Excerpt: Too Big to Fail and ZOMBIESWhat could be a bigger seller than Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book about the financial crisis? Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book about the financial crisis with ZOMBIES.
Wall Street’s Golden Idols All Have Feet of ClayFINANCE
• The struggle to find a successor at Merrill and Citi demonstrates another big flaw in the current culture of Wall Street: Do-or-die standards, and growing demands on public executives, have left firms with no succession plan and few capable of stepping in to take over. Both firms have been forced to turn outside for help: Laurence Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, has been approached about O’Neal’s old job, while Robert Willumstad and John Thain are in the lead to take Prince’s place. [WSJ]
• Why did Chuck Prince and Stan O’Neal fail? They took Gordon Gecko’s favorite maxim—”I create nothing, I own”—a little too seriously, and forgot the other part of banking is to sell, sell, sell. [NYT]
• Andrew Ross Sorkin dons his Miss Manners cap to explain the rules of corporate courting—and why Stan O’Neal’s worrywart parents, the Merrill Lynch board, were only looking for an excuse when they grounded him for asking Wachovia to “merge.” [NYT]
company town
Rupert Murdoch Wins the PartyMEDIA
• News Corp. surpassed Time Warner to become the largest media company on the planet, and Murdoch held off a shareholder revolt in order to keep his family tyranny in place. [Hollywood Reporter, USAT]
• ESPN poached marquee columnist Rick Reilly from Sports Illustrated after 22 years with the mag. Dan Patrick, who SI just poached from ESPN, will take Reilly’s place at the back of the book. [NYT, Deadspin]
• Stephen Colbert took his campaign to the Tim Russert show: “This is not a dream, you are not going to wake up from this. I am far realer than Sam Brownback.” [NYT]
