4TH AND GOAL One Man’s Quest to Recapture His Dream
Burke, Monte Grand Central Publishing (288 pp.) $26.99 | Sep. 18, 2012 978-1-4555-1404-5
The story of a successful CEO who left his position to pursue a longdeferred dream of becoming a college football coach. In 1983, Joe Moglia was the defensive coordinator for Dartmouth’s football team. He was also a husband and a father of four, and he was faced with a decision: continue slowly climbing the college coaching ladder, not making enough money to support his family, or turn his back on that dream and pursue something more lucrative. A great deal of hard work and chutzpah later, he had secured a comfortable position with Merrill, which he left to take over foundering TD Ameritrade. Moglia turned the company around, making it one of the most stable and respected brokerages in the country. After eight years, and at age 60, he left to pursue coaching. Breaking into college-level coaching at this age proved to be a different challenge, which left him back where he’d started, clawing his way through the ranks of coaching. Burke (Sowbelly: The Obsessive Quest for the World-Record Largemouth Bass, 2006, etc.) does Moglia’s story justice, showing how his strengths in finance helped lift his coaching of a small UFL franchise into financial stability. A winning record for the team, almost essential for Moglia to achieve his college coaching dream, was another matter. The team struggled, and as the focus shifted from a winning record to saving face, Moglia’s perspective on his dream also shifted. Burke’s approach is unique among financial, business and sports books, as it’s not crucial to understand much about football or money to enjoy the book. A winning story for fans of Friday Night Lights and believers in the American dream.
DEFENDING YOUR BRAND How Smart Companies Use Defensive Strategy to Deal with Competitive Attacks
Calkins, Tim Palgrave Macmillan (304 pp.) $30.00 | Oct. 16, 2012 978-0-230-34034-3
A handbook on the application of defensive strategies to business operations. Calkins (Marketing/Northwestern Univ.; Breakthrough Marketing Plans, 2008, etc.) thinks there is nothing more important for a profitable business than protecting it. This may seem counterintuitive to those who think strategies aimed at securing growth might be the best approach. Against them, the author insists that to succeed, business leaders need accurate 1882
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1 september 2012
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nonfiction
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information about competitors, gaps in the market and their own vulnerabilities. He stresses a financial approach, insisting companies first understand their own finances and then figure out how to estimate the financial positions of their competitors. He shows how a new entrant with a product that takes a small part of an established company’s market share can have a profound effect on the balance sheet over time. The best defense, he writes, is to keep competitors from getting new products off the ground at all. Some of the tactics he discusses—drawn from his knowledge of business practice—may strike some readers as somewhat unethical, and there is no camouflaging the reality that customers are the ones who pay for this additional overhead. No matter who wins the war for market share, customers lose from the lack of transparency and deception over purposes. The book concludes with “A Cautionary Word About Competition Law” written by the author’s brother, which indicates where the lines of criminality are drawn. An eye-opening book, sometimes shocking in its straightforwardness.
WHAT THE (BLEEP) JUST HAPPENED? The Happy Warrior’s Guide to the Great American Comeback
Crowley, Monica Broadside Books/HarperCollins (400 pp.) $27.99 | Jun. 19, 2012 978-0-06-213115-7
Political smut, slander, fiction, paranoia and conspiracy theories from the last four years are repackaged into this corrosive brew by Fox News contributor and former Nixon foreign policy assistant Crowley (Nixon in Winter: His Final Revelations about Diplomacy, Watergate and Life Out of the Arena, 1998, etc.). Obama’s “unaccountable ‘czars’…could operate with impunity,” writes the author, “do all of [his] dirty work, and, at the end of a typical workday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel would hand each of them a sweaty wad of untraceable bills.” Throughout the book, this kind of vitriol corrodes any basis for rational discussion. Those who might laugh probably won’t check the author’s accounting of the stimulus program agreed upon by Congress and the executive branch in 2009, which included “$50 to convince Barbara Mikulski to jump off the ferryboat,” and “$500 billion to paint Bill Clinton’s face on the side of the pleasure boat.” What might they think of those who get free Brazilian waxes and rides on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Jet Ski thanks to the American taxpayer? As the book progresses, Crowley continues to blend hate- and anger-driven fiction in a strange never-never land of nonsense, in which no government social program, the author writes, “is about their superficial purpose.” As expected, in this “war for the nation’s future,” Crowley wants to “discard the impulse toward social and economic justice” through the gutting of entitlement programs. If we don’t act now, she writes, “we’ll all speak Arabic,
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