Chemical Education Today
Book & Media Reviews
edited by
Jeffrey Kovac University of Tennessee Knoxville, TN 37996-1600
Everybody Wins! 2nd Edition by Gordon Cain Chemical Heritage Foundation: Philadelphia, PA, 2001. 353 pp. Paper: ISBN 0-941901-28-9. $14.95. Cloth: ISBN 0-941901-14-9. $24.95. reviewed by Michael Caswell
Everybody Wins! is as much a testament to personal success in a free-enterprise society as it is to the accomplishments of Gordon Cain. Like some others, Cain came from a less than privileged background to make important business contributions. Cain’s contributions are enormous. Cain details his early years in Louisiana where he enjoyed the benefits of a family that valued higher education and expected hard work. Another important value was his lifelong abiding interest in results rather than process. These values served Cain well throughout his life. The details of his early years are an excellent description of life in the early part of the 20th century. While Cain’s career gave him an entree into leveraged buy-outs (LBO), his career moves provide every new college graduate with a guide to career planning. His college degree gave him an opportunity for a job. Once in a job, his success came as a consequence of his knowledge, hard work, and results orientation. Cain moved through six corporations (one twice). Each move originated from a personal contact and
was based on Cain’s ability to get results. One important omission was insight into Cain’s decision-making process during his employment moves or during his business dealings. I would have enjoyed understanding his thinking. Managing his first LBO for Conoco, Cain gained confidence and important contacts for the second phase of his career: buying, restructuring, and selling corporations. He offers more details on the buying and selling than on the restructuring. In “Changing Management” (Chapter 12), Cain describes restructuring as reducing management work force to a “lean, entrepreneurial organization” while improving management. His view that “busy people have no time to build empires or interdepartmental squabbling” seems chillingly similar to the reason why he declined an employment opportunity from Armand Hammer (p 139). Unlike Mr. Hammer, Cain chose to spread the wealth of his achievements to lower-level management. Although salary is not a motivational tool for improved performance, Cain discovered that wealth was. His incorporation of employee stock ownership plans following a leveraged buy-out greatly enhanced performance standards. This is his greatest legacy to free enterprise business. Everybody Wins! should be on the shelf of every business school library and every chemistry library. The book makes enjoyable and rewarding reading by mixing technology and the business of technology. Michael Caswell is Director of Scientific Affairs, C. B. Fleet Company, Inc., Lynchburg, VA 24506;
[email protected].
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 79 No. 5 May 2002 • Journal of Chemical Education
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