company Man: The Rise and Fall of Corporate Life." By Anthony Sampson (Random House)
Illustration by Richard Downs
You know the question is chiefly rhetorical even as you put it to your companions, a brainy, svelte, well-traveled pair who love good food and wine. "But if you've heard that Cormac McCarthy and V.S. Naipaul are magnificent writers," you say, "why haven't you read any of their books?"
Both halves of this couple -- presently pressing their Stanford M.B.A. degrees into service at famous California computer companies -- are superior specimens of the managerial subspecies. They answer the question and your look of rank incredulity with a smile of mixed affection and condescension. It is the smile of people whose choices are perfectly synchronized with the tastes and conventions of their day.
"I don't read any book I can't finish on a flight between the coasts," she says. "And, hey, no one else does!"
"So we read John Grisham. And Maeve Binchy and Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton," he adds. "Or if we hack out time for anything longer, the latest Tom Peters and Peter Drucker books."
I am sorry to hear our best writers being marginalized as high culture of no interest or use to people manning the forges of capitalism. But to me, this couple's point of view has had a terrible familiarity at least since the late 1970s and 1980s, when I wrote about business for The Economist and Business Week. Business people I met who read modern literature -- or any literary fiction at all -- were almost always older Europeans with anachronistic well-rounded educations, working for large companies moving slowly enough to let me pick their employees' brains over leisurely, three-course lunches. Younger European managers closer to my own age imitated America's best and brightest, who were super-specialists, and preferred to meet for breakfast. For them, the world of business management and the world of literature -- in fact, of any intellectual or aesthetic pursuit divorced from the profit motive -- were mutually alien.
Next page: The glory days of literary capitalism
