If the reader is interested in how one of the world’s largest firms conducts its business in a largely efficient, profitable and largely praiseworthy manner and the reader also has problem falling asleep, our experience is that Steve Coll’s “Private Empire, ExxonMobile and American Power” is a worthy summer selection.
We come from a small business background, the realm of true entrepreneurs, a term which has been debased in recent decades to include anyone running an apple stand. So a window into a corporation that directly employs about 82,000 with the full spectrum of operations from exploration, producing, processing, marketing and distributing petroleum and natural gas products in varous parts of the globe is a revelation… and a cause for admiration, although we personally would not want to work under the constraining environment.
Below are excerpts from a worthy review from Business Week with an attachment to the entire article.
BUSINESS WEEK: There’s a startling scene early in Steve Coll’s Private Empire in which Lee Raymond, then the chief executive of ExxonMobil, speaks with offhanded candor about where his loyalties lie. Asked by an industry colleague if his company might consider building more refineries domestically, the better to protect the U.S. from potential gasoline shortages and security crises, Raymond shrugs off the question. “I’m not a U.S. company,” Raymond says, “and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”
Private Empire could easily have been a very different book than it is. Coll could have gone the Michael Moore route, marshaling his reams of interview transcripts and WikiLeaks finds into a bilious, scorched-earth indictment. Raymond, with his brusque manner, back-channel access to Dick Cheney, and villainous mien—picture John Sununu with jug ears and an even flappier goiter—is an almost irresistible target. Yet Coll, a staff writer for the New Yorker and the president of the center-left New America Foundation think tank, goes about his business with restraint. Private Empire is a book meticulously prepared as if for trial, a lawyerly accumulation of information that lets the facts speak for themselves. To anyone who, unlike Raymond, believes in global warming, the goal of U.S. energy independence, and not partnering with regimes with spotty human-rights records, these facts will paint a damning portrait. But just as easily, a fan of Ayn Rand might read this book as a heroic narrative, pumping his fist and shouting “Yes!” every time Raymond or his successor, Rex Tillerson, shuts out his critics’ voices and redoubles his efforts to drill for crude, glorious crude…
More often than not, Private Empire is a compelling and elucidatory work, though its disciplined, very ExxonMobil-esque adherence to rigor and propriety does make for some moments of reader fatigue. (Would a light sprinkling of personality-based gossip or insouciant asides have hurt?) On the other hand, Coll’s reputation and approach are probably what made Raymond cooperate, to some degree, with the book’s preparation… (more)
