The Big Time: The Harvard Business School's Most Successful Class and How It Shaped America

Harvard graduate students who received their M.B.A.s in 1949 have been dubbed ""the class the dollars fell on.'' These businesspeople had grown up with Depression and war and went on to achieve an unprecedented degree of success and influence. One in five became millionaires; half became top executives of firms like Johnson & Johnson, Xerox, Bloomingdale's and Capital Cities. In fast-paced, slick, often cynical style, Shames traces the students' careers and discusses how they shaped and were shaped by America's prosperity in the 1950s and '60s. It is an absorbing story, by turns stirring and comic, but one that grows somber as the author examines such facets of business ethics as ``strategic misrepresentation'' and the switch from production know-know to financial manipulation (mergers, buyouts, etc.), while producers in other countries outstripped American inventiveness. First serial to Playboy and Esquire. (April 16)