Catching Lightning in a Bottle
If a racy pot-boiler is what interests you, this book will do full justice. Author Winthrop H. Smith Jr. spent 28 years at Merrill Lynch, the company his father co-founded, which brings in a unique perspective to the story of a company that democratised the stock market and eventually fell from its lofty perch.
The book races to narrate how in just a few decades Merrill Lynch rose from its relatively low status of insignificant retail brokerage house to become a full-service international financial giant and fearsome competitor of Wall Street. Smith attributes ML’s unique success to a strong corporate culture and the principled leadership introduced by the company's founders.
Where the book actually sets the pace is when Smith writes about what resulted in the company’s collapse. He provides a convincing argument that a detached Board of Directors permitted their CEO and his cronies to hijack this proud institution, destroy the corporate culture and abandon all measures of financial prudence in the interests of short term personal gain and drove the company into a de facto bankruptcy.
At places emotion overrides the author which is why he details less of the corruption within ML in the 1990s. It is in this vein that Smith leads you into believing that the downhill of Merrill Lynch started in 2001 when Stanley O’Neal began his reign as the firm’s first and only leader without principles. This change in culture was why he left the firm that same year. This book becomes the most comprehensive work on Merrill Lynch.