Clarence Saunders founded the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain and is the central figure in “The Last Great Corner.” A self-made inventor from Tennessee, Saunders revolutionized the grocery business by introducing the self-service supermarket, but Brooks focuses primarily on his dramatic 1923 battle with Wall Street investors. When a group of New York speculators sold his company’s stock short in anticipation of a price decline, Saunders responded by purchasing large quantities of shares in an attempt to force the short sellers to buy them back at much higher prices.

Brooks uses Saunders’s story to examine the relationship between entrepreneurial ambition and the increasingly institutionalized nature of American finance. His attempt to corner the market initially succeeded, pushing the short sellers into an increasingly precarious position. The NYSE subsequently suspended trading and extended the settlement period, decisions that weakened Saunders’s position and became the subject of considerable controversy. Although Saunders eventually lost control of his company and entered bankruptcy, Brooks doesn’t portray the outcome as the result of a single mistake. Instead, he traces it to Saunders’s willingness to assume extraordinary financial risks, his dependence on borrowed money, and the Exchange’s intervention, all of which reflect the growing influence of financial institutions over individual entrepreneurs. Saunders’s experience shows Brooks’s reluctance to reduce major business events to simple moral lessons or single causes, even when one personality dominates the narrative.

Ralph J. Cordiner was the chairman of GE during the 1950s price-fixing scandal detailed in “The Impacted Philosophers.” His role highlights the difficulties of accountability within a large corporate hierarchy. Cordiner was a vocal champion of free-market principles and a strong advocate of GE’s anti-collusion policy, Directive 20.5, which he repeatedly instructed employees to follow.

Despite these directives, dozens of GE managers engaged in a systematic, illegal conspiracy to rig bids and fix prices with competitors. When the scheme was exposed, Cordiner maintained that he had been unaware of the unlawful activities until after they had taken place. Brooks examines the gap between GE’s formal commitment to competition and testimony suggesting that some managers received conflicting signals about the company’s expectations. Brooks shows how GE’s layered management structure made responsibility increasingly difficult to trace as decisions passed through multiple levels of authority. He doesn’t conclude whether senior executives knowingly encouraged illegal conduct or whether their instructions became distorted as they moved through the organization. Instead, he demonstrates how formal policies against collusion could coexist with informal practices that left responsibility for the conspiracy difficult to assign.

David E. Lilienthal is the main figure in “A Second Sort of Life,” which examines the transition from public service to private enterprise through one of the New Deal’s most prominent administrators. As the former head of the TVA and the Atomic Energy Commission, Lilienthal became closely associated with the New Deal and was viewed by many on Wall Street as a symbol of government intervention in the economy.

Brooks chronicles Lilienthal’s post-government career, during which he worked with business leaders associated with Lazard Frères, helped manage companies backed by private investment, and later co-founded D&R. His success in private enterprise challenged the widespread assumption that experience in government administration was incompatible with business leadership. Brooks shows that Lilienthal carried many of the managerial principles that shaped his public career into private business, applying them to industrial development, investment, and international projects. Rather than presenting public service and private enterprise as opposing spheres, the essay argues that the skills of administration, planning, and organizational leadership could be applied in both, even as Lilienthal’s changing career challenged prevailing political assumptions about the relationship between government and business.

Richard Krafve was the Ford Motor Company executive who, as head of the Special Products Division, led the development of the Edsel. His experience highlights the difficulties of managing a major product launch within a large corporate organization. Krafve oversaw a multi-year program supported by extensive market research and an investment of approximately a quarter of a billion dollars, although many important decisions about the car’s design and marketing ultimately extended beyond the research itself.

In “The Fate of the Edsel,” Brooks examines Krafve’s experience to show that extensive planning couldn’t eliminate the uncertainties of product development and consumer demand. The Edsel’s failure resulted from a combination of changing economic conditions, shifts in consumer preferences, production and quality problems, and internal corporate decisions rather than a single mistake or flawed strategy. Brooks presents Krafve as an experienced executive working within a decision-making process that couldn’t fully anticipate or control how the market would respond. The essay argues that the Edsel’s failure can’t be explained by market research, economic conditions, or management decisions alone. Instead, Brooks shows how these factors interacted throughout the project’s development, making the outcome far more complex than the popular image of the Edsel as a simple corporate failure.

Joseph C. Wilson led Xerox through the period in which the company evolved from a small manufacturer of photographic paper into one of the most successful technology businesses in the US. In Business Adventures, his importance lies less in the invention of xerography than in his willingness to invest in its commercial development despite years of uncertainty about its profitability. Wilson recognized the potential of Chester Carlson’s copying process at a time when many larger companies remained unconvinced that it could become a viable business. By supporting its long and expensive development, he helped establish Xerox as the dominant force in a new industry.

The essay “Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox” follows the company after that commercial success had already been achieved, shifting attention from technological innovation to the consequences of rapid corporate growth. Wilson worried that expansion would make the company increasingly bureaucratic and weaken the informal culture that had characterized its earlier years. He also argued that profitable corporations carried obligations beyond generating returns for shareholders, particularly through philanthropy, employee welfare, and broader social engagement. Brooks doesn’t simply accept these claims. Instead, he compares Wilson’s public statements with Xerox’s practices, asking whether the company’s actions consistently reflected the values its leadership promoted. The resulting portrait is neither celebratory nor cynical. Wilson emerges as an executive attempting to preserve a particular vision of corporate responsibility while leading a business whose remarkable growth continually tested those ideals. The essay demonstrates Brooks’s recurring interest in the distance that can emerge between a company’s stated principles and the practical demands of managing a rapidly expanding corporation.