Gates’ favourite business book is surprise summertime hit

Summertime reading lists are typically heavy on page-turning novels – not a collection of business articles, published as a book in 1969, and long out of print until a few weeks ago.

But Business Adventures, by John Brooks, a staff writer at The New Yorker who died in 1993, and originally published by Weybright and Talley, which is no longer around, has suddenly become a Lazarus-like publishing hit.

Currently Business Adventures is number three on the Amazon list of top-selling books. It is number one on Amazon's "Hot New Releases" list, and on its "Most Wished For" list.

The reason is an emphatic endorsement from Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and philanthropist, whose star power still burns bright in business circles. For years, Gates has recommended books including a summertime collection on his website, Gates Notes, with selections weighted toward science and policy subjects.

But this summer, Gates declared that Business Adventures was his favourite business book, and that he has read it repeatedly since 1991, when his friend Warren E Buffett gave him a copy.

And Gates and his personal office decided to do more, undertaking a campaign to bring the book back to life and introduce it to a whole new audience.

Gates's emissaries got in touch with the Brooks family and a publisher, Open Road Media, which brought Business Adventures out as an e-book on July 8th (a paperback edition is scheduled for August).

The Gates team, in doing a little research, found a "whole army of Brooks disciples", says Andy Cook, a general manager in Gates's personal office.

A few of them make appearances in a short video posted on the Gates website including Adam Gopnik, a writer at The New Yorker, and two New York Times journalists, James B Stewart and Diana B Henriques.

Media blitz

The video clip accompanies a lengthy appreciation of

Business Adventures

written by Gates.

The piece on Gates Notes also offers a link to download a free chapter, "Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox." ("The headline alone," Gates writes, "belongs in the Journalism Hall of Fame.")

Sales of the book began to take off with the weekend media blitz, and the momentum has continued, says Michael Palgon, senior vice president for business development at Open Road. The Brooks book was a good fit for the publisher, founded in 2009, with its focus on reviving worthy classics.

Open Road had already been in contact with the literary agent representing the Brooks estate, but about two other Brooks books, The Go-Go Years, his best seller until now, and Once in Golconda, Palgon says. Word that Bill Gates was about to declare Business Adventures his favourite business book made it the priority.

The case Gates makes for Business Adventures is the value of understanding the patterns of history. Brooks chronicled the triumphs and travails in the 1950s and 1960s of Xerox, General Electric, Ford and other companies. His business articles were rich in social history, literary and artistic references, and wit.

In the video interview, Gates called the Brooks articles “particularly fun and interesting and instructive”. They are stories with lessons. “The rules of running a great business, of value creation,” Gates says, “are unchanged.”

In one article, after a several thousand words of detailed description of Ford’s Edsel, Brooks delivered his verdict on the costly dud, in signature John Brooks style. “And yet, in a way, the Edsel wasn’t so bad,” he wrote. “It embodied much of the spirit of the time – or at least the time when it was designed, early in 1955. It was clumsy, powerful, dowdy, gauche, well-meaning . . . ”

Time capsules

Despite being the go-between, Gates and his office have no financial stake in the success of the rediscovered book. Still, the strong sales, Cook says, are “a nice side benefit, an upside in celebration of his work”.

To sample more John Brooks, The New Yorker has generously pulled three Brooks classics from its archives and posted them on its website. His subjects are the playfully named retailer Piggly Wiggly, Ford's misadventure with the Edsel, and the high-handed Spanish financier Juan March.

The Brooks pieces are terrific, but so are the cartoons and advertisements, enjoyed as delightful time capsules. – (New York Times)