MANAGEMENT: What Makes Tycoons Tick

Since Dreiser and Frank Norris, the businessman in U.S. fiction has seldom been a hero; if he has not been a heel, he has at least been a target for satire. In Marquand's Point of No Return, the satire was gentle, in The Hucksters sharp. In many other "realistic" novels, the businessman was actually a caricature. On sale last week was a book that broke the tired old pattern. In Executive Suite (Houghton Mifflin: $3), Cameron Hawley has depicted businessmen who are neither heroes nor heels nor geniuses but, in the words of one of the characters, "a quite ordinary group of men, disconcertingly human . . . and . . . given to the man-on-the-street practice of basing decisions on hunch and intuition." With understanding and sympathy, Author Hawley manages to give a notably realistic and exciting picture of how the top men in a corporation operate.

Soul on a Balance Sheet. The story centers around a problem common to many a company: What happens when the top man dies? Avery Bullard is a driving, domineering boss who has pulled a small family-owned furniture company from the brink of bankruptcy and built it into the giant Tredway Corp., one of the biggest in the industry. He has done it with boundless energy, and at the expense of his marriage. Bullard is a believable if not always admirable tycoon; he lives "as if ... his soul would be measured on a balance sheet where there was no credit for love." But it was not money that he was after. Dollars, Bullard used to say, "were just a way of keeping score." The thing that kept him going was "his terrific pride in himself ... He was only happy when he was doing the impossible —and he did that only to satisfy his own pride . . ." When he dies unexpectedly, his associates realize as never before that, in many ways, he was a great man. Who could possibly fill his shoes?

Embroiled in the struggle for power in the Tredway Corp. are five vice presidents. They are Jesse Grimm, the up-from-the-bench production man who demands perfection from his machines but is "too quick to excuse the lack of it in his people"; Don Walling, the fair-haired boy of design and development who seems to "skitter about over the . . . surface" of a problem, gathering up unrelated facts, and then solves it with "a brilliant flash of pure creative imagination"; J. Walter Dudley, the sales boss, a "runner who [runs] without a goal" and thinks that if he runs hard, and makes enough friends, "everything [will be] all right"; Frederick Alderson, treasurer, a tired old company veteran and longtime confidant of the boss; and Loren Shaw, comptroller, who can squeeze profits from pennies, and is sure that the smallest thing may be decisive in the struggle for power ("If you went to another man's office instead of forcing him to come to yours, you openly acknowledged his superiority").