The Watson Dynasty: The Fiery Reign and Troubled Legacy of IBM's Founding Father and Son, and: The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr., and the Making of IBM (review)

Business biography, long out of fashion in the academy, remains a staple of the vast popular literature aimed at businesspeople. To the extent business history penetrates the consciousness of contemporary managers at all, it likely does so more through biography than through any other medium. To some degree, of course, this is true for most branches of history. Anyone who scans the history section at the local bookstore or samples the offerings of television outlets such as PBS and the History Channel knows that much of the public adheres to the maxim that all history is biography. Yet the divergence between professional practitioners and the wider reading public seems especially acute in business history. The cultural turn has quietly drawn biography back into favor in many branches of academic history. Current generations of business historians, meanwhile, have actively distanced themselves from an earlier biographical approach that many saw as bordering on hagiography. Drawing upon social and institutional theorists who view the world in highly impersonal terms, and often working in close proximity to management professors, they write of organizational capabilities, network agglomeration effects, and information asymmetries. This can make for hard going under the best of circumstances. It is certainly not the sort of stuff likely to hold the attention of someone reading in a busy airport or seeking a quiet respite after a long day at the office.

The two books under consideration here bridge the gap between these harried, weary readers and those of us in the academy. Both present interpretive joint biographies of two of the most famous businessmen of the twentieth century, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., and his eldest son, Tom Jr. (Though the book by Kevin Maney is ostensibly a biography of just the elder Watson, it contains nearly as much material about the younger Watson as does the work by Richard Tedlow.) Together, these men ran IBM and its antecedents from 1914 until 1971. During this period the company grew from a small, obscure firm into the fifth largest corporation in the United States in terms of sales and profits and the largest in terms of market valuation. This record alone, the authors imply, sufficiently justifies their works.

The two authors converge on their common terrain from opposite directions. Tedlow, a professor of business history at Harvard, has clearly set out to write a book that would reach a substantial audience outside the academy. He aptly labels his study "an interpretive essay that attempt[s] to look at what is already known about the Watsons and IBM in a new way" (p. 301). The vast majority of his footnotes refer either to an early biography of the elder Watson or to the younger Watson's memoirs. Maney, a reporter who covers high-tech industries for USA Today, draws on these secondary works as well but has grounded his study in a newly recovered cache of primary sources in the IBM archives. He lards his book with substantial excerpts from transcripts of internal meetings conducted by the elder Watson, tracks his subject's movements through daily calendars, and tells us the amounts Watson recorded as having spent on his lavish households, vacations, and art collections. Both authors write in crisp, engaging styles and spice their works with enough literary flair to keep things interesting while maintaining tones of seriousness and intelligence. The academic Tedlow, unburdened by quotation of primary sources and more willing to insert himself into the text, may have produced a...