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A version of this article appeared in the spring 2022 issue Strategy + Business.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

By Sebastian Malabi, Penguin, 2022

The reputation of Venture Capitalists (VCs) has been tough over the last few years. Misconduct, inequality, and poor governance have kept VC-funded large companies at bay, often identified as an activator of a reckless, fake-it-to-you-make-it culture among startups. In a critical essay New Yorker In November 2020, author Charles Duhig called VCs “increasingly greedy and insane” and accused them of “co-conspirators with hype-artists, handing out millions of dollars to them and encouraging their worst tendencies.” Duhig argued that contemporary VCs were using less prudence than their predecessors. Instead of getting their hands dirty to create promising ideas in effective companies, they are spraying money around as if they are creating “trading-floor bets”.

Economic historian Sebastian Malabi tells the story differently. He believes that the venture capital industry has had a “positive impact on the economy and society” and, more importantly, its innovative farming model has proved so successful that it has helped almost every major US technology company in the last 60 years. It’s the story of the men behind the art – and it’s almost entirely male – that forms the basis of his new book, Power law. Heavyweight and richly detailed, this is a career journey through the chaos of startup culture and an accurate assessment of how the relationship between founders and their financiers has evolved. But where Duhig sees VCs sleeping on wheels, Malabi believes that structural changes have only weakened their influence, and in fact it has sidelined VCs, forcing many companies to lose their way.

Considering that VCs are now struggling to heal their promising people, it is ironic that entrepreneurial capitalism began as a practice of liberation. Malabi traces its origins to the late 1950s, when eight Ph.D. Researchers working for a semiconductor company in California wanted to escape the breathless management style of their indomitable boss. Since the financial industry was still living in the shadow of despair and was extremely risk-averse, they believed that their options were limited to hiring by another firm. Instead, a family connection led them to a young broker, Arthur Rock, who suggested that they start their own company with a bold new structure. The founders will each deposit a conceptual amount of money for equal shares in the firm. Rock will take a slice, and the funds will be provided by an outside investor who had the option to buy all of the company’s stock at a later date for an agreed price.

The new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, was a roaring success. Owning a piece of it means that the “traitorous eight” – as they will be known later – focused as much on talking to potential customers as they did on lab work. Fairchild has been successful because it initially combines science and commerce. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Together with a new partner, Rock sets out to refine his concept. He persuaded 30 rich people to invest in a time-limited, equity-only fund that would, in turn, finance a small number of ambitious companies. Rock’s two choices were so overwhelming that when he closed the fund seven years later, its value increased from US $ 3.4 million to $ 77 million.

The rock’s stratospheric return encouraged other early VCs to focus on similar moon shots. This approach brought them into contact with some unusual characters, including Nolan Bushnell of Atari (“a high-tech Hugh Hefner”), Steve Jobs of Apple, and Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner of Cisco. VCs needed to roll up their sleeves to turn their embryo firms into financial powerhouses. “We’ll stay in it up to our elbows,” said Tom Parkins, the first VC who was “unabashedly delighted” in the role of “promoter and front man.” In practice, this means showing founders how to run a business: who to hire, how to find potential customers, and where to spend their money. To reduce the risk, Perkins and others paid cash in increments, “calibrated to support the company with each cautionary charge until it reaches an agreed milestone.” This type of hand-on activism means that in the 1970s and 1980s, VCs were advisors and mentors as a source of funding.

This era proved to be a high point for VCs. They did not have such an impact on their founders or how their companies developed. Malabi marks the rise of Internet service providers as the moment when power shifted from the financier to the founder. Yahoo and Google have created code instead of hardware, which means they don’t need the same amount of capital to get started. Three decades of growth in the industry will increase the number of venture capital firms, giving founders more options. In 1999, Sergey Brin and Google’s Larry Page met John Doyer, one of the most respected VCs of the era. The presentation they gave was 17 slides long and illustrated with cartoons. Five years later, Mark Zuckerberg wore pajamas to a meeting with one of Doyer’s rivals. The VCO was not discouraged. But even though Rock claimed up to half of the company for his involvement, Doerr and his contemporaries were happy to own the eighth.

The arrival of growth investors has put more pressure on traditional VCs. While Rock and his successors were regularly involved in marketing a product long before, others finally realized that there were many more opportunities down the line and provided large amounts of capital to established companies that they believed were likely to grow many times over. These investors, who included Yuri Milner and Masayoshi Son, were irresistible to the ambitious technology companies. Unlike the VCs, who demanded equity in exchange for funds, Milner and son did not even want to sit on the board. Malabi argues that the injection of huge capital by growth investors (and VCs who have chosen to compete with them) results in greater control for entrepreneurs, but also weak corporate governance and ultimately excessive restraint and discipline. “Of course, at a time when technology companies were gaining momentum and the founders needed to feel more confident about themselves,” Malabi wrote, “the normal forms of private or public governance would thus be suspended.”

Nevertheless, Malabi is wary of highlighting the efforts made by VCs to rein in and even remove their founders. His chapter is instructive on the relationship between Uber’s Travis Callahan and his first VC supporter on the benchmark, Bill Gurley. As Uber grew older, Kalanik lost interest in Girl’s advice. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund proposes to invest $ 3.5 billion in the firm and expand the board with selected members of Kalanik, pushing Garley to further margins. Garley was upset about how the Saudi money would be spent (and what it would eventually do with the benchmark share price), and was given the results of an investigation into Uber’s work culture. Garley used its toxic content to confront what became known as the “religion of the founders” and eventually expelled Kalanik from the company. Kalanik’s successor, Dara Khasroshahi, followed Gurley’s recommendation to tighten corporate governance, and the company’s 2019 IPO was relatively good. Although it lowered the highest personal valuation of $ 79 billion, at $ 69 billion it became one of the ten largest IPOs of all time in terms of market cap — and gave the benchmark a 270x return on its investment. As Mallabi puts it, the VC’s precise direction took the company back from the brink.

The tools operated by venture capitalists are extremely powerful. A VC Mallabi has spoken of comparing his service to jet fuel. This energy has helped Cisco, Apple, Google and all the firms that work around them But if it is pumped into the wrong companies, it can cause spectacular failure. Arthur Rock once said that his decisions about which companies to support would “come from the top of the pants seat or hat.” Inside Power lawMalabi has made a strong case that VCs have since become more strategic and analytical in deciding where to place their powers, even if their goals are not always true.

Throughout the year, our reviewers have found recent business books to find the necessary ideas, observations, and lessons from business history, current events, and cutting-edge research. Here are half a dozen lessons that we found to be particularly thought-provoking in 2021.

Distance Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere

By Tsedal Neeley, Harper Business, 2021

The COVID-19 epidemic will not result in permanent, wholesale transfers to remote work. But it is more likely that leaders will have to manage, if not already, people who have been working remotely for at least some time. Challenges for leaders include keeping people connected when they are not in the same place, building trust and alignment without personal communication, avoiding zoom fatigue and other technical issues, creating effective boundaries between work and personal life, and shifting to highly integrated work. In distributed settings. Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, has addressed these obstacles The remote work revolutionA handbook full of practical and subtle tips for effectively leading distances.

Arrived today: From the factory to the front door — everything has changed about why, how and what we bought

By Christopher Mimes, Harper Business, 2021

A detailed and dedicated commentator on the state of the logistics industry, Coming today By The Wall Street Journal Tech columnist Christopher Mimes offers a snapshot of a logistics industry on Flex. The world described in the book is a marvel of human ingenuity থেকে from interactive delivery maps created by an automated semitrack to Willy Wanka-Esc Energy Amazon’s full engine. It is also deeply troubling. Truckers are tired, grateful for a rest stop with room for them to park for the night. The third companion on a container ship is so depressed that he does not notice the spectacular sea sunrise. Most of all, however, it is a world that, due to the pace of change in the industry, is likely to become unfamiliar in five years.

Talent Aristocracy: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World

By Adrian Uldridge, Skyhorse, 2021

Inside Talent aristocracyAdrian Uldridge, Political Editor Economist, Explores the history of the intellectual system and fears for its future. The fall of Venice, once a major city, appears at the end of the book as a warning story. At the beginning of the 14th century, realizing the need for a downward and upward movement for social mobility, a group of strong Venetian families tried to maintain the status quo and, at best, shut down. Immigrants were no longer welcomed. Trade comes under state control. The population has shrunk. The era of Venice’s dominance is over. Oldridge believes that today’s advanced economies, mainly the United States and the United Kingdom, are heading for a similar outcome. Like Venice, these powerful economies gradually came to accept meritocracy as their guiding principle, only to allow successful meritocrats to manipulate their systems, creating a pool of resentment and anger.

Anthro-Vision: A new way of looking at business and life

By Gillian Tett, Avid Reader Press, 2021

The next time you hear someone arguing that a liberal art education for business is wasting, point them to Gillian Tate. Anthro-Vision. In this new book, Dr. Chair Financial timesIts U.S. editorial board makes a compelling, readable argument for the business value of social anthropology. Tate sees that this value is distributed in three ways: anthropology makes strangers familiar, it makes acquaintances strange, and it inspires awareness when listening to social silence.

Want: The power of imitative will in daily life

By Luke Burgess, St. Martin’s Press, 2021

Luke Burgess, entrepreneur-resident and program director at Catholic University, Bush School of Business, USA, takes readers into the rabbit hole of imitation theory. Developed by French sociologist and philosopher Renেনে Girard in the 1960s and 1970s, the theory of imitation seeks to explain human relationships and culture in terms of will. In short, someone else has what we want. The most important point of the book, even if it is somewhat opaque, is that leaders choose to follow a fancy aspiration called bourgeoisie: The model is the external mediator of the will. These leaders expand the universe to everyone’s liking and help them explore it. “

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

By Sebastian Malabi, Penguin, 2022

Economic historian Sebastian Malabi believes that the venture capital industry has had a “positive impact on the economy and society” and, more importantly, its model for innovation has proved so successful that it has helped almost every major US technology company in the last 60 years. . His new book, Power law, The story of the men behind the art – and it’s almost entirely men’s. Heavyweight and richly detailed, the book is an accurate assessment of a career journey through the chaos of startup culture and how the relationship between founders and their financiers has evolved.

A version of this article appeared in the spring 2022 issue Strategy + Business.

A Shot to Save the World: A Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine

By Gregory Zuckerman, Portfolio, 2021

Do you remember the glorious moment when it was discovered that new vaccines against COVID-19 were about to provide a clear, miraculous path from the epidemic? “There’s nothing like it in all of history,” said Eric Topol, MD, director and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in San Diego, California. Tweet. “It simply came to our notice then. It’s probably the most impressive. “

The story is about the development of vaccines that have saved the lives, health and wisdom of many The Wall Street Journal Reporter Gregory Zuckerman tells us in his new book, A shot to save the world. There was no guarantee. Success in vaccine development has historically been somewhat haphazard, and as AIDS painfully shows, there have been terrible failures. In addition, we all know that there has been a big mistake in our response to COVID-19. But, Zuckerman writes, “this is the story of what went right.”

Although the author describes other vaccine technologies, the role in his story is played by a special molecule called mRNA (which is short for Messenger ribonucleic acid) It contains mRNA which carries the information needed to teach our cells how to make proteins; On paper it could make mRNA a useful tool in the fight against viruses and other pathogens such as cancer. But mRNA, first described in a 1961 landmark report by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, has been underestimated for decades as a potential resource for most diseases, as the report headlines, calling it a “volatile molecule” of our body. The mRNA quickly breaks down and disappears within hours. “It was as if Columbus traveled to America and wrote a letter entitled ‘New Continent – Not Worth Visiting’,” Zuckerman wrote. With no small degree of doubt.

But there were certain people who believed that mRNA could be effective in both curing the disease and a vaccine, as it could provide a way to direct the body to fight against various pathogens. In 1990, an iconoclastic scientist named John Wolf, an unnecessary phrase in Zuckerman’s book, showed that you can make a functional protein by injecting mRNA into a cell. In a fit of irony, Wolfe died of cancer in April 2020, his work “contributing to a vaccine system that will protect most parts of the world from the virulent virus.”

Zuckerman tells the story of many more puppies, as well as pathbreaking scientists who followed mRNA, along with other less expensive vaccine technologies that ultimately proved their worth. Take the case of Caitlin Kariko, a Hungarian immigrant who worked as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. He and a colleague, Drew Weissmann, figured out a way to hide mRNA, which, when injected, crosses the body’s main line of defense, triggering the immune system to go to war. Lots of surprises, some care.

At the age of 70, Carico left the university to join a startup called Bioentech, which was founded in Germany by Ugur Sahin, a Turkish-born couple, and Ozelem Turesi, a cancer vaccine. They also agreed to work with Pfizer on an influenza vaccine. When the epidemic hit, BioNTech struck a deal with the American drug giant to collaborate on a possible COVID-19 vaccine.

Science can be a fiercely competitive field, even when life is at stake. Zuckerman takes readers inside arrogance and ambition that are usually invisible to outsiders. He showed how careful they all were to kill the virus – but how careful they were to kill each other. According to Zuckerman, scientists are not so different from Hollywood stars that they are afraid of fading from the public eye. They “fight with security and think that their past achievements will be accepted and future papers will be rejected.” In this case, the search was on to create a vaccine, but also to be the first. Pfizer-BioNTech, as we now know, competed with Moderna for the development of an mRNA vaccine, as well as with others working on different technologies.

Currently, Moderna is virtually a family name with a market value of over US $ 100 billion. But before the epidemic, very few people heard of it. Within the investment community, the company had little reputation for excessive publicity, not least because of the super-salesmanship used by its hard-driving French CEO, Stephen Bansell, but also because the drugs it promoted have yet to materialize. Product By the end of 2018, Moderna was the shortest biotech stock on the market, and in 2019, desperate to raise money, it had to sell shares at a price that was universal. When the epidemic first hit, big investors didn’t want to confuse the company by creating what they saw as a potentially useless vaccine. Repeatedly, Bansell, who immediately realized the severity of COVID-19, came up short in his fundraising efforts; One of the most touching moments in the book comes when he says, “I wasn’t good enough to do it.” Of course, that soon changed.

Zuckerman writes about the moments we know best, such as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which have an efficacy rate of over 90% for the first time. “The Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen, social media has been enlightened, and millions of people around the world have breathed a sigh of relief,” he wrote. “For the first time in more than eight months, they can imagine a return to normal.” But the narrative allows us to understand that moment in a whole new way, because Zuckerman shows us our personal moments that were before. Champagne and tears flowed during an interim review of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on Sunday, November 8, 2020, where executives first saw performance data. “I love you,” Pfizer CEO Albert Borla shouted at his colleagues.

Zuckerman made it clear at the outset that his goal in writing the book was not to cover every aspect of the epidemic. That said, there is a strange gap: he basically ignores Operation Warp Speed, or OWS, a U.S. government initiative that guarantees billions of dollars to companies, including Moderna and NovaVax, in exchange for possible doses of the vaccine, funding and, arguably, the United States. Citizen first dibs. He noted that Pfizer-BioNTech has decided not to participate in OWS, but he has downplayed the role of the government elsewhere that you can move away believing his book is irrelevant, and that companies that have raised all their funds from private investors and their Ready to produce its own, which is exactly what happened.

The book concludes with an exuberant moment when it seems that vaccines are salvation. We all know now that the virus is cunning. While vaccines are a remarkable achievement, the restless optimism has turned into a talk of recognition that it is not over. But even that knowledge is not enough to dampen Zuckerman’s optimism. Because scientists were forced to create vaccines on a schedule that had never been used before, they knew much more than they did. Zuckerman quotes Jeremy Farrer, a British medical researcher and director of the Welcome Trust: “A whole new field of medicine has opened up. Significant progress will be made from the horrors of Kovid. “

Yes, we hope this is true.

Win from within: Build organizational culture for competitive advantage

By James Hesket, Columbia Business School Publishing, 2022

It was one of the first business books I reviewed in 1992 Corporate culture and performance, By James Hesket and John Cotter, professors at Harvard Business School. A few books have explored organizational culture before, most notably In search of excellence, By Tom Peters and the late Robert Waterman, however Corporate culture and performance Was the first to try to measure the economic return of culture in a rigorous way. Thirty years later, Hesket, now 88, and Professor Emeritus, are still making business cases for corporate culture.

His new book, Victory from within, A master class in culture building. It’s a book you can read in a few hours and then apply throughout your leadership career – which goes to Hesket’s thesis: Most leaders don’t spend enough time managing their company culture and the time they spend is often wasted. .

Hesket pinned both problems to a flawed understanding of culture. “The strategy is difficult; Culture is soft, ”he writes,“ starting a list of common misconceptions. ”The impact of a strategy on growth and profitability can be measured, but not by a culture. If you get the key values ​​shared by everyone correctly, the rest will take care of itself A strong culture helps ensure good performance. It takes a long time to change the culture of an organization. All these claims have been passed in the management circles over the last few years. And they’re all wrong. “

Leaders who hate to embrace cultural change efforts (often because they believe they may not have enough time to complete the transformation) should pay attention to Hesket’s arguments. “Fundamental efforts to lead to significant change … must be completed within a reasonable time frame, often no more than twelve months,” he wrote. This does not mean that culture should be communicated in an ad hoc manner; In fact, “the work of rebuilding and perpetuating a culture never ends.” But it does mean that leaders can change and revive a culture that has tracked off fairly quickly, as Nadela did when he led Microsoft and John Ledger at T-Mobile. Hesket details a 14-point action plan to support leaders who set a six-month timeline to try it out for themselves.

If you are one of these leaders, Chapter 3, which describes how to create a solid, data-driven business case to garner support for culture change initiatives, may be particularly effective. “The purpose here is to explore the impact of culture on sales and profits – that is, by numbers,” Hesket explains. “It simply came to our notice then. In fact, one time may be enough to explain to employees from every department, department and functionality of the organization exactly how importantly culture contributes to their success as well as the success of the organization. “

To make such a case, Hesket suggests measuring a number of key metrics that combine culture – with performance and profit expressed in employee and customer engagement. These are employee referrals, employee retention, labor return (productivity), customer referrals and customer retention. That’s not to say that culture can deliver solid, measurable contributions: Hesket believes that employee and customer engagement also strengthens innovation, but acknowledges that the evidence is limited. Nevertheless, he points to a study conducted by him and colleagues at Caesars Entertainment, which found that “Seven Star” offers more than twice as much product and service improvement as enrolled in customer loyalty programs (US $ 50,000-plus annually). “Gold” customer advice (মূল 2,000 in lifetime value).

Win from the insideContent is far more time consuming than content, but Hesket still provides readers with a short chapter on a topic that many leaders are considering these days — how to preserve culture and support employee engagement in the rapid growth of remote work. He looks at the experience of established all-remote companies such as Automatic and GitLab for concepts. And he sees that the leaders of such companies must “put extra effort into communicating across their organization, making sure that middle managers (the key to long-term success) are doing the same thing, gathering people on a face-to-face basis” over time, and sure Make sure workers who work remotely don’t ‘fall off the grid’ and get involved. “

Suitable for a guide to managing culture, Hesket closes the book with a chapter describing 12 personal behaviors for leaders. Live the culture, Hesket begins, pointing to Bill Marriott, who wants his hotel chain employees to think like owners — and models that behavior by picking up trash. Ensure fairness. Servant leadership practice. To be visible. The list goes on and on, but you’ve probably heard enough to know where it’s going: “It doesn’t make much sense to try to create and maintain a competitive culture without a leader’s faith, enthusiasm and passion,” Hesket wrote. Meaningful change, like so many, begins at the top.

President Joe Biden warned Wednesday that the United States will not have enough covid vaccine shots this fall to ensure free and easy access for all Americans if Congress fails to pass the প্রশাস 22.5 billion in additional funding requested by the administration.

Biden said the United States has sufficient supplies to ensure that qualified individuals have access to the fourth shot. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention this week recommended additional Pfizer or Modern Doses for people 50 years of age or older, as well as some young people with reduced immunity.

Biden, 79, received his fourth dose on live television after his remarks.

As the country enters a new phase of its vaccination drive, the president urges Congress to work to ensure that the United States has the necessary resources in case another wave of infection occurs.

“The Americans are back in their way of life,” Biden said. “We cannot surrender it. Congress please act. You must act immediately. The consequences of inaction are serious, they will only increase over time.”

Don O’Connell, a top official in the Department of Health and Human Services, told Congress Wednesday that the United States does not have the required dose if a booster campaign for the general public proves necessary in the fall.

O’Connell told the House Select Committee, “We have significant concerns about whether we will have enough vaccines if we run a general population growth campaign in the fall, especially if we need an alternative-specific vaccine.” Coronavirus crisis.

“We don’t have any of these doses, or we don’t have any funding for those doses,” said O’Connell, HHS’s assistant secretary for preparation and response.

New infections and hospital admissions have dropped by more than 90% since the peak of the winter omikron wave in January. However, the decline in infections has slowed down and plateau in recent days as the more contagious Omicron subvariant, BA.2, has become the dominant version of Kovid in the United States. BA.2 has already created new waves of infection in Europe and China.

White House Chief Medical Adviser. Anthony Fawcett said earlier this month that BA.2 could potentially increase transmission in the United States. He did not expect another increase in lawsuits.

The Washington State Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimates that infections will continue between spring and summer. However, Ali Mokdad, an epidemiologist at IHME, said another increase could occur in the fall as vaccines reduce immunity and people move in colder weather.

Democrats and Republicans in Congress have failed to reach a 15 billion bipartisan deal on Covid funds, less than the White House has requested. Republicans want to cover any new spending by cutting funds already allocated to state and local governments. Democrats have rejected that claim.

Discussions are underway in the House and Senate to find a compromise.

Biden further warned that there would be no money for testing, monoclonal antibody treatment and antiviral pills if another covid wave spread in the United States.

The president also unveiled a new official website, covid.gov, where Americans can find out where they can get masks, tests, vaccines and treatments.

Is there a difference between who you are and what you do? You can earn money and even identity from your work. But the death of a coworker, sudden layoffs, a serious illness or even the progress of the year can raise questions about the motives that usually sink into the busy pace of a claimant’s career.

Business leaders face these problems, sooner or later most people want to consult a brilliant and enterprising executive named David Lewinsky. You will probably find a few with this name on LinkedIn, but the only thing you need to know is that it exists only in the cover. The rise of David Lewinsky It was probably the first important American Jewish novel, yet its themes – the vague nature of “success” – remained timely and universal among them when the book was first published more than a century ago, in 1917.

If that was all Lewinsky As suggested, it will suffice, as we sing the Passover song. But the book provides much more, as literature succeeds, even depicting the difficulties of starting a business in a new country, the importance of production to encourage innovation, the social tensions arising from extreme inequality, and the effects of Impostor syndrome. Lewinsky, lifelong suffering. “At the bottom of my heart,” he will be reflected as a middle-aged tycoon who hires his own driver, “I keep cows in front of the waiters to this day. Ridiculed. “

Abraham Kahn’s psychologically intense story, most literally a rag-to-rich story, has long been regarded as a little classic, but it deserves special attention here as the tragic events of business life. In 1951, critic Isaac Rosenfeld wrote, “This is one of the best fictional studies of Jewish character available in English, as well as an intimate and sophisticated account of American business culture.”

The protagonist tells his own story from the point of view of advancing age, carrying the eloquent testimony of his confusing journey from the depths of poverty to the heights of business success. “The transformation I went through makes me feel like a miracle,” he wrote at the outset. But “when I look at my inner identity, it fascinates me that it is exactly the same as it was thirty or forty years ago.”

Born in Russia in 1865, the young David lived in a large house with his devoted mother and three other families. When he was 2, his father died, leaving his mother to make a living by selling pea mash and doing strange things. Despite these difficulties, he would accept any sacrifice to enroll David in a religious school. There, in spite of the humiliation of cruel teachers and poverty, his intellectual power flourished in the hothouse of Talmudic studies.

When his mother was assassinated by anti-Semitic David, David, 20, joined the exodus of his compatriots who had fled persecution for the Promised Coast of the New World – an immigration that, before the U.S. Congress stopped immigration in 1924, in the United States. Will bring catalytic flow of 2 million East European Jews. Lewinsky landed without any friends, English and 4 cents in the pocket.

That turns out to be plenty. Blessed with an adequate store of mental and physical fortitude, she survived hunger pangs and home sickness before entering the women’s clothing business and learning to sew sheets. When an opportunist, perhaps driven by piety, provides an essential first aid, including a dress, a bath, and a barber, Lewinsky readily accepts something that cannot be imagined before leaving home: his orthodox sidelock Haircut. He will also shave his chin soon. In his new country, the young man who once spent all his waking hours in religious training has discarded this part of himself as if it were melting an unseasonable skin.

A Viennese of Lewinsky sells contemporary, rather than psychoanalysis schmattas, Perhaps saying that his religious passion was ripe for ecstasy. After learning how to match his native drive, our hero soon starts his own business, to avenge himself against a somewhat heartless employer. Levinsky is an intellectual, but he is also a warrior driven by another hunger: for honor, for dignity, for kinship, and for love. Her experiments in caring for her newborn enterprise from one day to the next will be known to anyone who has gained a startup experience. The frantic search for funds to keep the wolf in the bay or to buy raw materials for a trial order led to his isolation and even abandonment. Sometimes he intentionally mixes checks in the wrong envelope before mailing, causing them to delay the day he hit his bank account. Sometimes he sends the correct check but neglects to sign.

As a salesman, a role that doesn’t come naturally to the studying and thin-skinned Lewinsky, there is no limit to his perseverance and skill — and every bit he needs to get his first order. He learns English as quickly as possible by making his way through Dickens, first painfully and then into something like delirium. He will also read Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, embracing the unfortunate social Darwinism that seems to be living in the dog-eating-dog world of the rag trade.

Lewinsky did not hesitate to copy successful clothing designs to competitors (which is legal, then now, until a distinctive “commercial clothing” is reproduced). He works under the radar of the Union, stops on weekends to catch religious landlords, and sometimes keeps labor costs low by renting potential money to cross the Atlantic. He also gives them the opportunity to apply their skills and appetite over a long period of time by paying for piecemeal work যার resulting in fat rather than thin, even if union rules are violated.

The novel argues that Russian Jews like Levinsky were able to take over the clothing business from their German Jewish predecessors not only because the former was new and hungry, but also because they entered the business with technical skills from the old country. In the United States, they have used this knowledge to innovate in production, improve the quality of clothing, and reduce costs.

“The old clothes-makers, the German Jews, were just merchants. On the other hand, most of our people were tailors or clock operators who learned the mechanical part of the industry, and they were introducing thousands of innovations into it, perfecting it, revolutionizing it. We brought to our work a knowledge, a taste and a greed that the people of the old company did not have. And we dropped our irrationality as well. We’ve adapted to the American way of doing things as we get older. “

In the 30 years since Peniless Ruby arrived, Lewinsky has transformed himself into a democratic fashionist with a Polish American industrialist এবং and his fellow immigrants. The result, she says, uses an important adjective with the precision of a needle, “the average American woman is the average woman dressed in the best clothes in the world.”

Yet, without a wife, children, or faith in God, and alienated from Jewish tradition, Lewinsky’s biggest problem is one that surrounds many who work hard to succeed in business, and that is a problem of purpose. Towards the end of the book, after describing his remarkable accomplishments, he sadly reports: “My sense of triumph is mingled with a sense of emptiness and worthlessness. I do. “

He was particularly upset by the decision not to attend City College and perhaps to become a writer or physician. And he never seems to be able to overcome the tendency to fall in love with the women he can’t love while avoiding the more appropriate matches that are always on offer. Gives a brief glimpse of the larger meaning of his engagement to a pious young woman he hopes to find in a family. “My outlook on working for my wife and children provoked a desire for altruism in a broader sense. While free from any scratch of religion, in the general sense of the word, I was shaking with a religious joy that was based on public sense of duty.” But Lewinsky soon married.

Abraham Kahan, though he wrote Lewinsky In English, he was editor for many years Daily Forward, The great Yiddish newspaper whose socialism reflects his views. It is not surprising that he will give us a tycoon whose experience, turning away from Jewish tradition to create fortune, equates material success with infertility. Rosenfeld praised the book, saying that “it is, at the same time, an imitation of the influential myths of American capitalism – that the millionaire finds nothing but emptiness at the top of the pile.”

The interesting thing about David Lewinsky is that his problems are our problems. In one sense or another, we are all immigrants today, devoid of tradition, deviating from the wonderful world of technology, and so often lacking the many bonds of family and culture that once held us back. The freedom and prosperity that we are fortunate enough to share with Levinsky to some extent is far better than the alternatives, yet somehow not enough within ourselves.