Books

Bruce Piasecki’s collected Bibliographies, Great Contemporaries
(Forthcoming 2024)

By Bruce Piasecki

INTRODUCTION

By Paul Grondahl 

Bruce Piasecki has studied the genus Chief Executive Officer the way that acclaimed Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov studied butterflies. It was Nabokov, a world-renowned lepidopterist best remembered as a novelist and the author of Lolita, who discovered and named the Karner blue butterfly species in 1944. It is an endangered species found in my backyard, the Pine Bush Preserve on the outskirts of Albany. It got its name because Nabokov found it in the pine barrens in the hamlet of Karner between Albany and Schenectady, through which Karner Road runs today.

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I offer this Nabokovian detour because it seems apropos of the way Bruce Piasecki’s fertile mind works. When it comes to CEOs, Piasecki has studied their habitats and traits and characteristics with passionate devotion and granular detail. Much the same way that the acclaimed novelist Nabokov devoted himself to the study of butterflies, organized the butterfly collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and became an internationally renowned lepidopterist, Piasecki has turned his career as a business consultant into a laser-focused observer of the CEO in situ, as it were, those occupying the original landscape of the C-suite.

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Over the course of four decades, Piasecki, founder of the AHC Group, has worked as a management consultant with roughly 200 CEOs and 150 corporations – including several Fortune 500 companies. To say he knows what makes CEOs tick is an understatement. Piasecki’s research has been so intentional and longitudinal that he may know more about the zeitgeist of CEO culture than the CEOs themselves.

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In his penetrating new study, Great Contemporaries, Piasecki compresses forty years of close study of CEOs into a highly readable narrative that focuses on seven corporate leaders who span a wide range of industries, from capital investment to women’s fashion. What Piasecki offers in these pages are sharply observed, highly detailed, and remarkably insightful profiles that amount to small-scale biographies. They are right-sized sketches for today’s hyper-busy, multi-tasking, over-subscribed business person looking to climb the corporate ladder, perhaps, or just a general reader who does not wish to spend an entire summer slogging through an 800-page tome on a titan of industry.

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Piasecki’s modus operandi, as well as the title of his collection, is an homage to that extraordinary world leader and esteemed man of letters, Winston Churchill, who wrote a collection of twenty-five short biographical essays about notable people that he titled Great Contemporaries.  Churchill’s much-praised collection was originally published in 1937 with twenty-one essays, and four were added in a subsequent edition. Churchill profiled literary luminaries such as George Bernard Shaw, archaeologist T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), and political figures Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. Churchill called his book “essays on Great Men of our age.” He wrote, “Taken together they should present not only the actors but the scene. In their sequence they may perhaps be the stepping-stones of historical narrative.”

Taking his cue from Churchill, Piasecki has succeeded in one of the most challenging assignments facing a non-fiction writer: writing well by writing short.

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It is far easier, in my experience, to write a 150,000-word political biography, as I have done, compared to the compression and rigorous selection required for a compelling 1,500-word magazine profile of a political figure. I speak from forty years’ experience as a journalist, non-fiction author and, since 2017, as the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.

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Since Pulitzer Prize-winning Albany author William Kennedy, my mentor, founded the Writers Institute in 1983 with seed money from his MacArthur “genius grant,” we have hosted more than 2,500 of the world’s greatest writers in all genres, including fourteen recipients of the Nobel Prize and more than 200 winners of a Pulitzer Prize or National Book Award. We are recognized as one of the pre-eminent literary presenting organizations in the nation.

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In terms of biographers, we have welcomed some of the finest practitioners of the craft, including Robert Caro, author of The Power Broker, an exhaustive biography of Robert Moses that spans 1,344 ages and is widely considered to be one of the greatest contemporary biographies in American letters. Other highly acclaimed biographers that we have welcomed under the Writers Institute banner include Doris Kearns Goodwin (Team of Rivals), David McCullough (Truman), and Ron Chernow (Hamilton).

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What I have learned from meeting each of those titans of biography, along with many others who practice the biographer’s art at a high level, is that it requires an immersion and commitment of uncommon proportions. McCullough toiled for more than a decade to bring Harry Truman to life on the page, including countless hours of research with primary documents in the Truman Library archives, interviewing more than 125 then-living Truman contemporaries and spending an entire day chronicling the trees in Minor Park in Kansas City so he could describe what Truman’s forebears saw when they relocated from Kentucky to Missouri in the frontier days.

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That daylong first-person research foray yielded this sentence in the opening chapter of McCullough’s bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman: “They counted hickory, ash, elm, sycamore, willow, poplar, cottonwood, and oak in three or four varieties. “Walnut, the most prized, was the most abundant. Entire barns and houses were to be built of walnut.”

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I can remember having drinks with Kennedy and McCullough (who died in 2022 at 89) after a Writers Institute talk and the writer telling me that he chose his biography subjects like Truman because he is drawn to people who were underestimated or ridiculed, and who overcame obstacles and unlucky breaks. An editor suggested he write a Picasso biography, which he abandoned after just a few months.

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“I decided this fellow and I shouldn’t be roommates,” McCullough told me. “He was an immediate success and that’s not very interesting. I’ve always stuck to an old writers’s adage: ‘Keep your hero in trouble.’ ”

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I can remember hanging out with Doris Kearns Goodwin, who talked about her book Team of Rivals, essentially a multi-cast biography of President Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet, as “my guys.” 

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“I loved learning everything I could about my guys,” she told me. “If you’re going to write a biography and end up spending several years with your subject, you don’t have to love them, but you at least have to find them compelling. Or your readers won’t find your biography interesting.”

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What Piasecki offers in his version of Great Contemporaries is a smorgasbord of varied delights, each chapter a self-contained portrait of a compelling CEO. There is John Streur, president and CEO for Calvert Research and Management, which specializes in responsible and sustainable investing across global capital markets. Piasecki writes:  “John Streur is gregarious and outgoing. You get the impression in meeting John that despite his powerful voice and standing in the industry, he still needs to be heard. He wants to be heard. In the first dozen times you meet John, one thing is clear: his life enables money, as opposed to money enabling his life. That is what stands out as remarkable.”

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Piasecki describes what he describes as “the quiet genius” of fashion designer Eileen Fisher, who has created a timeless and elegant luxury women’s fashion brand that focuses on eco-friendly fabrics and is committed to sustainable clothing. He notes “an atmosphere of contemplative privacy around her” and he highlights a question she asks often: “What is enough?” Piasecki adds, “And she means it. Her legends rests on opposing aspirations, a set of beliefs far more uncommon and complex...What motivates Eileen and her talented staff is best thought of as a creative enterprise, first and foremost.”

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There is much to learn here in Piasecki’s illuminating essays on Linda Coady, Jack Robinson, Steve Percy, Frank Loy, and William Novelli.