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Maven Takes On Business Books

Marek Fuchs

How do you look at books through investors' eyes? Well, welcome to a new feature: The Business Press Maven on Books.

Whether an investment advice book, a business leader's biography, a history tome on a particular Wall Street era or even a financial thriller, a book can either add to or detract from an investor's basic understanding of high finance.

At their best, business books can lay the foundation for better investment performance on your part. At their worst, business books can give you all the direction of a salad spinner and set you on a road you don't want to go down.

That's why The Business Press Maven, with a nod and a wink toward Siskel and Ebert, has created a new rating system, specifically for business books. The Business Press Maven will slap a "Help" label on books containing premises or threads of thought that -- you guessed it -- help investors. A "Hindrance" label goes on books that can potentially hurt or mislead investors.

What if a book does neither? Well, if a book can't manage to do anything for busy investors, then guess what? It's a Hindrance.

A quick housekeeping note: Authors, readers and even those famously lazy flacks in book publishing, feel free to drop me notes, letting me know of upcoming books. I'll be focusing like a laser at whether the words contained within are a Help or Hindrance to investors. If you disagree with my ruling, send me a reasoned rebuttal. I'll give voice to some of the good ones.

A Weekend with Warren Buffett: And Other Shareholder Meeting Adventures by Randy Cepuch (Thunder's Mouth Press, an imprint of Avalon) gets a Help seal slapped on its front cover.

Cepuch, a corporate copywriter, set out across America to attend annual meetings. Think of him as the William Least Heat-Moon of the shareholder set. (Blue Highways was certainly more quirky than A Weekend With Warren Buffett, but the former never made me one thin dime.)

While basic in many respects, Cepuch's book can serve investors in one of two ways. For beginners, it explains what annual meetings are, how they vary and what insights you can glean from them if you look around the edges. For the more experienced, the book can serve as a reminder that -- despite all the formalities and ways the PR folks have worn these meetings smooth of natural interplay between management and the public -- there is still a lot to see, hear and sense.

To be sure, you have to wade through a fair number of stale observations, from Cepuch's contention that Buffett is the business world's equivalent of Captain Kangaroo (less stale than silly) to this less-than-bracing insight about the Starbucks (SBUX Quote) gathering: "Oddly, no food or beverages are allowed in the auditorium."

Cepuch can also be cloying, such as when he finds himself an hour outside Fargo at the annual meeting of Otter Tail (OTTR Quote), a prairie utility, and remarks: "I've long had a fondness for this part of the world and an admiration for the people who live here." I hope the good folks of Fergus Falls, Minn., poked him in the eye for being condescending.

But despite his occasional glaring faults, Cepuch makes clear what every investor should know: Shareholder meetings are their own little ecosystems -- in that sense, very representative of their companies and not something you can miss, despite the temptation to think of these meetings as boilerplate. As the author points out, there's always something to know and notice: From how proposals get on meeting agendas to how some CEOs, like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, react with "disdain," "staring frigidly" at shareholders who introduce proposals.

Frigid? Quick, someone get that man a hot beverage.

At Otter Tail, Cepuch rightly notices that for a local company not known widely, shareholder meetings are filled with almost all employees, retirees and customers. What better way to get a bead on who the company is and how it treats people than to absorb the vibe there?

Far from Otter Tail -- at Google (GOOG Quote), in fact -- Cepuch rightly praises CEO Eric Schmidt for going light on the "double talk" and "tech lingo." At every annual meeting, investors are well-served to be on the lookout for too much jargon, which obscures thought and can be indicative of a lazy mind, or worse.

What better time to curl up with a Chrysler (DCX Quote)-related book than the past few days, with the stock so much in the news? And Lee Iacocca has, of course, a history of success with books.

But Where Have All the Leaders Gone? (Scribner), a 263-page lament that runs about 262 pages too long, earns the Business Press Maven's Hindrance label. Iacocca starts off with some faux populist rhetoric, and things degenerate from there: "Am I the only guy in the country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage?" Trust me, Lee. I read on. I had some outrage by the end.

Iacocca then goes the most common business book route: setting down the nine C's of leadership. That said, I'll give him this for originality (as well as grandiosity): He says he shied away from a tenth to avoid comparisons with Moses.

He then goes on to tell us that "leaders are made, not born." Whether in books about investing or business leadership, this sort of simplified, hackneyed advice is potentially dangerous. The world is not so simple. Setting out into it, guided by advice that makes it appear that way, is a recipe for failure.