NEGOTIATING

BUSINESS
NARRATIVES
Fables of the Information
Technology, Automobile
Manufacturing, and
Financial Trading Industries

Sandford Borins
Beth Herst
Negotiating Business Narratives
 Sandford Borins · Beth Herst

Negotiating Business
Narratives
Fables of the Information Technology,
Automobile Manufacturing, and Financial
Trading Industries
Sandford Borins Beth Herst
Professor of Strategic Management Narrative and Innovation Incorporated
University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada
Toronto, Canada

ISBN 978-3-319-77922-5 ISBN 978-3-319-77923-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2

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 EARLY PRAISE FOR NEGOTIATING BUSINESS
NARRATIVES

“We all think with a repertoire of stock narratives taken from film, documentary,
popular biography and memoir. Borins and Herst’s major work provides us finally
with the framework we have been lacking to understand the range of available
tropes and standard stories, and to compare the dominance of different stock
narratives in representing businesses in the fields which shape our lives. This book
should be read by anyone who wants to understand the stories we think with, as
well as by anyone interested in business and popular culture.”
—Perri 6, Professor in Public Management, Queen Mary
University of London, UK

“Building upon Borins’s earlier Governing Fables, Borins and Herst’s Negotiating
Business Narratives is a remarkable set of insights across a range of industries and
media. Their deconstruction of plot lines confirms the power of myth as a way
of framing our understanding of institutional phenomena. A powerful analy-
sis critiques stereotypes against more nuanced frameworks. Ideal types are tem-
pered with emergent concerns for social justice. This book is especially important
because storytelling has lately become more of a marketing practice; because
cinematic representations of corporate leadership have become common refer-
ence points for media analysts; and because the very direction of our societies has
becomes a function of deliberately constructed fables. The authors have built a
unique argument for the power of individual protagonists as linking pins between
corporations and societal values, and it is incumbent upon us to listen carefully.”
—Marc Holzer, Dean Emeritus and University Professor, School of Public
Affairs and Administration, Rutgers University-Newark, USA

v
vi EARLY PRAISE FOR NEGOTIATING BUSINESS NARRATIVES

“Read Negotiating Business Narratives and you’ll never look in quite the same
way at simplistic tales of brilliant tech entrepreneurs, heroic auto-industry
turnaround artists, or evil financiers. And you’ll be smarter for that.”
—Walter Kiechel, author of The Lords of Strategy, former
Editorial Director of Harvard Business Publishing
For Beverley Borins
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book had its genesis in Sandford Borins’s teaching of narrative and
management at the University of Toronto. Our original intention was to
write a book encompassing both public and private sector management.
Such a book would have been very lengthy, and we decided to write
first about public management. Following the publication of Governing
Fables in 2011, we (re)turned to the private sector. The Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded this project (grant
number 410-2011-0436), just as it funded Governing Fables. This essen-
tial funding supported three excellent research assistants: Cassandra Liu,
Cindy Li, and Elizabeth Lyons. We thank them for their commitment
and hard work.
Over the years, Sandford Borins taught many of the movies dis-
cussed here in his Narrative and Management course at the University of
Toronto—Scarborough. Students’ responses to and discussions of these
movies have contributed to our thinking about these films and their nar-
rative strategies. We are grateful to these active viewers for their enthusi-
asm and engagement.
A preliminary version of this monograph was presented to the
Strategic Management Area, Joseph L. Rotman School of Management,
University of Toronto. The chapter on financial trading was read by
Professor Laurence Booth, of the Rotman School Finance area. As
always, colleagues’ reactions have been thought-provoking and very
helpful.

ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Marcus Ballenger and Gabriel Everington at Palgrave Macmillan

helped us speedily move from manuscript to published book. Naomi
Pauls provided the index, with support from the University of Toronto
Scarborough Research Impact Fund. We sincerely appreciate their
friendly professionalism and skill.
 CONTENTS

1 Conceptual Framework and Methodology 1

2 Insanely Great: The Dominant IT Fable 13

3 Cults of Personality: Fables of the Automobile

Manufacturing Industry 23

4 “A Good Dose of Outrage”: Financial Trading Fables 37

5 Conclusion: Narrative Templates and Social Negotiations 57

Appendix: Tables of Texts 61

References 65

Index 73

xi
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 Private sector fables 7

Fig. 2.1 Information technology narratives 15
Fig. 3.1 Automobile manufacturing narratives 25
Fig. 4.1 Financial trading narratives 39

xiii
 CHAPTER 1

Conceptual Framework and Methodology

Abstract Narratives circulating widely within popular culture provide

templates for engaging with the actors and institutions they represent.
Academics and critics generally assert that popular narratives about busi-
ness (movies, novels, histories) are invariably critical. This monograph
presents a more nuanced view. This chapter outlines an inductively
derived structural matrix that is used to analyze 63 narrative texts pro-
duced in the US in the last 40 years dealing with three major industries:
information technology (IT), automobile manufacturing, and finan-
cial trading. The matrix defines an eight-cell array of structuring fables
ranging from Nirvana to Nightmare with six mixed or compound fables
intervening between these extremes. Texts that cluster in one or a few
related cells are defined as instantiating a dominant fable.

Keywords Narrative · Fable · Corporation · Text · Nirvana

Nightmare

Does Hollywood hate Wall Street? For most academics and critics sur-
veying cinematic representations of business the answer is unequivocally
yes. Show business consistently vilifies big business while rarely seem-
ing to understand, or accurately portray, its workings (Younkins 2014,
4). Musing on three recent “evil corporation” movies, Erin Brockovich,
The Rainmaker, and A Civil Action, Philip Lopate noted in a New York

© The Author(s) 2018 1

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_1
2 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

Times essay in 2000 that corporations and their agents had become the
entertainment industry’s favorite “fantasy villain” (Lopate 2000). Five
years later, writing for Slate, Edward Epstein speculated on the increas-
ing indispensability of “lily-white impeccably dressed American corporate
executives” as cinematic villains in a climate that no longer accepts the
racial, ethnic or geographic stereotyping of the past. In fact, the title of his
review of Syriana proclaims that business has now become “an essential
part of Hollywood’s new axis of evil” (Epstein 2005). And the phenome-
non may not even be particularly new. The financial commentator James
Surowiecki considers the movies’ “mistrust of capitalism” to be “almost as
old as the medium itself” (2010). Explanations for this anti-business bias
typically invoke business’s “bourgeoning cultural influence” (Surowiecki
2010), more specifically the acquisition of major studios and production
companies by multinational corporations and the resulting ascendance of
“the suits” over “the creatives.” For Lopate, it is inevitable that filmmak-
ers, seeing themselves as “mavericks,” would incorporate in their films
their disdain for the “studio bean counters who oversee them.” Lawrence
Ribstein, in two separate scholarly articles (2009, 2012) makes the point
explicit, attributing the hostility of Hollywood’s representations of busi-
ness to screenwriters’ and directors’ resentment of corporate control over,
and interference with, their art.
This study tells a different story differently. Rather than consider an
undifferentiated set of business narratives, it focuses on three high-profile
US industries of global importance: information technology, automo-
bile manufacturing, and financial trading.1 Rather than attempting a
comprehensive survey, or offering a small sample of arguably represent-
ative instances, it limits its purview to the preceding four decades, with
a cut-off of 2016, while expanding the set of narrative forms it engages
to include both print and visual media and the genres to encompass fic-
tion, docudrama, documentary, biography, history, and memoir. Most
fundamentally, this study draws methodological inspiration from classical
structuralist narratology to identify and analyze structural patterns within
clearly defined sets of business narratives. By doing so, it also begins
to explore some larger questions the authors cited above have gener-
ally not broached. Almost three decades ago, the psychologist Jerome

1 “Trading” as it is used here refers to the buying and selling of financial assets by hedge
funds, private equity funds, investment banks, and trading desks in other large financial
institutions. It excludes commercial banking and insurance.
 1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY 3

Bruner famously noted that narratives are “especially viable instruments

for social negotiation” (1990, 55). His insight challenges us to consider
more deeply what social and cultural functions these industry-specific
narratives might be performing, what assumptions, values, beliefs,
norms, expectations, and anxieties are being expressed and engaged. To
use Bruner’s formulation, what is being negotiated here?

THEORETICAL CONTEXT
Research on narrative and management is still an emerging discourse, its
theoretical and methodological boundaries far from settled. At least two
significant constituencies can be mapped, however, based on a distinc-
tion between scholarship engaging with formally structured, profession-
ally authored narrative texts (in a range of media forms) on the one hand
and the products of “storytelling” on the other. Both objects of study
are narratives, in the fundamental sense defined by the influential film
scholars Bordwell and Thompson: “a chain of events linked by cause and
effect and occurring in time and space” (2013, 75). Both depend upon
processes of “situated communicative action” (Herman 2012, 44), but
those processes and their outputs clearly differ in fundamental ways.
Storytelling research in management typically takes as its focus infor-
mal personal communications circulating within organizations as an
important mode of knowledge exchange, sense-making, or persuasion.
The management scholar David Boje, a pioneer in this area of research,
defined a story simply as “an oral or written performance involving two
or more people interpreting past or anticipated experience” (Boje 1995,
1000). In his most recent research, he has taken the position that “sto-
rytelling organizational practices happen continually in every office, on
every floor, in every hallway, in every field location of every organiza-
tion” (Boje 2014, xix). Boje lists ten examples of this pervasive organi-
zational practice, from “an entrepreneur giv[ing] a pitch to a group of
Angels” to “a customer leav[ing] a message on the answering machine”
and “the janitor explain[ing] to a supervisor why the buffing machine
no longer works.” In effect, he subsumes all organizational communica-
tion under the rubric of storytelling. Boje’s self-defined objective is prac-
tical: to teach practitioners to apply his conceptualizations of storytelling
to their working lives. Another well-known proponent of this practi-
tioner-centered approach is Stephen Denning, who began his career as
an executive at the World Bank. After using stories to help implement
4 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

a major knowledge-sharing initiative in the early 1990s, Denning left

the Bank to write and consult, basing his practice on the definition and
application of a typology of stories for different managerial challenges
(Denning 2005, 2007).
This monograph does not consider the type of narratives that Boje
and Denning study or the oral narrative practice they advocate. Instead,
our focus is what the psychologist Raymond Mar (2004) calls “crafted
narratives,” extended, complex, imagined structures, produced with
conscious aesthetic as well as informational intent, artefacts bearing the
impress of genre norms and conventions, explicitly designed to circu-
late beyond the context of their initial production. Our intent here is
to explore the implications of the creation, circulation, and reproduc-
tion of these narratives within popular culture, rather than to advise
practitioners.
It is crafted narrative texts that are at the center of recent cross-
disciplinary work on what a leading scholar in the area calls “the
mind-narrative nexus” (Herman 2013, 1), an approach that seeks to
fuse the insights and methods of narratology with the theoretical con-
structs and experimental findings of a range of sciences of mind, includ-
ing social, developmental, and cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind,
cognitive linguistics, evolutionary biology, psychology, and anthropology.
This study’s methodology—its focus on recurring structural elements—
owes an obvious debt to a much earlier phase of narratology. But its con-
ceptual foundation and impetus is the cognitivists’ premise that we are
a fiction-making, story-seeking species, unable not to impose narrative
structures and significance on our experience (Gottschall 2012, 105).
Where do those structures come from? The assumption here is that
narrative forms circulating widely within popular culture (movies, tele-
vision series, memoirs, biographies, novels, nonacademic histories) serve
as templates, sometimes consciously adopted, more often perhaps not,
for how we experience and represent the world around us. If narrative
constitutes “a primary resource for configuring circumstances and events
into more or less coherent scenarios” (Herman 2013, 74), it seems
reasonable to suppose that the scenarios we daily produce may well be
shaped by the ones we are daily consuming.2 And it is these narrative

2 The German media scholar, Monika Suckfüll, has written of the ways our “lifelong sociali-

zation and learning process relating to the media” conditions us in a range of “modes of recep-
tion,” teaching us not just how to respond but what to look for (Shimamura 2013, 324).
 1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY 5

scenarios, or “patterns of salience” as the film scholar Carl Plantinga

calls them (2009, 48), that can, in turn, shape personal and public dis-
course. So, the narratives we consume about Wall Street, or Detroit, or
Silicon Valley feed back into the ways we perceive, understand, respond
to, even seek to regulate Wall Street, or Detroit, or Silicon Valley. And
the feedback need not end there. This public discourse may then be
reflected in new narratives cultural producers create and distribute. It is
this hypothesis concerning the potential reciprocal interactions between
widely circulating fictional or fiction-like narrative representations and
public discourse that prompts the central questions this paper asks.3
What are the constituent structures of these narratives? Are there recur-
ring patterns among them? What might such patterns reveal about the
cultural discourse they both shape and reflect?

ANTECEDENTS AND CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE

Borins’s previous research engaging public-sector narratives deduced and
applied a four-quadrant analytic matrix (Borins 2011). The matrix defined
four recurring fables, that is, shared structures of narrative agents, functions,
trajectories, and preferred meanings that informed individual narrativiza-
tions (configurations of characters, actions, and plot events within specific
texts). This approach distantly echoes work of pioneering structuralists like
Vladimir Propp (1928, translated 1968) who in the early decades of the
twentieth century analyzed 100 Russian folk tales to identify inductively fun-
damental and recurring structural elements, including seven basic character
roles and 31 functions or types of action. More immediate influences include
film scholars like Bordwell and Thompson (2013) and Haywood (2006)
writing on the evolution of film genres and genre-specific plots, character
types, and formal conventions. The primary distinction this public-sector
research employed, differentiating structuring fable, specific narrative instan-
tiation, and text (the individual cultural artefact considered in the light of

3 “Fiction-like” is used here to denote narrative texts whose primary source materials are
fact-based, but whose representational strategies draw on the methods, and generic con-
ventions, of fiction. McLean and Elkind’s account of the Enron scandal, or Hoffman’s nar-
rative of Alan Mulally’s turnaround of Ford, exemplify this fiction-like form. Of the latter,
one reviewer noted that it “read more like a thriller than a business book” (Koehn 2012).
The formula is common in reviews of many of the nonfiction texts being considered here.
And this, no doubt, helps to account for the “best-seller” status of many of them.
6 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

its production, circulation, and reception), derives from the work of later
twentieth-century narratologists, particularly the eminent Dutch scholar
Mieke Bal (1997).
Public-sector narratives necessarily involve both an individual protag-
onist (or group of protagonists) and an explicitly defined institutional/
societal context, with the narrative’s emplotment activating a series of
challenges to, or crises deriving from, that context.4 The protagonist’s
responses affect both her personal story and the larger public context
in which that story is embedded. The interactions of these two axes of
meaning, the personal and the public, generate an array of four fable
types: heroic, in which both the protagonist and the institution tri-
umph (this occupies the upper left position in the matrix’s four-cell
array); ironic, in which the protagonist prevails by exploiting the insti-
tution (lower left position); sacrificial, in which the institution survives
at the expense of the protagonist (upper right); and tragic, in which
both protagonist and institution suffer harm or defeat (lower right). The
matrix was validated by applying it to the analysis of forty contemporary
political and bureaucratic texts from the United States and the United
Kingdom. All fit readily within its framework.
In this public-sector narrative research, the institutional context (an
organization mandated to serve the public interest) was understood as
a synecdoche for society as a whole. This study seeks to extend the fable
typology and analytic matrix of this earlier work to private sector nar-
ratives by introducing a third axis of meaning: a corporate entity inter-
posed between the individual protagonist and the societal context.
Recent events in global financial markets have forcibly reminded us that
the interests of a profit-maximizing corporation and the society in which
it operates may diverge widely. And it is precisely the extent to which the
personal, the corporate, and the societal axes do, or do not, align which
generates the eight-cell analytic matrix that will be employed here (see
Fig. 1.1). The degree of alignment, or discordance, also determines the
overall mood or tenor of the fables, ranging from positive/celebratory to
negative/critical. Individual cells within the matrix are shaded to provide
a visual key.

4 Herman et al. in Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012) defines

emplotment as “the way events are, in being narrated, set out in a particular order that
in turn implies a particular way of understanding causal-chronological relationships among
them” (71).
 1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY 7

Corporate Nirvana
S – wins
C – wins
P – wins

Sacrificial/Thrown Over Triumphant Critic Corporate Rip-Off

S – wins S – wins S – loses
C – wins C – loses C – wins
P – loses P – wins P – wins

Retributive Defeated Critic Inside Job

S – wins S – loses S – loses
C – loses C – wins C – loses
P – loses P – loses P – wins

Corporate Nightmare
S – loses
C – loses
P – loses

S = Society; C = Corporation; P = Individual protagonist(s)

Fig. 1.1 Private sector fables

FABLES AND TEXTS

It is useful to describe briefly the structural configurations that define
the eight cells of the typological matrix, before looking more closely
at patterns of fables within each industry. At the top of the figure, and
unshaded, is the Corporate Nirvana in which the interests of the protag-
onist(s) (P), the corporate entity (C), and society (S) are fully aligned.
Narratives instantiating this fable typically center on the successful devel-
opment of a transformative technology or the execution of a major cor-
porate turnaround. The protagonists responsible gain in wealth and
recognition. The corporate owners/shareholders benefit financially.
Societal benefits accrue initially to employees and customers but through
multiplier effects then spread more broadly. The information technol-
ogy sector, as we will see, has generated innumerable narrative iterations
of the first version of this fable, the automobile manufacturing industry
multiple instances of the second.
8 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

The inverse of the Corporate Nirvana is the Corporate Nightmare,

shaded in black and positioned as the lowest cell in the array. In this fable,
senior executives’ mal/misfeasance bankrupts the company, destroys their
careers and reputations, and sends shockwaves through the broader com-
munity, often resulting in “collateral damage” to thousands of individuals.
Two fables intervene between Nirvana and Nightmare. Both involve pro-
tagonists who align themselves with the larger social good against the cor-
porate entity, either as external critic or whistleblower. In the case of the
Defeated Critic, the fable ranged directly above the Corporate Nightmare
but shaded less darkly, the protagonist’s attempts to expose corporate
wrongdoing fail. Society continues to suffer, while the corporation con-
tinues to profit. Typically, the defeated critic pays a high personal price
in health and reputation as a result of her fruitless labors and/or the cor-
poration’s defensive and retaliatory actions. The Triumphant Critic, in
contrast, successfully uses either insider knowledge or external expertise
to bring a socially irresponsible corporation to justice. She emerges with
enhanced status and brighter career prospects. The corporation suffers
financially, legally, and in reputation, while society benefits from the ces-
sation of harm and, frequently, from remediating measures enforced upon
the wrongdoers. While the net outcome of the fable is positive, it should
be noted that the fable requires the antecedent of substantial societal harm
to trigger the critic’s activism; hence the (lighter) shading of this cell.
Two other cells of the matrix share the shading of the Triumphant
Critic fable. Both denote fables in which society “wins,” though this
comes at the expense of the protagonist. They constitute the left side
of the matrix and are defined as the Sacrificial/Thrown Over fable and
the Retributive fable. The first of these has two basic variants. In both,
the corporation and society benefit, either through the uncompensated
exploitation of the protagonist’s intellectual property (Sacrificial), though
instantiations of this fable variant are relatively rare, or because one of the
founders of a successful venture is pushed out by more aggressive (and
typically more visionary and/or able) partners who go on to enormous
success (Thrown Over). The Retributive fable involves agents of social insti-
tutions (the media, the courts, citizen activists) seeking and obtaining ret-
ribution for corporate wrongdoing. Here, both the corporation and some
individual protagonists (corporate officers, employees) suffer as a result.
The final two cells of the matrix, occupying the right-hand side of
the figure and sharing the shading of the Defeated Critic fable, rep-
resent further instances of corporate malfeasance at society’s expense.
 1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY 9

The Corporate Rip-Off presents both corporation and protagonist

benefiting at high social cost. This might be due to monopoly dom-
inance, oligopolistic collusion, environmental pollution, regulatory cap-
ture, corruption, or criminal negligence. The Inside Job is similar to the
Corporate Nightmare, with the difference that corporate insiders (senior
executives, directors, consultants, traders) benefit from perverse incentive
systems, enriching themselves through actions detrimental to their firms’
long-term interests and escaping the inevitable catastrophic result with per-
sonal wealth intact, if not significantly increased. Less privileged employees
and “ordinary” citizens are, again, collateral damage. Virtually all the finan-
cial trading narratives considered here cluster within these two cells.
The shading of the matrix cells might seem either self-evident or purely
cosmetic. In fact, it was a surprisingly difficult task, but the difficulty
proved instructive. While the choices for Corporate Nirvana and Corporate
Nightmare were literally black and white, the remaining fables and cells
prompted significant debate between the authors. The initial challenge was
the relative weight to attach to positive versus negative outcomes along
each axis of signification. Ultimately, we agreed that a “win” for society
would determine a comparatively more positive register for the fable as
represented by a lighter shade of gray, while a loss for society would be
marked by a darker shade. The use of gray, we felt, would acknowledge
the mixed nature of the outcomes in all six fables and the shifting functions
and values associated with the protagonist role within each.
The presence of this relatively large “gray area” within the matrix also
serves as a visual correlative for the complex responses instantiations of
these mixed fables can generate. A narrative of the Defeated Critic fable
type, for example, representing the failure of a sympathetic protagonist
whose perspective and ethical agenda clearly serve as focalizers need
not be experienced as unrelievedly negative. The existence of the tex-
tual artefact relating this defeat can be felt as a vindication of the pro-
tagonist’s narrative agenda.5 Alternatively, narratives of the Inside Job

5 Film scholars have paid particular attention to the phenomenon of “artefactual

response,” noting how readily viewers accommodate shifting from “the perspective within
the film to a perspective about the film” (Freeland in Plantinga and Smith 1999, 72).
Currie’s essay in the same volume engages suggestively with the differences between “desir-
ing something for a character and desiring something for a narrative” (189) and notes that
highly satisfying narrative experiences can be generated not only despite, but because of, a
tension between the two types of desire.
10 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

or Corporate Rip-off fable type, in which an unscrupulous or immoral

protagonist succeeds in exploiting a broken system, can generate signif-
icant narrative pleasure, despite the costs paid by society and the corpo-
rate entity. (When even a “bad” corporation is brought down, a lot of
“good” people suffer.) This is particularly true if the protagonist is both
self-aware and critical of the systems he exploits. The film The Big Short
is constructed around not one but three such protagonists and the com-
plexities and ambiguities of audience allegiance and complicity this struc-
ture generates make it a particularly rich text for analysis.
The process of selecting individual texts for inclusion here involved
two stages. With invaluable help from research assistants, an extensive
search was made of movies, television series, novels, histories, memoirs,
biographies, and autobiographies produced in English in the United
States in the last 35 years dealing with one of the three designated busi-
ness sectors (IT, automobile manufacturing, financial trading).6 Three
criteria were then used to select texts from within this group. The text
had to be structured around a clearly identified individual or group of
individuals as protagonist. This excluded purely institutional or eco-
nomic histories. It had to focus primarily on the protagonist’s experience
in relation to the organization/industry. This excluded office romances
or thrillers and, more recently, memoirs of addiction or other personal
dysfunctions represented as resulting from participation in the industry.
Finally, the text needed to possess a significant cultural profile, an admit-
tedly subjective judgment based on such factors as sales and viewership,
media attention, critical reception, and recognition through high-profile
awards.7 Where multiple texts were effectively reproducing variations of
the same narrative, for example, texts about the early years of Bill Gates

6 The search was extensive, but we do not claim it was exhaustive. There are inevitably
relevant texts that have been inadvertently overlooked despite the best efforts of highly
motivated research assistants. The authors believe the texts selected can fairly be considered
representative in scope.
7 There are notable texts produced in the UK that would meet these criteria. The mul-

ti-award winning British playwright Caryl Churchill’s play Serious Money, first produced at
London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1987, is an obvious example. After a successful transfer
to the West End, a long run at Wyndham’s Theatre, and a Lawrence Olivier Award for
Best New Play, Serious Money was produced Off-Broadway in 1988. It closed after just 15
performances. The set of texts chosen for analysis was restricted to material produced and
first distributed in the US precisely because circumstances of production, distribution, and
reception can differ so widely from country to country.
 1 CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND METHODOLOGY 11

at Microsoft and Steve Jobs at Apple, the strongest exemplar meeting the
criteria just outlined was selected for inclusion and analysis.
This sifting process produced a set of 63 texts: 22 relating to IT, 28
to financial trading, and 13 to automobile manufacturing. The texts were
somewhat more heavily weighted to print than moving image media (36
and 27, respectively). The latter included feature films, documentary
films, “docudramas,” dramatic television series, television documentaries,
and television docudramas. The print texts encompassed histories writ-
ten for a general readership, autobiographies, biographies, and a single
novel. The final text set was overwhelmingly fact-based, with only five
purely fictional works. In six cases, a print text was also adapted to film.
Tables listing all the texts analyzed are included in the appendix.
For any of the three industries being considered, one can posit a null
hypothesis that individual narratives will fall randomly across the eight
fable types. An alternative hypothesis would be that the narratives clus-
ter around one or a few closely related fables. We identify such a clus-
ter as a “dominant fable.” Industries can also demonstrate narratives that
respond to the dominant fable, through such means as parody, inver-
sion, distortion, or subversion. We identify these as “counter fables”
(Borins 2011, 8 ff.) which can be instantiated as separate texts or as an
internal narrative counterpoint. Figures (2.1, 3.1, and 4.1) reproduce
the fable matrix for each of the three industries. Each clearly reveals a
unique pattern of narrative clustering. The analysis that follows focuses
on the dominant pattern for each industry, leaving the Figures to provide
the overview.
 CHAPTER 2

Insanely Great: The Dominant IT Fable

Abstract This chapter outlines a dominant nirvana fable of the success-

ful IT startup from the interrelated Microsoft and Apple origin stories
to recent instantiations concerning Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter,
and Uber. The popularization of this fable has channeled the potentially
disruptive ideology of digital innovation into the institutions of contem-
porary venture capitalism. The chapter also describes two counter-fables:
the thrown-over original partner elbowed out of the business and the
nightmare of the failed IT startup. The successful startup fable is now
being challenged by narratives about the IT industry’s rampant under-
representation and harassment of women, monopolization by the most
successful firms, and the covert but widespread use of the Internet and
social media for extremism.

Keywords Startup · Information technology · Hacker · Disruption

Harrassment

The young men (it is always men) have an idea: “killer” hard or soft-
ware that will change everything. Rejecting traditional educational and
career paths, defying business orthodoxies, they devote themselves to its
development. Holed up in their garage/basement/industrial loft, they
max out their relatives’ credit cards and dispense with most trappings of
normal adult life (salaries, personal relationships, proper nourishment,

© The Author(s) 2018 13

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
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14 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

daily hygiene). Their obsession bears fruit. They launch. Early adopters
are enthusiastic and savvy media types spread the word. Consumers take
notice. Angel investors and venture capitalists—“adult supervision”—
come on board and the happy ending is in sight: the IPO (initial public
offering). The twenty-something visionaries from the garage/basement/
industrial loft are now richer than they ever imagined. Growth accelerates
and revenue streams flow, benefiting all those capable of capitalizing on
the investment opportunity presented. And consumers have access to that
transformative device or app they have now learned they cannot live with-
out. It is the quintessential information technology Corporate Nirvana.
Figure 2.1 demonstrates that this familiar story of the insanely success-
ful digital startup is the dominant fable structuring most of the IT nar-
ratives analyzed here (15 out of 22). The HBO television series Silicon
Valley has been included in the table, but not counted in the total.
The series revolves around a startup, and employs many of the familiar
character and plot structures, but the company’s ultimate trajectory is
unclear. The series’s fifth season will be broadcast in 2018. One extremely
high-profile Corporate Nirvana narrative surveyed here is not a startup
but a turnaround: Louis Gerstner’s (2002) memoir Who Says Elephants
Can’t Dance? an account of IBM’s reinvention as a provider of integrated
technology solutions under his leadership. Gerstner’s narrative is undeni-
ably dramatic, involving the reversal of a policy of disaggregation already
underway, $7 billion in cost cutting, the end of the company’s long-
established culture of life-time employment resulting in extensive job
losses, and its commitment to an aggressive pursuit of a unique market
position. But the story he tells is not particularly reflective of the distinc-
tive trajectories and dynamics of the IT industry.1 Undoubtedly, as the
startups whose stories are represented as Nirvana narratives enter subse-
quent phases of growth and founders leave or are pushed out, there will
be more turnaround stories that adapt the form to the industry. For the
period we are considering, Gerstner’s text is an outlier.

1 Two accounts of Gerstner’s rescue of the company were produced by business journal-
ists and published in 1999: Garr’s IBM Redux: Lou Gerstner and the Business Turnaround
of the Decade and Slater’s Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of
IBM’s Lou Gerstner. Both conform closely to the established transformational corporate
leader, or “superhero CEO,” genre that will be discussed at length in relation to the auto
industry. Neither Garr nor Slater received cooperation from Gerstner himself or any of
IBM’s senior management.
 2 INSANELY GREAT: THE DOMINANT IT FABLE 15

Corporate Nirvana

Silicon Valley (PBS)

The Intel Trinity
Pirates of Silicon Valley
Steve Jobs (Isaacson, Stern,
Sorkin)
Triumph of the Nerds
The Everything Store
In the Plex
The Social Network,
Accidental Billionaires
The Facebook Effect
Hatching Twitter
Something Ventured
Who Says Elephants Can’t
Dance?
The Soul of a New Machine
Silicon Valley (HBO)
Sacrificial/Thrown Over Triumphant Critic Corporate Ripoff

Steve Jobs (Ron Wayne) The Circle

Pirates of Silicon Valley Steve Jobs: The Man in the
(Paterson) Machine
The Social Network (Saverin,
Winkelvoss)
Hatching Twitter (Glassman)
The Everything Store
(Kaphan)
Retributive Defeated Critic Inside Job

Corporate Nightmare

Startup.com
E-Dreams
Startup

Fig. 2.1 Information technology narratives

The most widely circulated and influential instantiations of the startup

fable for this period are the many iterations of the Microsoft and Apple
sagas. These include relatively early texts like the three-part documentary
Triumph of the Nerds produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting in 1995
and the moderately successful independently produced 1999 docudrama
Pirates of Silicon Valley, both of which focus as much on the personalities
of the main players as on the technological innovations, paying particular
16 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

attention to the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates dyad.2 Arguably, the canonical

version of the fable is Walter Isaacson’s exhaustive, and occasionally
exhausting, biography of Jobs, published in 2011 and written with
full access to its subject. Detailed accounts of other insanely successful
startups and their disruptive founders, written with similarly full access,
include Levy’s history of Google (In the Plex 2011), Kirkpatrick’s of
Facebook (The Facebook Effect 2010) and Bilton’s of Twitter (Hatching
Twitter 2013). Stone’s history of Amazon (The Everything Store 2013)
was not authorized by Jeff Bezos. While this may explain the inclusion of
extensive criticism of Bezos’s management style by Amazon employees,
none of the other texts offers pure hagiography. In fact, a euphemistically
characterized “intense” personality and “idiosyncratic” leadership style
frequently serve as markers of the protagonist’s status as visionary in this
fable. He manages, like he thinks, “different.” In her review of the recent
biography of PayPal founder and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, which does not
stint on anecdotes revealing a staggering lack of empathy, loyalty, and
basic interpersonal skills, Sue Halperin notes: “It’s as if inhumane behav-
ior were a necessary and expected part of the tech narrative. Without it,
the story loses its frisson. Would a biography like this be half as thrilling
if the protagonist were not a colossal jerk?” (Halperin 2015).
More than two decades of seismic technological, cultural, and finan-
cial shifts separate Wozniak, Jobs, and Gates’s now legendary epiphanies
at the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park and Page and Brin’s
equally legendary big idea in the doctoral program at Stanford. Yet their
narratives, and the others catalogued in Fig. 2.1, share certain structural
elements: the precocious protagonist(s) marked by their youth and intel-
lectual abilities; the eureka moment of the disruptive idea; the obsessive
pursuit of the enabling technology; the garage-band phase of the fledg-
ling company’s development, with its rejection of conventional corporate
hierarchies and managerial shibboleths; the inevitable need to formal-
ize operating procedures and “scale up” capacity and capital resources,
bringing outsiders into the fraternity; the personal and professional
conflicts that result. These narratives often have a ticking clock compo-
nent: funding is running out, backers are twitchy, there is a competitor

2 The fascination was both shared and fed by other popular culture media. To cite just

three “middle-brow” publications, between 1982 and 2011, Jobs appeared on the cover of
Time magazine eight times and Gates eleven. Between them, they also had twelve covers of
Newsweek.
 2 INSANELY GREAT: THE DOMINANT IT FABLE 17

gaining ground, the official launch date looms/has passed. And there is
frequently at least one major reversal, either technological or financial,
to be overcome through a combination of inspiration, desperation, luck,
and sheer audacity.
The Corporate Nirvana startup fable often also includes a version of
the Thrown-Over fable as a subordinate plot line. This accounts for the
appearance of certain texts in two cells of Fig. 2.1. (The name in brack-
ets indicates the superseded founder/partner.) Successful IT initiatives
demand highly specialized technical skill sets, as well as entrepreneur-
ial genius. This typically requires partnerships or small teams (bands of
brothers) in the early days of the venture. As it becomes more success-
ful, the balance of power will shift and either the less business-oriented
“code head” will step aside to pursue hacker obsessions (Wozniak and
Jobs) or the less aggressive/opportunistic/visionary partners will be
elbowed out by the alpha male who will become the face of the enter-
prise (Saverin and the Winklevoss brothers outflanked by Zuckerberg at
Facebook; Kaphan and Bezos at Amazon). Eberhard and Musk at Tesla
enact this fable as well, a reflection of the hybrid status of Tesla Motors
as an auto manufacturing enterprise with an IT DNA. This ruthlessness
may shadow but it does not ultimately undermine the narrative’s implicit
endorsement of its protagonist’s achievement. An exception here, as
its title suggests, is Mezrich’s (2010) account of the early history of
Facebook (The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale
of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal) which was based on the interviews
with Eduardo Saverin alone. Mark Zuckerberg refused to participate.
Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for director David Fincher’s 2010 film ver-
sion of the book, The Social Network, uses joint deposition-taking pro-
cesses with Saverin and the Winklevoss brothers in their lawsuits against
Zuckerberg as a structuring device. But, however, unsavory the legal
facts on which it is putatively based, the narrative focus and energy of the
film belong to the manic, driven, hyper-verbal, and obnoxiously intel-
ligent Zuckerberg rather than the sad-eyed Saverin or the twin Brooks
Brothers mannequins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, outflanked at
every step by the pushy outsider they hired to build a dating website for
Harvard students and who created Facebook instead.
The popular mythologizing of Jobs-Gates from the late 1980s
onwards effectively codified the startup fable in ways that reflect the
unique intellectual capital involved in digital technology ventures. But
it is a fable with a prehistory. Many of its defining elements are already
18 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

present in Tracy Kidder’s (1981) Pulitzer Prize winning The Soul of

a New Machine, a new journalism style account of the driven team of
young engineers and programmers (“the kids”) who did the impossi-
ble, building a game-changing “super-mini” computer at the upstart
Massachusetts mainframe manufacturer Data General and bringing it
to market in record time (Kidder 1981, 29–30). Their technological
achievements would be eclipsed by the personal computing revolution
just beginning. But the story of their cult-like dedication to the project
and its leader, the idiosyncratic working process they followed, and the
stubbornly noncorporate ethos of the project manager, engineer Tom
West, made The Soul of a New Machine nothing less than “the original
nerd epic” (Ratliff 2000) and West himself, according to a former col-
league and current technology blogger, “the original geek rock star”
(Sundman 2011).
Kidder’s book was published four years before Steven Levy’s Hackers:
Heroes of the Computer Revolution and it introduced what would become
the defining characteristics of the startup in the popular imagina-
tion: a sleep-deprived coterie of brilliant young men engaged in an all-
consuming technological quest, at once highly collaborative and fiercely
competitive. They are geeks and freaks and wire-heads with a touch of
the mad scientist, impatient of conventional wisdom, willing to try any-
thing, the antithesis of the IBM drones and by-the-book MBAs they
both pity and despise. “Anyone in Harvard Business School,” Kidder
quotes one of “the kids” as saying of the project’s management struc-
ture, “would have barfed” (Kidder 116). Levy was the chief technology
reporter for Newsweek, a contributor to Wired magazine from its first
issue, and is the author of a number of books about technology in addi-
tion to Hackers and In the Plex, including Insanely Great: The Life and
Times of the Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything (1994).
Levy’s books and journalism reproduced, amplified, and further circu-
lated the startup/hacker mythos first given mainstream cultural currency
by Kidder’s prize-winning work.
Where the narratives of Data General’s “kids” and Levy’s hackers
differ from the later instantiations of the startup fable is the complete
absence of the profit motive. Tom West and his “Hardy Boys” were sala-
ried employees whose motivation, and reward, were the engineer’s prize
of building the machine: “knowing that the thing you designed works,
and works almost the way you expected it would” (Kidder 273). For
the early figures of the personal computing movement, when it was a
 2 INSANELY GREAT: THE DOMINANT IT FABLE 19

movement and not yet an industry, “the hacker ethic” meant a hands-on
imperative to “try anything, experiment endlessly, but you should not do
it for financial gain” (Levy 1985 [2010], 86). Software and digital tech-
nology, like information, want to be free. Levy’s narrative is, in effect,
an extended elegy for the demise of the hacker creed with its visions of a
dawning digital utopia and its counterculture rejection of the imperative
to “monetize”: “The proper hacker response to competitors was to give
them your business plan and technical information, so they might make
better products and the world in general might improve” (230).3
The startup fable eliminates this aspect of the hacker creed entirely
to define, and valorize, a cultural template for digital entrepreneurship.
It does so by coupling the anarchic intellectual and creative methods,
the style, of the hacker to the mechanisms and structures of late twen-
tieth-century finance capitalism. Digital utopianism, belief in the trans-
formative powers of technology, are still operative, but these are centered
on either cultural/social disruption or the revolutionizing of modes
of consumption and revenue generation, and are now entirely bound
up with the free play of a deregulated market rather than any alterna-
tive to it. The startup fable functions to contain the disruption it cele-
brates, licensing iconoclasm, indeed codifying its forms, thereby ensuring
that nothing fundamental to the existing profit-driven system is broken.
An appendix to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Levy’s Hackers
quotes Paul Graham of Y Combinator, a leading startup incubator, on
the importance of hacker trappings in securing capital: “We tell found-
ers presenting at Demo Day, ‘If you dress up too much, you will read as
a stupid person to the investors. They’re coming to see the next Larry
and Sergey, not some junior MBA type’” (Levy 2010, Appendix C).
Rejection of the conventional business model is the business model of
the “new” economy.

3 Turner, in From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), provides a detailed archaeol-

ogy of the cultural networks that linked 1960s countercultural movements to California’s
emerging personal computing industry, with a particular focus on the cultural entrepre-
neur Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalogue and the early networked community the
WELL. The book’s final chapters analyze the role of Brand and Wired magazine in defining
and promoting the doctrine of the technology entrepreneur as the agent of inevitable, and
essential, social, and cultural transformation. It is, as Turner documents in detail, a doctrine
that makes deregulation of technology industries an article of faith and which explains the
Wired magazine cover interview of Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich by technology doy-
enne Esther Dyson in August 1995.
20 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

New technology ventures are notoriously risky and, indeed, the

majority fail, a fact of economic life acknowledged by the startup fable
in the “near death” experiences encountered by the protagonists en
route to their eventual triumph. Three of the IT texts considered here
instantiate this implicit shadow fable. Each one chronicles a Corporate
Nightmare in which a faulty business plan, or the inability to execute a
viable one due to external circumstances (technical setbacks, failure to
secure funding, mistiming the market) or internal ones (personal limi-
tations, interpersonal conflicts), or a combination of all three, result in
bankruptcy, loss of investors’ money, and unemployment. Two of these
texts, the documentary films E-Dreams (2001) and Startup.com (2000),
center on pairs of young male protagonists clearly inspired by the suc-
cessful startup fable whose dreams of Gates-Jobs like success founder in
the dot-com bubble of 1999–2000. The third, Startup: A Silicon Valley
Adventure, is founder Jerry Kaplan’s memoir of the birth, growing pains,
and early demise of Go Corporation which had sought to pioneer port-
able “pen computing” in the late 1980s. Kaplan had little in common
with the young strivers of Kozmo and GovWorks, the still-born compa-
nies of the films. He had been the chief technologist at Lotus and his
venture received the personal support of its CEO, Mitchell Kapor. But
Go, Kozmo and GovWorks all burned through the extensive capital they
raised (75, 250, and 60 million dollars, respectively) and were out of
business within five years or less of their founding.
Narrativizations of the failed startup fable have gained significant cul-
tural currency, particularly in the years since the 2009 global financial cri-
sis. In April of 2014, Wired magazine, the self-appointed official organ
of the digital revolution, featured a lengthy story entitled “No Exit: One
Start-Up’s Struggle to Survive the Silicon Valley Goldrush” (Lewis-Kraus
2014). Focusing on yet another pair of visionary young men, its author
chronicled their increasingly desperate, ultimately futile efforts to keep
their venture afloat and the high personal price they paid. By this point,
the story was hardly new. What was significant was Lewis-Kraus’s conten-
tion that failed startups had become a necessary feature of the new econ-
omy’s ecosystem, producing ideas, technologies, and a skilled labor pool
to sustain the unrelenting growth of a small number of existing compa-
nies. It is a system designed “to turn strivers into subcontractors … doing
low-overhead, low-risk R&D for five corporate giants.” And the strivers
themselves have accepted the system, treating a failed startup as “an alter-
native to grad school.” It is a point Martinez makes repeatedly in his 2016
book Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon
 2 INSANELY GREAT: THE DOMINANT IT FABLE 21

Valley. Counter-fables typically function as critiques of, or correctives to,

the values and assumptions of the fable they engage. In this instance, the
counter-fable has been incorporated into the larger narrative of the new
digital economy. As one reviewer of Chaos Monkeys noted, the book will
inevitably be read not as a cautionary tale, but as a how-to manual.
IT narratives celebrating entrepreneurial disrupters and their insanely
great brainchildren continue to be produced and widely circulated.4 But
the dominance of the Corporate Nirvana fable they instantiate is being
challenged from two perspectives. The first addresses what a Wired mag-
azine 2014 story called “Tech’s ugly gender problem,” an issue that has
been a subject of increasing scholarly and popular media attention. The
startup fable has always been gendered, from its first iterations in the
garages and computer clubs of the 1970s. And the template continues to
hold: that same Wired article cites data from the venture capital information
website Pitchbook that only 13% of venture backed companies had at least
one female cofounder. It also quotes the advice given to a female founder
after being turned down for funding: “Hire a young guy in a hoodie”
(Lapowsky 2014). Their exclusion from the protagonist’s role in the startup
fable is only one aspect of women’s alternative technology narrative. The
other, now regularly featuring in the headlines of business media, concerns
the unrelenting sexual harassment, discriminatory promotion and compen-
sation structures, and overt misogyny typical of the “disruptive” culture of
many IT firms, both behemoths and startups. Nonprofit organizations like
Women Who Code, Project Include, and the Anita Borg Institute are work-
ing to change the IT narrative at the source by bringing more women and
minorities into programming.5 As a recent spate of media reports, whistle-
blowing, and a few high-profile firings at IT and venture capital firms make
plain, harassment, and discriminatory work environments are unlikely to be
written out of the tech story either easily or soon.

4 A recent sampling includes Adam Lashinsky’s Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World

Domination, Leigh Gallagher’s The AirBNB Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an
Industry, Made Billions and Created Plenty of Controversy, and Brad Stone’s The Upstarts:
How Uber, AirBNB, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the
World, all of which were published in 2017.
5 The San Francisco-based systems engineer and writer Ellen Ullman has long been a voice

for this movement, beginning with her 1997 memoir Close to the Machine: Technophilia and
Its Discontents. A new collection of her essays, Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology
was published in 2017 and has been widely reviewed. While the essays—some newly writ-
ten, some dating from the early days of the Internet—reflect on a wide range of IT issues,
reviewers have focused almost exclusively on questions of gender and diversity.
22 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

The second challenge to the dominant IT fable presents a distinctly

dystopian vision of the industry’s technical achievements, corporate
and financial triumphs, and real-world impacts. The title of Jonathan
Taplin’s (2017) Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and
Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy encapsulates
this alternative view. Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, published in 2013,
imagines an increasingly sinister social media/networking conglomer-
ate controlling 90% of the world’s online searches and using its inva-
sive technologies to implement global mind-control and surveillance.
The novel was moderately successful and seriously though not particu-
larly enthusiastically reviewed. A film adaptation starring Tom Hanks
and Emma Watson was released in 2017 to uniformly negative reviews,
though it performed reasonably well at the box office. Given the
increasing awareness of the scourge of social media enabled fake news
and its role in the recent US election, however, as well as the use of
the Internet for radicalization and recruitment of extremists of all kinds,
and the aggressively monopolistic positioning of industry juggernauts
like Amazon, texts like Taplin’s may point to the emergence and circu-
lation of a different technology fable, a new form of Corporate Ripoff
whose contours are only now beginning to be seen. It is a fable whose
implications may indeed prove world-changing, in profoundly disturb-
ing, and entirely unprecedented, ways.6

Kendall (2011) analyzes the continuing reinforcement of the “white and nerdy” stereo-
type that excludes women and (some) men of color from popular culture representations of
“techies.” Leslie Miley, a former Director of Engineering at Twitter, and the only African-
American in a leadership position there, has spoken and written widely on the limitations of
so-called diversity initiatives within the technology industry. See, for example, a November
6, 2015 interview with Miley posted on NPR’s Code Switch (http://www.npr.org/sec-
tions/codeswitch/2015/11/06/), accessed September 24, 2017. These are, of course,
extremely complex and consequential issues, involving economic, cultural, legal, and politi-
cal questions that cannot be adequately addressed here.
6 Taplin is a fascinating figure whose eclectic background (concert and film producer, VP
for Media Mergers and Acquisitions at Merrill Lynch, founder and CEO of Intertainer, a
video-on-demand provider for cable and broadband, Director Emeritus of the Annenberg
Innovation Lab at USC) is reminiscent of the earliest days of American digital culture. He
has worked with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. His
2011 memoir Outlaw Blues: Adventures in the Counter-Culture Wars was one of the first
works created specifically as an enhanced ebook for the iPad, embedding more than 100
videos into its text. Taplin was appointed to the California Broadband Taskforce in 2007
and consults widely to both government and industry.
 CHAPTER 3

Cults of Personality: Fables of the

Automobile Manufacturing Industry

Abstract Automobile manufacturing is a highly complex activity,

particularly subject to external, macroeconomic, and geopolitical factors.
Its narratives, however, center on transformative CEOs. It is a structure
that dates back to the earliest years of the industry with the representa-
tion of Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan as exemplary business lead-
ers. This chapter analyzes turnaround and debacle texts to explore the
function of leader-centered narratives. Using the construct of the attri-
bution to leadership it charts the ways in which heroicized CEOs like
Lee Iacocca, Allan Mulally, Elon Musk and, paradoxically, conspicuous
failures like GM’s Roger Smith and Rick Wagoner, serve to reaffirm the
agency of the individual in an increasingly impersonal, globalized, and
corporatized world.

Keywords Leadership · Turnaround · Complexity · Manufacturing

Electric car

In 1985 the management scholars Meindl, Ehrlich, and Dukerich

published a seminal study investigating subjects’ assumptions regard-
ing the causation of organizational outcomes. Drawing on experimental
survey data, their influential article “The Romance of Leadership” con-
cluded that “the concept of leadership is a permanently entrenched part
of the socially constructed reality that we bring to bear in our analysis

© The Author(s) 2018 23

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_3
24 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

of organizations” (1985, 78). Leadership consistently functioned as the

primary explanatory category enabling both participants in, and observ-
ers of, organizations to account for outcomes more accurately viewed as
the result of complex interactions of multiple factors, both internal and
external. It is, the authors suggested, something like a secular cult, “a
faith in the potential if not the actual efficacy of those individuals who
occupy the elite positions of formal organizational authority” (79). More
than thirty years later, scholars of a succeeding generation returned to
this analytic construct to “demystify” the phenomenon of the business
celebrity. Guthey, Clark, and Jackson include in this category entrepre-
neurs, chief executives, and management consultant gurus. The authors’
primary focus is the network of cultural intermediaries and the “clusters
of promotional activities, representational practices, and cultural dynam-
ics” producing, reproducing, and maintaining these exemplary busi-
ness personalities (Guthey et al. 2009, 36). But their analysis repeatedly
returns to the premise that the function of these cultural products is reas-
surance: they serve as guarantors of a power of individual agency increas-
ingly perceived as threatened by “the dominance of business institutions
in contemporary society” (4), embodying but also allaying “debates and
conflicts over what it means to be a person in a corporate society” (14).1
These theorizations of the function of the CEO-leader are particu-
larly useful in probing a structural feature that shapes virtually all the
auto industry texts being considered here. The dominant IT fable of
the successful start-up clearly featured what Guthey and his coauthors
call “celebrity entrepreneurs” functioning as “prototypical figures of
pure agency” (13). But as central as Jobs, Gates, and their hoodie-clad
successors and emulators undoubtedly are to the fable, what that fable

1 The historian J.O. Robertson, in his 1980 study American Myth, American Reality,

had advanced a similar thesis, though using very different language. Robertson noted the
importance of “the controlling individual, the individual possessed of vast power, able to
make far-reaching decisions, the individual of unimaginable wealth or success,” to what he
called “the mythology of corporations” (178). For Robertson, this figure performed an
essential function as the American economy transformed from rural and agrarian to urban
and industrialized, reconciling earlier myths of frontier adventure, self-reliance, and individ-
ualism with the increasingly centralized organization of labor and production in structures
controlled by a handful of immensely powerful men. Robertson identifies Andrew Carnegie
as an important transitional figure in this process, noting the extensive newspaper and mag-
azine coverage he received, his lecture tours, and the books he authored with titles like
Road to Business Success published in 1885.
 3 CULTS OF PERSONALITY: FABLES OF THE AUTOMOBILE … 25

Corporate Nirvana

My Life and Work:

Autobiography of Henry
Ford*
My Years at GM*
The Fog of War
Iacocca
American Icon
Revenge of the Electric Car
Gung-Ho
Elon Musk
Sacrificial/Thrown Over Triumphant Critic Corporate Rip-Off

Flash of Genius Roger & Me (Roger Smith)

Elon Musk (Eberhard)
Retributive Defeated Critic Inside Job

Roger & Me (Michael Moore)

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Corporate Nightmare

Tucker
Overhaul
Once Upon a Car

*Predates period of this study

Fig. 3.1 Automobile manufacturing narratives

ultimately codifies and valorizes is a process for channeling technologi-

cal innovation and potentially disruptive intellectual capital into existing
financial and corporate mechanisms. In contrast to the IT narratives, the
auto industry texts surveyed here, and shown in Fig. 3.1, do not clus-
ter as tightly within a single cell, though there is a weighting toward
the Corporate Nirvana. What unites these texts across all the cells of
the matrix they populate is a shared focus, both structural and thematic,
on the figure of the catalyst CEO, the single figure at the center who
changes everything. This is true whether we consider the turnaround
narratives of Lee Iacocca at Chrysler (Iacocca and Novak, Iacocca: An
Autobiography 1984) at the beginning of our period and Alan Mulally at
Ford (Hoffman, American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford
Motor Company 2012) at the end, the Corporate Nightmare of Richard
Wagoner’s tenure at GM, culminating in his highly public firing by the
Obama Administration’s “Auto Czar,” Steve Rattner, as the company
26 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

went into government-mandated bankruptcy (Rattner, Overhaul: An

Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the
Auto Industry 2010; Vlasic, Once Upon a Car: The Fall and Resurrection
of America’s Big Three Auto Makers GM, Ford, and Chrysler 2011), or
the cinematic stalking of the hapless Roger Smith of GM, emblem of all
that has gone wrong in the filmmaker’s hometown of Flint, Michigan,
in Michael Moore’s genre-bending 1989 documentary Roger and Me.
Meindl and his coauthors noted that the “attribution to leadership” is
most likely to occur when organizational performance is either very good
or very bad (85) and these texts attest to that. Whether celebratory or
accusatory, stories of turnaround “miracles” or debacles of incompetence
and/or corporate heartlessness and bad faith, they share a structuring
assumption of the causative influence of a single individual, an assump-
tion that necessarily shapes both the form and the content of their
narratives.2
The centrality of the chief executive to representations of the auto-
mobile industry in American popular culture has a long history, dat-
ing back to its earliest years. In many ways, Henry Ford and Alfred P.
Sloan of GM functioned as the Jobs and Gates of the early decades of
the twentieth century, at once the agents and the embodiments of a
technological and cultural revolution in which cars were the disrupt-
ers, transforming patterns of industrial production, corporate organiza-
tion, marketing, consumption, leisure, and the physical landscape of the
nation itself. Ford, the immigrant farmer’s son, was the self-taught, intui-
tive genius, a showman, and relentless self-promoter, whose carefully cul-
tivated folksiness made him a popular celebrity. Business scholars King
and Fine describe Ford as “the best-known business leader of the first
half of the 20th century,” observing that throughout the 1920s Ford’s
press coverage was exceeded only by Calvin Coolidge’s (2000, 73). In
fact, the authors note that in 1923 Ford was favored three to one over

2 Errol Morris’s award-winning documentary about the life and times of Robert
McNamara has been included in the Corporate Nirvana cell. This dark and searching
morality tale may seem a very unlikely text to feature here. Admittedly the film’s focus is
primarily—and understandably—on McNamara’s experiences in the Kennedy and Johnson
Administrations, first during the Cuban Missile Crisis, then as Secretary of State during
the escalation of the Vietnam War. Early portions of the film, however, detail McNamara’s
highly influential time at Ford (1946–1960) where he pioneered safety improvements
including seatbelts, as well as leading development of the small and economical Ford
Falcon as a response to the immensely successful VW Beetle.
 3 CULTS OF PERSONALITY: FABLES OF THE AUTOMOBILE … 27

Coolidge as a presidential candidate. Their description of Ford’s launch

of the successor to the Model T, the Model A, in 1927 suggests that
Jobs himself would have had little to teach him about the creation of
consumer demand. After shrouding the entire development process in
well-publicized secrecy, Ford rented Madison Square Garden for one
week to unveil the new car to the public. Over one million people viewed
it (King and Fine, 81) and over two million Model As were sold in the
first year of its production.3
Sloan, the wealthy, MIT-trained engineer, was the foil to the pop-
ulist Ford, a data-driven, publicity-averse chart-maker whose 1919
“Organization Study” transformed General Motors into “the prototype
of the twentieth century business corporation” (Houghton 2013, 332)
and whose 1964 memoir was hailed as a landmark of business strat-
egy. If Ford was “the people’s tycoon” (the title of a 2005 biography),
Sloan was the corporate executive’s hero. In fact, when a new edition
of Sloan’s My Years with General Motors was published in 1990, the
front cover featured a glowing endorsement from Bill Gates who called
it “probably the best book to read if you want to read only one book
about business.” And Gates would repeat the praise nine years later in
his Business @ the Speed of Thought where he called My Years at General
Motors “my favorite business book.”4 In their very different ways, the
grandstanding Ford and the resolutely reticent Sloan functioned as

3 The authors note Ford’s increasingly virulent anti-Semitism throughout the 1920s and
30s, but do not address the issue of its role in his populist cult. Recent scholarship has
greatly expanded our understanding of the extent of Ford’s active support for the Nazi
regime in Germany, see for example M. Wallace, The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles
Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich (2003). Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot
Against America imagines an alternative history in which Ford serves as Secretary of the
Interior in President Charles Lindbergh’s isolationist administration.
4 “Sloan’s” book has a complicated genealogy. Although completed sometime before

1964, it was not published until its coauthor, the business journalist John McDonald, took
legal action against Sloan and GM. The company had pressured Sloan to withhold publi-
cation, fearing the book’s revelations might trigger anti-trust investigations. McDonald is
credited as editor, but subsequent research has revealed the far greater extent of his role
as well as that of the lead researcher for the book, Alfred Chandler. Chandler would use
his commissioned research in the GM archives as the basis for his landmark study Strategy
and Structure. McKenna (2006) in “Writing the Ghost-Writer Back in: Alfred Sloan, Alfred
Chandler, John McDonald and the Intellectual Origins of Corporate Strategy,” provides a
detailed analysis of McDonald’s and Chandler’s intellectual and practical contributions to
“Sloan’s” book.
28 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

embodiments of the two key dimensions of this increasingly important,

and increasingly complex, sector of the American economy: production
process innovation and the rationalization of corporate structure and
control.
Manufacturing cars is a hugely complex enterprise, dependent on the
interactions of innumerable internal and external variables,5 and particu-
larly subject to macroeconomic and geopolitical events: fluctuations in
gas prices; changing environmental and safety regulatory regimes; and
trade agreements and tariff wars.6 Then, too, as with any business enter-
prise, the wild cards of timing and luck also play a part. An online reeval-
uation of the much-maligned Richard Wagoner of GM in Automotive
News, five years after the government bailout, noted the irony that Alan
Mulally’s widely praised managerial coup of, in the author’s words,
“mortgaging enough of Ford in 2006” to avoid the devastating effect
of the freeze of the global credit markets in 2008 must be attributed at
least in part to the relatively worse financial condition of his company
at that time: “Wagoner may have suffered simply because he had GM
on a slightly better glide path and didn’t need to take what seemed like
such a drastic measure” (Johnson 2014).7 If we accept the premise of
Meindl and his coauthors, it is precisely the fact of the auto industry’s
particularly high combination of complexity, uncertainty, and vulnerabil-
ity to external factors and events that accounts for the repeated framing
of its narratives on the premise of the decisive agency of the “man at
the top.”8 In their words, “the faith in leadership is likely to exceed the
reality of control and will be used to account for variance that is in fact

5A recent scholarly article on the restructuring of the American auto industry after the
2008 recession calculates that “the roughly 15,000 auto parts that go into vehicles are pro-
duced at several thousand parts plants” (Klier and Rubenstein 2013, 152).
6 In interviews broadcast on the Canadian public television network’s cable news channel

(CBC NewsNetwork), city councilors from Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, as
well as the governor of Michigan, noted in response to US President Trump’s declared
intention to “reopen” the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that a single
auto part may cross the border between the two countries fifteen times in the course of
production and assembly. The interviews can be found in audio form at http://www.cbc.
ca/player/play/899000387582. They were aired as part of a special “Power and Politics”
episode filmed at the University of Windsor on Wednesday March 15, 2017.
7 Mulally negotiated $23.6 billion in financing just prior to the subprime mortgage crash.

8 Until the appointment of Mary Barra as the Chair and CEO of General Motors in

2015, no woman had held the position of chief executive of a major global automaker.
 3 CULTS OF PERSONALITY: FABLES OF THE AUTOMOBILE … 29

uncontrollable” (Meindl et al. 1985, 99). It is a faith that implies a

particular narrative structure, imposing not just coherence and purpose
but a familiar plot (the hero’s quest) on entities and processes that have
steadily become more diffuse and less susceptible to representation, con-
taining anxiety by affirming the determinant agency of the individual.9
Of course, the leader-centered narrative is not unique to the auto
industry. But that industry produced what is arguably the most influ-
ential business leader narrative in twentieth-century American popu-
lar culture, courtesy of a brash, Italian-American car salesman, and one
that would serve as a template for innumerable examples of “tycoon-
lit” that would follow, in North America and far beyond.10 It would be
hard to exaggerate the cultural profile of Iacocca: An Autobiography.
For two successive years the New York Times ranked it as the best-selling
hard-cover non-fiction book in the US. By 1986, over 2.6 million cop-
ies had been sold and Iacocca himself was receiving five thousand let-
ters a month and more than three thousand speaking invitations a year
(Dianisopoulos 1988, 227). His syndicated column appeared in over
one hundred newspapers (Geist 1986) and he was featured twice on
the cover of Time magazine, first as “Detroit’s Comeback Kid” (March
21, 1983) and then with the cover text “I Gotta Tell Ya: America Loves
Listening to Lee” (April 1, 1985).
The story of how the blunt-talking, hard-selling son of Italian immi-
grants rescued one of America’s industrial icons not only established a
template for subsequent business narratives, it enshrined the explanatory
construct of the transformational corporate leader, in management theory
as well as the popular imagination. An analysis of popular media coverage
of the Chrysler saga and Iacocca’s role in it, from 1977 to 1985, notes
that it “unfolded in the press almost like a weekly serial,” with Iacocca
himself compared to both Rocky and Indiana Jones. The title of the
1985 Time article refers to him as “a spunky tycoon turned superstar”
(Dianisopoulos 1988, 227–229). At the same time, the emerging school
of management theory organizing under the rubric of “transformational

9 Guthey et al. offer an illuminating discussion of this issue in their chapter “The Visual
Politics of Corporate Representation” (see pp. 78 and ff.).
10 Skapinker, in his article “The American Global Dream,” analyzes the difficulties

faced by celebrity CEOs and entrepreneurs in “the emerging market set” in adapting Lee
Iacocca’s Horatio Alger fable to their very different national mythologies and economic
conditions. It is something, Skapinker notes, which they uniformly seek to do (157).
30 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

leadership” found in Iacocca both its exemplar and its evidence. As a

recent study notes, “the explicit connection between ‘superior leader-
ship performance’ and Lee Iacocca was a founding tenet in the initial TL
[transformational leadership] writing” (Spector 2014, 366). An influen-
tial early TL paper by the scholars Tichy and Ulrich published, fittingly,
in the Sloan Management Review in 1984 explicitly identified Chrysler’s
CEO as “one of the most dramatic examples of transformational man-
agement and organizational revitalization,” somberly asserting that
unless more such leaders are produced “we are not very optimistic about
the revitalization of the American economy” (59–60). Subsequent schol-
ars repeated the authors’ assertions, despite the absence within the arti-
cle of anecdotal evidence, interview transcripts, or hard data to support
their claims of Iacocca’s “transformative” effects on employee morale,
workers’ job satisfaction, or general corporate culture. As a recent reas-
sessment observes, Iacocca’s turnaround at Chrysler may have become
“a staple of business and administrative courses at universities,” but the
company in 1985 was much the same as it had been in 1978, minus
most of its multinational structure. By 1991, it was in trouble again.
Essentially, the author concludes, “Iacocca was a salesman, and his great-
est sale was Chrysler’s crisis,” and himself (Anastakis 2007).
Even corporate boards, which might have been presumed to under-
stand the complex nature of their own industries at least, succumbed
to the cult. Writing for The Guardian in 2002, the American business
journalist James Surowiecki gave an unequivocal answer to the question
posed in the title of a lengthy op-ed essay: “Did Iacocca Ruin American
Business?” Tracing the effects of the “superhero CEO” phenomenon in
sky-rocketing executive compensation, Surowiecki observed, “The shift
in Main Street’s perception of CEOs would not have mattered so much
had people in the boardrooms not also bought into the myth of the
CEO as superhero. But they did. Companies everywhere wanted their
own Iacocca.” This despite the well-known fact that “Chrysler only sur-
vived because of a government bail-out and some well-timed interven-
tion against Japanese imports” (Surowiecki 2002).11 For Surowiecki, the
causality is clear. The conjunction of the myth of the “corporate savior”

11 Seven years later, they were still wanting one. A columnist for Forbes writing in March

2009 to explain “Why Rick Wagoner Had to Go” informed his readers “What GM needs
in this crisis, of course, is a spirited leader. . . . We’re talking about the likes of Lee Iacocca”
(Flint 2009).
 3 CULTS OF PERSONALITY: FABLES OF THE AUTOMOBILE … 31

with the widespread practice of exorbitant executive compensation

through stock options inevitably created a system of perverse incen-
tives at the highest levels: “If it weren’t for Iacocca, it is unlikely that we
would be talking about Enron and WorldCom today.”12 The issue was
not merely one of attribution error but an increasingly entrenched fatal
flaw in the system itself. It is a construct we will be encountering repeat-
edly in the financial services texts.
Iacocca’s turnaround “miracle” came at a time of profound national
malaise. He became president of Chrysler in late 1978, Chairman John
Riccardo announcing the appointment at the same time as a record $158.5
million loss in the company’s third quarter. US President Jimmy Carter
delivered his “crisis of the American spirit” television address six months
later in July 1979.13 Anastakis notes that for many Americans Chrysler’s
impending collapse “represented the end of American postwar economic
hegemony and the deindustrialization of North America.” Iacocca effec-
tively tapped this anxiety, making Chrysler’s recovery a metaphor for
reclaiming American industrial initiative and national pride, appearing as
pitchman in Chrysler’s television ads invoking “the stuff America was made
of” and promising to “beat the Japanese at their own game.” Not every-
one bought Iacocca’s patriotic pitch, however, since his rescue of Chrysler
depended on securing both a government bailout and protectionist action
against the Japanese. For Thomas Murphy, the chairman of General
Motors, this did not constitute a return to American industrial glory or the
pioneering spirit of self-reliance: “I do not think that is in accordance with
what made this country great,” he remarked austerely of the government’s
plan to rescue Chrysler (quoted in Anastakis).

12 Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana published his academic study

of the issue Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs
in 2002, shortly after Surowiecki’s essay appeared. Surowiecki refers to it within his own
discussion.
13 The full text of Carter’s speech is available at the website of The American Presidency

Project, (http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=32596), accessed September 27, 2017.

The relevant passage comes early in the speech in Carter’s description of the true threat
facing the nation, which is not energy crises, inflation, or foreign enemies: “The threat is
nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the
very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing
doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our
Nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and
the political fabric of America.”
32 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

It is precisely the avoidance of government intervention that was at

the heart of the popular celebration of Alan Mulally’s tenure at Ford
three decades later. And this too came at a time of profound economic,
social, and cultural unease. Hoffman’s American Icon did not achieve the
“blockbuster” status of Iacocca’s biography, but it was widely reviewed
and excerpted, spent weeks on best-seller lists, and featured prominently
on numerous rankings of best business and non-fiction books in 2012.
Reviewers made much of the book’s depiction of Mulally’s quintessen-
tial Americanness, describing him as “an inveterate optimist from Kansas
with a wholesome grin” (Vaughn 2012), noting his “farm boy exterior”
and “constantly chipper, boosterish presence” (Reed 2012), one going
so far as to compare the gangly, sandy-haired Mulally to a character
from a Preston Sturges movie, “all ‘aw shucks’ and ‘gee whiz’” (Taylor
2012).14 Though the same reviewer did note this was a farm boy with
a $29.5 million pay check in 2011, “the biggest Detroit payday since
Lee Iacocca got $23.6 million from Chrysler in 1986.”15 The details
of Mulally’s turnaround strategies receive respectful attention in these
reviews: the insistence on data-driven management, the promotion of
a culture of collaboration and teamwork, the sell-off of prestige brands
like Jaguar and Land Rover to focus on core markets, the elimination
of all corporate level meetings except for the weekly mandatory busi-
ness plan review and the “special-attention review” which occurred daily
during crucial periods and at which use of BlackBerrys was banned. But
ultimately Mulally’s “miracle” is defined as nothing less than the pres-
ervation of the true spirit of American manufacturing, Hoffman’s nar-
rative being read as a tribute to “the ingenuity, grit and optimism that
once defined American industry and to capitalism played with govern-
ment on the sidelines” (Vaughn 2012). In this reading, Mulally rewrites
the inconvenient chapters of Iacocca’s story (government interven-
tion, protectionism, cyclical crises) and reaffirms the essential role of

14 He may have meant a Frank Capra movie. Two of Capra’s favorite male stars were the
lanky, laconic, all-American icons Gary Cooper and James Stewart, while the small-town
naïf who beats the sophisticates at their own game is a familiar Capra motif.
15 A Reuters article reporting Mulally’s compensation, noted that the bulk of it came in

the form of stock options, and was therefore dependent on the performance of the com-
pany’s shares: Surowiecki’s point again. (http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ford/ford-
ceo-pay-rose-11-percent-to-29-5-million-in-2011-idUSBRE82T1AJ20120330), accessed
September 29, 2017.
 3 CULTS OF PERSONALITY: FABLES OF THE AUTOMOBILE … 33

the transformational leader precisely at a time of almost unimaginably

complex external challenges. For the business journalist Joe Nocera,
writing recently on Bloomberg.com, this was simply “one of the greatest
comebacks in American business history,” with Mulally a latter-day Clark
Kent “donning his superhero cape” (Nocera 2017), while an online col-
umnist for Forbes predicts that this narrative, too, “will likely be studied
by business students for years to come” (Caldicott 2014).
Michael Moore’s Roger and Me had also effectively rewritten the
Iacocca story well before Mulally’s apotheosis. It did so by inverting
Iacocca’s founding assumptions. The film makes the beleaguered Roger
Smith of GM an emblem not just of the decline of Flint but of the evils
of late-twentieth-century American capitalism itself, a supervillain CEO
laying waste to the industrial heartland. Dismissing accusations of inaccu-
racies, errors of chronology, and possible misrepresentations leveled most
notably by Pauline Kael in a scathing New Yorker review, Roger Ebert
hailed Moore’s film as “an original work of art on the subject of cor-
porate greed” (Ebert 1990). A reviewer for the Washington Post agreed,
noting that Moore transforms Smith, who presided over a catastrophic
period in GM’s history and was voted one of “history’s ten worst auto
chiefs” by Fortune, into a “mythic” figure: “the personification of the
heartless capitalist” (Hinson 1990). In 2014, to mark the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the release of Roger and Me, the Detroit Free Press ana-
lyzed the film’s legacy. Its culture critic concluded that however “polit-
ical” Moore’s film may once have seemed, it is now best known as “the
little movie that changed the face of documentary filmmaking” (Hinds
2014), paving the way for other idiosyncratic, highly personal, satiric,
and unabashedly entertaining documentaries like Morgan Spurlock’s
2004 Super Size Me.16 What it did not change was the mythologizing
of the CEO within popular culture representations, whether as hero or
villain.
There is no cell in the auto industry matrix for a fable of Corporate
Utopia. If there were, a single figure, and his singular narrative, would
undoubtedly belong there: Elon Musk and the story of Tesla Motors.
Musk acquired a controlling interest in Tesla with some of the additional

16 Moore continues to make highly personal documentaries in the calculatedly outra-

geous style he first defined in Roger and Me. His film Bowling for Columbine won the 2002
Academy Award for Best Documentary. Moore addressed Wall Street and the financial crisis
with Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009.
34 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

fortune he realized when his second Internet startup, PayPal, was

acquired by eBay in 2002. His first, Zip2, a searchable business direc-
tory/mapping application was bought by Compaq in 1999, netting
Musk $22 million at the age of twenty-eight. Having instantiated the
dominant IT fable twice by the age of thirty-one, Musk then reversed
Silicon Valley’s first article of faith, “bits not atoms,” and invested $70
million in a fledgling venture in iconic Menlo Park, California whose
cofounders were seeking to build electric cars powered by lithium ion
batteries. This despite “the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup
succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a
successful electric car startup was never” (Urban 2015).17 Musk invested
the rest of his startup fortune in the aerospace venture SpaceX.
In the narrowest terms, Musk’s accomplishment with Tesla was to
adapt the mindset and methods of the Internet and software industries,
what one aerospace manufacturer who produced parts for SpaceX called
Musk’s “build quick and learn quickly” philosophy (Vance 2015, 197),
to a pillar (some would say dinosaur) of the old economy. Ashlee Vance,
Musk’s biographer, defines this “harmonious melding of software, elec-
tronics, advanced materials, and computing horsepower” (Vance, 22)
as Musk’s unique skill. The reviewer of Vance’s book in The Financial
Times goes further calling it “a particular genius” (Waters 2015). In
seven years, Musk’s particular genius transformed Tesla from a company
on the brink of bankruptcy to a publicly traded enterprise with a market
capitalization of $31 billion (Urban June 2, 2015).
Reviews of both Vance’s biography and Chris Paine’s 2011 docu-
mentary Revenge of the Electric Car, however, make clear that Musk is
rarely viewed in narrow terms. For Slate’s senior technology writer Will
Oremus he is a figure of “boundless ambition … [and] more vision

17 The quotation comes from one of several long blogs written by Tim Urban on the

website Wait But Why? Musk is a fan of the site and contacted the blogger, inviting him
to write about Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity, visiting the enterprises and interviewing
Musk himself. As Urban explains in the introduction to his first post, Musk told him that
he felt the electric car, aerospace, and solar power industries “confused people” and that
Urban might be interested in helping make them more understandable. Urban was inter-
ested, though he concedes that interviewing Zeus about the process of throwing lightning
bolts “would have been less stressful.” The result is four very long and very thoroughly
researched essays on the science and technology underlying Musk’s ventures interwoven
with Musk’s own commentary and Urban’s irreverent and informed observations. The first
was posted on May 7, 2015. All four are available on the Wait But Why? site and for pur-
chase as a pdf download or an ebook.
 3 CULTS OF PERSONALITY: FABLES OF THE AUTOMOBILE … 35

and vigor than most mortals could muster,” the founder of not one
but three companies “that could be fairly said to have upended their
respective industries” (Oremus 2015). For Chris Anderson of TED
Talks, he is simply “by common consent, the world’s most remarkable
entrepreneur.”18 Musk’s cultural status rests not on his ability to bring
the mentality and production practices of Silicon Valley to the business of
making cars, solar panels, or even rockets, but on the scope of his ambi-
tions and the existential beliefs that inspire them. As one of the cofound-
ers of the original Tesla Motors notes, Musk’s business plan was never
simply to build electric cars: “He wanted to change the energy equation
of the country” (Vance, 154). In pursuit of that aim, Musk even revived
the hacker’s first principle, long since abandoned by Silicon Valley in
its rush to monetize: in 2014, he announced that all Tesla’s patents
would be open-source. As Vance explains it, this was neither the public-
ity stunt nor the cunning ploy industry analysts assumed: “the decision
was a straightforward one for Musk. He wants people to make and buy
electric cars. Man’s future, as he sees it, depends on this” (Vance, 345).
Tesla’s imperative, as Musk is heard explaining to employees in Paine’s
film, is to “move us off fucking oil as soon as possible.” A byproduct of
Musk’s mission has arguably been a critical shift in the types of cars that
are made not just in the US but globally, as well as how they are sold,
marketed, and serviced, the transformation not just of a company but of
an entire industry.19 Corporate boards everywhere may want their own
Musk as they once wanted their own Iacocca, but it is unlikely they will
get one. He is, clearly, a unique phenomenon, a relentless visionary with
the soul of an engineer and a deeply held belief in the need for humans
to become a multiplanetary species. Not even Steve Jobs, Musk’s closest
comparator, and certainly not Lee Iacocca, would inform his biographer
in all seriousness “I would like to die on Mars.” Musk did add “Just not
on impact” (Vance, 359).

18 Anderson’s comments can be found in a YouTube video published by BigThink

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUMZTtQU10o), accessed August 20, 2017.

19 According to Urban, “When the first Tesla Roadster shipped in 2008, there were no

big company EVs [electric vehicles] on the market. Today, Ford, Chevy, Nissan, BMW,
Mercedes, Volkswagen, Fiat, Kia, Mitsubishi, and Smart all have an EV on the road”
(Urban, “How Tesla Will Change the World,” June 2, 2015). Other innovations Tesla
has introduced include abandoning the concept of model years, selling its cars directly to
consumers, and providing continuous, automatic upgrades through its vehicles’ software
systems.
 CHAPTER 4

“A Good Dose of Outrage”: Financial

Trading Fables

Abstract In contrast to the IT industry’s dominant fable of the successful

startup, the financial trading industry’s dominant fable almost invariably
involves executive and/or corporate wrongdoing, sometimes criminality,
with a detrimental impact on society. Financial trading’s corporate night-
mare fable is often the result of pure fraud. A close analysis of texts about
the Enron bankruptcy and the 2008 financial crisis (the book and movie
The Big Short, the documentary Inside Job, and the movie Margin Call)
reveals deep ambivalences and tensions regarding recent transformations
of the American financial system, its foundational inequities, and the fre-
quently compromised moral agency of the individuals participating in it.

Keywords Financial derivatives · Insider trading · Fraud · Greed

Incentives

In October 2008, as the shock waves of the American subprime mort-

gage crisis spread through global financial markets, Australian Prime
Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a speech in which he acknowledged “We
did not learn the full lessons of the greed-is-good ideology. And today
we are still cleaning up the mess of the twenty-first century children of

The phrase quoted in the title is taken from A.O. Scott’s New York Times review of
Alex Gibney’s documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, April 22, 2005.

© The Author(s) 2018 37

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2_4
38 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

Gordon Gekko.”1 Rudd was not alone in reaching back to a twenty-

one-year-old Hollywood movie to explain the current crisis. One month
before, the London Telegraph began an editorial titled “Who is to Blame
for the Great Financial Crisis?” with an invocation of “Gordon Gekko-
style spivs”—British slang for a hustler/con-artist with pretensions.2
References to Gekko, and his creator Oliver Stone, were inescapable
throughout those months. It was a sign of how completely Stone’s fic-
tional narrative of insider trading had become the popular cultural short-
hand for representing all forms of financial fraud and predation.3
A quick glance at Fig. 4.1 indicates that when we talk about widely cir-
culated narratives of the financial services industry, we are speaking, over-
whelmingly, of narratives of wrongdoing, though not always, technically,
of criminality. Of the 28 texts surveyed here, only one represents a clear
alternative: Alice Schroeder’s authorized biography of Warren Buffett.
Its publication could not have been more timely. Schroeder, a former
Morgan Stanley research analyst, began work on the book in 2003.
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life was published on
September 29, 2008. On October 13, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson
met with the CEOs of the nine biggest American financial institutions
to finalize the terms of their industry’s bailout.4 Widely praised, and

1 An edited version of Rudd’s speech was published in The Australian on October 6,

2008 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/the-children-of-gordon-gekko),
accessed August 28, 2017.
2 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3562248/Who-is-to-blame-

for-the-great-financial-crisis.html), accessed August 28, 2017. The term “spiv” first gained
currency after WWII to describe newly rich men who had made their fortunes as war profi-
teers and black marketers.
3 In 2012 the FBI enlisted Michael Douglas, the actor who played Gekko, to film a public

service video encouraging citizens to report suspected cases of securities fraud or insider trad-
ing. The video begins with a clip of Douglas as Gekko intoning the famous “Greed is good.
Greed is right” speech. It then shifts to a much older, greyer Douglas somberly identifying
himself and his role in the film as “a greedy corporate executive who cheated to profit while
innocent investors lost their savings.” He goes on: “The movie was fiction, but the problem is
real. Our economy is increasingly dependent on the success and the integrity of the financial
markets. If a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.” The video ends with instructions
on how to report suspected fraudulent activities (https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/
newss-financial-fraud-public-service-announcement/view), accessed August 29, 2017.
4 Sorkin notes “It was the first time – perhaps the only time – that the nine most power-

ful CEOs in American finance and their regulators would be in the same room at the same
time” (Sorkin 2010, 526). Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of Too Big to Fail cited here,
should not be confused with Aaron Sorkin, author of the screenplay of The Social Network
(and creator of the cult TV series The West Wing).
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 39

Corporate Nirvana

The Snowball
Flash Boys
Sacrificial/Thrown Over Triumphant Critic Corporate Rip-Off

Margin Call
The Big Short
The Quants
Money and Power
Liar’s Poker
Why I Left Goldman Sachs
Dark Pools

Retributive Defeated Critic Inside Job

No One Would Listen Inside Job

The Big Short
Too Big to Fail
Barbarians at the Gate

Corporate Nightmare

Enron: The Smartest Guys in

the Room
The Smartest Guys in the
Room: The Spectacular Rise…
24 Days
Wall Street
Too Good to be True
Madoff
Billionaire’s Apprentice
Den of Thieves
Boiler Room
Wolf of Wall Street
When Genius Failed

Fig. 4.1 Financial trading narratives

widely reviewed, repeatedly identified as one of the year’s best nonfiction

books, The Snowball was inevitably read as an indictment of the greed,
malfeasance, and arrogance of all those who had traded in the arcane
instruments Buffett had famously termed “financial weapons of mass
destruction.” Buffett’s unpretentious lifestyle, living in the same modest
house in Omaha he bought as a young man, and his 2006 announcement
that he would give the bulk of his wealth to charity through the Gates
Foundation, offered a sterling contrast to the greed and excesses of the
CEOs of those same institutions assembled by Paulson at that unprece-
dented meeting.
40 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (2014) appears

alongside The Snowball as an instantiation of the Corporate Nirvana
fable. And that is a reasonable assessment of the narrative as Lewis frames
it. A group of principled outsiders seek to “level the playing field” for
ordinary investors by depriving high-speed traders of the ability to “front
run” stock market trades, challenging a market that had become “a class
system rooted in speed” (69) and creating a potentially highly profitable
enterprise in the process. But Lewis’s narrative in Flash Boys has not met
with the universal acceptance his account of the subprime mortgage cri-
sis of 2008—The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010)—did.
Informed reviewers challenged a number of the assumptions underly-
ing its analysis of the implications of high-frequency trading and noted
crucial elisions. For James Surowiecki (2014), writing in The New York
Review of Books, Lewis overstates his central thesis of a rigged market
and understates the ways in which high-frequency trading makes the
entire market system less stable and far more fraught with risk. For Felix
Salmon (2014) at Slate, Lewis’s repurposing of the narrative template he
had employed to such successful effect in The Big Short, “good” outsid-
ers ranged against a “bad” or “rigged” system, turns “a highly complex
issue into an unhelpfully simplistic morality tale.” One, moreover, which
grossly overstates the altruistic motivations for, and beneficent outcomes
of, his heroes’ endeavors. Scott Patterson’s Dark Pools: The Rise of A.I.
Trading Machines and the Looming Threat to Wall Street, published in
2012, offered a different narrative, as its title indicates, and both review-
ers considered it both more accurate and more persuasive.5
In contrast to The Snowball and Flash Boys, the remaining financial
services industry texts considered here all clearly fall within the “dark
side” of the matrix, but as the spread of cells indicates, their darkness
manifests in differing forms and shades. There is the unequivocal crim-
inality of insider trading traced in various instances of the Corporate
Nightmare, from Stewart’s definitive recounting of the Boesky, Milken,
and Levine scandals of the 1980s (Den of Thieves 1991) to Raghavan’s
account of the Department of Justice’s successful prosecution of Raj

5 When originally published in hardcover in 2012 Patterson’s book carried the subtitle

noted in the text. Subsequent paperback and ebook printings, however, recast the subtitle
to The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market, although the
text’s content remained unchanged. This suggests that Patterson’s publishers, at least, felt
the trope of the rigged market had a broader appeal, or perhaps conformed more closely to
readers’ expectations of the Wall Street exposé genre, than that of an unstable one.
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 41

Rajaratnam (Billionaire’s Apprentice 2013) convicted on fourteen counts

of conspiracy and securities fraud, as well as the hidden-in-plain-sight
Ponzi scheme of Madoff (Arvedlund, Too Good to be True: The Rise
and Fall of Bernie Madoff 2010; Madoff, the 2016 television docu-
drama starring Richard Dreyfuss) and the myriad forms of account-
ing fraud documented by Fortune journalists Bethany McLean and
Peter Elkind in their exhaustive retelling of the collapse of Enron (The
Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Spectacular Fall of
Enron 2003) and less comprehensively by Smith and Emshwiller (24
Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that
Destroyed Faith in Corporate America 2003). Madoff’s crimes also gen-
erated a Defeated Critic narrative, Markopolos’s No One Would Listen: A
True Financial Thriller (2010) which recounts his years-long struggle to
persuade the SEC to investigate Madoff’s financial activities. The excep-
tion here is the story of Long-Term Capital Management, as recounted
by Lowenstein in When Genius Failed (2000). As his title indicates,
LTCM’s nightmare was the result of intellectual hubris, not criminality,
the refusal of Nobel Laureates in Economics turned hedge fund manag-
ers to believe that their models and insights could be wrong despite the
evidence of mounting, ultimately enormous, losses.
Among the ranks of the criminals, Ivan Boesky, who was convicted
of conspiring to file false stock trading records and sentenced to three
years imprisonment in 1987, had the unique distinction of inspiring two
generations of Wall Street malefactors, one fictional, the other all too real
who was then memorably incarnated in another high-profile Hollywood
movie. Boesky’s widely publicized remarks made in a commencement
address to graduates of the School of Business Administration at the
University of California at Berkeley in 1985—“Greed is all right, by the
way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy
and still feel good about yourself”—were the acknowledged source for
Gekko’s climactic monologue in Stone’s film.6 Gekko, as has been fre-
quently recounted, inspired legions of young men to seek a career on
Wall Street, much to Douglas and Stone’s dismay. One of those was
Jordan Belfort, the self-styled Wolf of Wall Street, whose “bucket shop”
brokerage firm defrauded investors of 200 million dollars and landed

6 See for example “$100 Million Idea: Use Greed for Good,” Chicago Tribune, December 15,

1986 (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1986-12-15/features/8604030643_1), accessed

September 29, 2017.
42 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

Belfort in jail in 2004 for money laundering.7 Belfort’s memoir, which

he began writing while serving his four-year sentence, was made into a
well-received 2013 film by auteur Martin Scorsese. That film, also titled
The Wolf of Wall Street, was the single most pirated movie of 2014, with
30 million illegal downloads, according to the data tracking firm Excipio
(Child 2014). The circumstance may have as much to do with the mov-
ie’s well-publicized graphic sexual content as its potential career guid-
ance. Or at least one can hope.8
The mechanics and the outcomes of the various instantiations of the
Corporate Ripoff and Inside Job fables surveyed here frequently over-
lap with those of the insider trading and what could be termed the
pure fraud versions of the Corporate Nightmare, as well as with each
other. Corporate Ripoff narratives like Cohan’s (Money and Power: How
Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World 2011), Lewis’s book (The Big
Short 2010) as well as McKay’s film adaptation of the same name (2015)
and Chandor’s feature film (Margin Call 2011) pit investment banks,
hedge funds, and even individual traders within firms against each other,
generating corporate winners and losers, but with enormous, almost
unimaginable negative consequences for the global economy and untold
numbers of “ordinary” people. As the silent coda to McKay’s frenetic
and ferocious movie notes, in white text on a black screen: “When the
dust settled from the collapse, 5 trillion dollars in pension money, real
estate value, 401K, savings, and bonds had disappeared. 8 million people
lost their jobs, 6 million lost their homes. And that was just in the USA.”
Inside Job narratives of the financial services industry, however, tend
to focus more specifically on the far-reaching contagion of “pernicious
incentives.” As Surowiecki noted in his denunciation of “superhero
CEOs,” the widespread practice of basing executive compensation on

7 Belfort acknowledged his “inspiration” in an interview with the London Telegraph in

February of 2008: “My role models were Michael Douglas’s character, Gordon Gekko, in
the movie Wall Street and Richard Gere from Pretty Woman ... the ultimate Wall Street rich
guy.” On the “Making of” feature included in the 2000 release of the Wall Street DVD,
Douglas recounts his disgust with the innumerable young male fans who continue to accost
him on the street saying “Hey man, you’re the reason I got into Wall Street. Yeah, Gordon
Gekko, right.” Douglas adds acidly, “And I say I was the villain in that movie.” Belfort, at
least, acknowledged that Gekko was a fictional character.
8 The hope may not be well-founded. In a recent course (2017), Borins read an under-

graduate paper whose student author proudly noted that he had viewed The Wolf of Wall
Street fourteen times and considered it the template for his future career—though omitting
the criminal convictions and four-year jail term.
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 43

short-term profits as reflected in stock value, with no accountability for

later losses, promotes a culture in which actions with potentially disas-
trous long-term consequence are richly rewarded, and those who might
be expected to expose, or “manage,” the risk either deny its existence
or connive at its continuation. This is, in fact, one of the structuring
arguments of Charles Ferguson’s Academy Award-winning 2010 docu-
mentary titled Inside Job. Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics at
NYU’s Stern School of Business and one of Ferguson’s star witnesses for
the prosecution notes: “People are essentially being rewarded for taking
massive risks in good times to generate short-term revenues and profits
and therefore bonuses. But that’s going to lead to [sic] the firm to be
bankrupt over time. That’s a totally distorted system of compensation.”
The issue also features memorably in Andrew Sorkin’s recounting of the
Bush Administration’s frantic attempts to shore up the financial system
in the fall of 2008, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street
and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves
(2010). According to Sorkin, when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson
summoned the heads of the major banks to tell them the allocations their
firms would receive under Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) and
to demand their acquiescence, John Thain of Merrill Lynch immediately
asked if the bankers would be protected against changes in compensa-
tion policy. According to Sorkin, it was “the one [question] that every-
one present wanted to ask” (528), though Ken Lewis, the CEO of Bank
of America, angrily commented in response “If we spend another second
talking about compensation issues, we’ve lost our minds” (Sorkin 529).
Timothy Geithner, then President of the New York Federal Reserve who
was present at the meeting, and was clearly no stranger to Wall Street
mores, described the exchange simply as “incredible” (2014, 239).
The mechanism of perverse incentives does not operate only at the
highest executive levels, a point J.C. Chandor’s feature film Margin
Call effectively dramatizes. In her extraordinary ethnographic study of
Wall Street, Liquidated, Karen Ho analyzes at length the centrality of
the so-called “pay for performance” principle to Wall Street’s pervasive
culture of risk, a culture that is structurally conditioned to favor short-
term profit over sustainable, long-term benefits, or indeed tangible ben-
efits of any kind. As Ho explains, “performance” is measured according
to the number of deals executed “regardless of their impact on the cor-
poration or society at large” (2009, 258). What matters is volume and
the perceived addition to “shareholder value,” that is rising stock prices
due to apparent increased profitability, however illusory or short-lived.
44 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

“Liquidity and volatility” become the primary measures of success, for

both individual employees and the firm or institution itself (Ho 171).9 As
Ho notes, it is a volatility that is reflected in the industry’s own employ-
ment structure, with little or no job security, and “downsizing” a regular
feature. Margin Call begins and ends with files of ashen-faced employees
being marched to elevators by corporate security, carrying their bankers’
boxes of personal effects. The professionally sympathetic leader of the ter-
mination team offers a parting consolation: “This is in no way personal.
The majority of this floor is being let go today.” It is, simply, business
as usual, and those who are “still alive” or “still good, for now” avert
their eyes and carry on. One of the employees being “liquidated,” after
19 years, is Eric Dale, the Head of Risk Management—not, as he dryly
notes in his exit interview, “a natural place to start cutting jobs.” As he
leaves, he hands a flash drive to a younger colleague that will reveal the
catastrophic extent of the firm’s exposure, setting the narrative’s plot in
motion. The elevator doors close on Dale’s parting words: “Be careful.”
But there are more patterns at work here than a repeated story of either
criminality or the corrosive ripple effect of perverse incentives. Looking
more closely at the most widely circulated and highest profile texts (the
best-selling books by McLean and Elkind and Lewis, as well as the widely
reviewed and distributed, critically praised, award-winning movies Enron:
The Smartest Guys in the Room, Inside Job, Margin Call, and The Big
Short), we can trace recurring narrative structures and tensions. Every
financial scandal may be scandalous in its own way, but in their own ways
each of these narratives manifests tensions between individual agency, sys-
temic failure (corruption, dysfunction), and complexity. They are tensions
that prove even more difficult to resolve or contain than those at work in
the personality-centered narratives of the auto industry.

9 Ho’s chapters “The Neoclassical Roots and Origin Narratives of Shareholder Value”
and “Liquid Lives, Compensation Schemes, and the Making of (Unsustainable) Financial
Markets” provide a detailed exploration of the ways in which both the ideology of share-
holder value and the mechanism of “pay for performance” lie at the “core of Wall Street’s
institutional values” (258). She also discusses at length the profound implications of the
accompanying structural assumption of insecurity of employment, in the investment bank-
ing sector in particular.
In his editorial essay on the distorting effects of the superhero CEO phenomenon, Sorowiecki
describes shareholder value as “that favorite mantra of every 1990s CEO.” And Elkind com-
ments in the Enron film: “Everyone at Enron had a stake in the stocks going up. And it was
driven very clearly by the profits every quarter … They posted the stock price in the elevator.”
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 45

The portentous opening voice-over of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the

Room poses a question which reverberates in different forms throughout
these narratives of financial malfeasance: “Was Enron the work of a few
bad men or the dark shadow of the American dream?” Both McLean and
Elkind’s book and Gibney’s documentary carefully lay out not only the
mechanics of the accounting frauds and insider trading perpetrated by the
bad men at Enron, but also the extensive failures and collusions of entire
networks of institutional bad actors: Wall Street analysts who consistently
rated Enron’s stock highly despite never being able to explain how it
made its profits; accounting firms like Arthur Andersen, which routinely
signed off on the company’s fictitious financial statements (and which
was ultimately found guilty of obstruction of justice for its shredding of
tons of Enron related documents); law firms like Vinson and Elkins which
authorized CFO Andy Fastow’s burying of debt through the creation
of “off-the-book entities” which effectively enabled Enron to trade with
itself; the SEC which approved the company’s mark-to-market accounting
at the heart of its nonexistent spectacular profits; and the business media
which, at least initially, accepted the Enron fiction unquestioningly and
heralded the company as a paragon of the “New Economy.”
Yet both book and film, though the latter more insistently, repeat-
edly frame their narratives as, in the words of McLean in the movie, “a
story about people … a human tragedy.” Gibney returns to the point
throughout his director’s commentary included with the DVD of the film:
“A very stark human tragedy … ultimately it was a story about people …” It
is not the mostly offscreen victims, however, the large numbers of nameless
and faceless defrauded investors and employees who lost an estimated $200
billion, that McLean, Elkind, or Gibney are referring to, but the exhaustively
analyzed individual executives, the “stars,” around whom both narratives
keep circling: CEO Jeff Skilling, “this Gatsby-like character” in Gibney’s
words,10 Ken Lay, the dirt-poor preacher’s son who rose to Chairman, and
Andy Fastow, the CFO, whose flagrantly self-serving machinations were
essential to preserving the Enron illusion in its last years. The only Enron

10 British reviewers of the film reached for other literary references, invoking the great

swindlers of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope’s panoramic social novels Little Dorrit
(1857) and The Way We Live Now (1875). Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian on
April 28, 2006, observed “Dickens and Trollope, who created the phony billionaires Mr.
Merdle and Mr. Melmotte, would have appreciated Lay and Skilling,” while Anthony Quinn
of The Independent felt “even Trollope and his High Victorian readers would have won-
dered at” the levels of hubris and greed Enron’s “riveting story” reveals (April 27, 2006).
46 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

victim who is named and given screen time is Al Kaseweter, a linesman with
Portland General Electric whose lifesavings were wiped out when his com-
pany was purchased by Enron and his stock converted to Enron shares.
Gibney’s comment “we didn’t spend a lot of time with the victims of the
Enron collapse” is an understatement. Kaseweter receives approximately 60
seconds in a 109-minute film. It is the Enron executives, portrayed as deeply
flawed, over-reaching, self-deluding American dreamers engaging in what
McLean and Elkind call “a grand experiment in the deregulated world”
(xxi), “smart people who believed their next gamble would cover their last
disaster – and who couldn’t admit they were wrong” (406), who are the
narrative focus.
Both book and film, then, struggle with competing impulses: on the
one hand, a painstaking exposure of the complex financial and regulatory
ecosystems that enabled an unprecedented corporate fraud, what McLean
in the film calls “synergistic corruption,” and on the other, the provision
of the familiar narrative pleasures of a morality tale, a story centered on
strongly defined, individual actors whose ambitions and demons drive that
tale’s mechanism to its inevitable ending. But the risk of the latter impulse
is that it undercuts the former. As Gibney himself asks in his voice-over
commentary: “Had we created the impression that these are just a bunch
of bad guys? And if only those particular bad guys weren’t there everything
would have been okay?” The tension is compounded by both narratives’
insistence on the critical role played by other individuals in exposing the
“bad guys” at Enron.11 Perhaps the most important of these is McLean
herself, closely followed by Sherron Watkins, the Enron executive who first
went on record, though only internally, regarding the company’s massive

11 How issues of gender play out within these financial narratives is a fascinating sub-

ject that deserves sustained analysis. Gibney’s film documents extensively what Peter Elkind
calls “the whole macho culture of the place,” seeing in its financial risk-taking another
version of the extreme sport adventure trips organized by Skilling for favored executives
and the company sanctioned expenditure on strip club entertainment. In his commentary
Gibney asserts that “the women in the Enron story” function as moral arbiters, outside
of the boys’ club and with “a larger sense of ethics and morality,” though it is clear that
several of those women (Sherron Watkins, Amanda Brock-Martin) who receive significant
screen time analyzing and denouncing the “bad guys,” are rather more complex, and more
compromised, characters than this formulation allows. It is also worth noting Gibney’s
voice-over remarks at Bethany McLean’s first on-screen appearance: “Such a pretty young
woman in this high-octane film about finance, but she earns your respect at the end.”
There is, clearly, a lot to unpack there.
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 47

accounting fraud. But there are many others: Mike Muckelroy, another
former Enron executive who had flagged and contained the company’s
first financial scandal (Valhalla); John Olson, a stock analyst who tried,
and failed, to discover how Enron executives could earn $53 million dol-
lars in bonuses on a deal that didn’t make any money (Broadband); and
Jim Chanos, a hedge fund investor who first suggested to McLean that she
examine the company’s financial statements to see if she could track where
Enron’s reported profits were coming from, since no one else appeared to
be able to. It was this suggestion that leads to McLean’s first investigative
report for Fortune on March 5, 2001 titled “Is Enron Overpriced?”12
The narrative structure of Ferguson’s Inside Job, which is even more
emphatic in its denunciations of the institutional, regulatory, and aca-
demic networks that converged to corrupt and destabilize the American
financial services industry, is equally dependent on “outsider” individ-
uals who saw, and said, what others could or would not. These include
foreigners like the Turkish-born Nouriel Roubini and the Indian-born
Raghuram Rajan, former Chief Economist of the IMF, as well as French
Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, soon to be appointed Managing
Director of the IMF, and the British economic journalists Martin Wolf
and Gillian Tett, whose elegantly accented commentaries are featured
prominently. They are joined by the decidedly less patrician Robert
Gnaizda, former director of the Greenlining Institute, an American con-
sumer advocacy group which had early called attention to the dangers of
predatory subprime lending and the “ticking time bomb” of the finan-
cial instruments being created out of bundles of complex adjustable rate
mortgages. It is Gnaizda’s pure Brooklynese that offers the demotic
voice-over to a series of images of mansions, luxury cars, corporate air-
planes, and CEOs enjoying the lifestyle their multi-million-dollar annual
bonuses sustain: “It was never enough. They don’t wanna own one home.
They wanna own five homes. And they wanna have an expensive pent-
house on Park Avenue. And they wanna have their own private jet.”13

12 The full title of McLean’s article as it originally appeared is “Is Enron Overpriced? It’s

in a bunch of complex businesses. Its financial statements are nearly impenetrable. So why
is Enron trading at such a huge multiple?”
13 Jordan Belfort, in his interview with the Telegraph confirms Gnaizda’s indictment, not-

ing that his ambition to emulate “the ultimate [fictional] Wall Street rich guy” involved
some very specific real-world concomitants: “the presidential hotel suite, the Ferrari, the
house on the beach, the gorgeous blonde, the expensive wine, the art auctions, the yacht”
(Leonard 2008).
48 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

In part, Ferguson’s choice to structure his indictment around the

(unheeded) warnings of prescient individual observers and critics was
an enforced one. The list of subjects who refused to be interviewed for
his film includes many of the key institutional actors: Alan Greenspan,
Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Richard
Fuld, and Timothy Geithner among others. (Ferguson lists them all in
the concluding frames of the documentary.)14 Reviewers made much
of the “gotcha” interviews in which Ferguson ambushed senior aca-
demic economists at prestigious universities who had served as highly
paid consultants to, and even directors of, financial institutions deeply
implicated in the subprime mortgage scandal, while publishing osten-
sibly objective scholarly research supporting the practices and instru-
ments at its heart. The most notable is Ferguson’s encounter with Glen
Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School, who memorably
spits at the camera “This isn’t a deposition, sir. I was polite enough
to give you time. Foolishly, as I now see. But you have three more
minutes. Give it your best shot.” Ann Hornaday, film critic for the
Washington Post, called these scenes “the art of muckraking at its fin-
est” (Hornaday 2010) and she was not alone in calling them out for
special notice.
These interviews are featured late in the film and they provide a vis-
ceral narrative pay-off it otherwise lacks: an on-screen humbling of some
of those who profited from the crisis they either actively abetted or did
nothing to avert. But, here too, the effect is to counter the narrative’s
insistence on the systemic nature of both the problem and any possi-
ble solutions. There is an implicit reassurance in the narrative time and
explanatory/accusatory functions allocated to camera-friendly presences
like Roubini and Rajan, who, as the film’s producer Audrey Marrs notes
in her commentary, “kind of looks like a movie star.”15 And there is an

14 Ferguson also notes in his director’s commentary that as he was recording his

remarks, “The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has requested to screen the film.” The
Commission, unlike the filmmaker, had the power to subpoena witnesses.
15 Inthe supplementary commentary on the DVD of the film, Marrs discusses extensively
the selection and grooming of interviewees. The choice was determined, according to
Marrs, by “What they could offer substantively and whether they would work behind [sic]
a camera.” Regarding appearance—all the interviewees, with the exception of Gnaizda,
wear decidedly expensive-looking “banker” garb—Marrs notes “We prompted them to
dress that way. We talked to every interviewee about what they were going to wear. We
coordinated ties and backgrounds.”
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 49

undoubted narrative pleasure to be found in the on-screen punishing of

a few representative, if relatively minor, “bad guys.” Both come together
in the film’s concluding voice-over, a call-to-arms to individual viewers
to take action: “The men and institutions that caused the crisis are still
in power and that needs to change. They will tell us that we need them
and that what they do is too complicated for us to understand. They will
tell us it won’t happen again. They will spend billions fighting reform. It
won’t be easy. But some things are worth fighting for.”16
What is required, the viewer is assured, is not a complete rejection of
the assumptions on which the financial services industry rests, still less a
rejection of the ideologies of the market or finance capitalism themselves.
The system may have been warped to breaking point, but there were
always individual good actors who saw what was happening, who were
on the side of the angels, and individual culprits to be called to account,
on screen, if nowhere else. Ultimately, Inside Job is not a call for revo-
lution, but rather an appeal to the individual viewer to take the action
that can, and will, return the system to an earlier, more pristine form.
The closing voice-over just quoted in fact begins with an evocation of a
pre-lapsarian phase of American finance capitalism before the original sin
of deregulation: “For decades, the American financial system was stable
and safe. But then something changed. The financial industry turned its
back on society, corrupted our political system, and plunged the world
economy into crisis.”
Ferguson was the founder of one of the first Internet software com-
panies, Vermeer Technologies, which he sold to Microsoft for $133
million in 1996. And Ferguson himself implicitly links his personal his-
tory to his film’s narrative stance. Throughout his director’s commen-
tary on the DVD of the film, Ferguson repeatedly notes his personal
knowledge of various key players whom he is able simply to telephone
to secure interviews or access to further contacts, asserting his familiar-
ity with, indeed his charter membership in, the financial, governmental,
and academic tribes he documents. Ferguson earned a Ph.D. from MIT
and worked as a technology consultant to the government and industry.

16 Marrs and Ferguson, in their commentary, acknowledge that the film’s narration owes
a significant debt to the actor Matt Damon who performs it. He was consulted not just on
the text of the narration but was also sent a transcript of all the interviews in advance of
recording. They note that the film’s concluding narration, in particular, “owes a considera-
ble amount to the suggestions he made.”
50 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

In a highly favorable review of Inside Job for Salon, critic Andrew

O’Hehir describes the filmmaker as “a wealthy, well-connected policy
wonk who makes expensive movies aimed at a large audience” (O’Hehir
2010). It is not entirely clear that this is meant as a compliment. In an
interview with Nick Hasted of the British newspaper The Independent,
Ferguson himself defines the limits of his documentary’s outrage: “I
don’t think there’s anything wrong with the stock market and people
making money, if they make it doing something productive. What hap-
pened here is an extraordinary amount of money was made by doing
immoral things that did great damage” (Hasted 2011). As scathing as
the film’s critique is, it never questions the underlying ideologies of
finance capitalism that “the stock market” and “Wall Street” continually
normalize and render transparent. 17
Inside Job was unanimously praised by critics as an accomplished and
important film, noteworthy for both its anger and its lucidity. It received
the 2011 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, as well as
numerous other accolades, including recognition by the Directors’ Guild
of America and the National Society of Film Critics. Adam McKay’s
2015 film adaptation of Michael Lewis’s The Big Short proved more divi-
sive among professional reviewers, though it outperformed Inside Job at
the box office by multiple orders of magnitude, and won the Academy
Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. (It was also nominated for Best
Picture, losing to a much more somber “based on a true story” film,
Spotlight). Lacking the documentary’s patina of high moral seriousness,
and its creator’s impressive resume, McKay’s film is loud, jumpy, unre-
lentingly profane, and literally “in your face” as characters, and oddly
assorted celebrities in cameo appearances, repeatedly break the frame
and speak directly to the camera, explaining arcane financial instruments
like credit default swaps and synthetic collateralized debt obligations and

17 Ho’s Liquidated seeks to expose the institutional practices and structures through

which this normalization is continually enacted and reproduced. The most relevant chap-
ters are “Anthropology Goes to Wall Street,” and “Leveraging Dominance and Crises
through the Global.”
Ferguson notes in his commentary that the renowned director Werner Herzog had asked
him why he had not included more in the film about the general mania that accompanied
the subprime housing bubble, that is, why his account left out any assessment of the inter-
pellation of “ordinary” Americans by the values and mechanisms of the market: “And the
answer was just time, you know, focus.” He had a different story to tell.
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 51

adding “Got that? Good. Now fuck off.”18 The film The Big Short is also
a highly complex narrative, arguably more challenging and more unset-
tling than Ferguson’s tastefully modulated and cinematically burnished
account, a narrative that increasingly implicates itself and its audience in
the financial systems both the film and its protagonists simultaneously
exploit and excoriate.
Like the Enron and Inside Job narratives, The Big Short is structured
around a small group of “seers,” individuals who notice what the reg-
ulators, analysts, rating agencies, banks, and investment firms ignore
or deny: the network of deception and collusion fueling the mort-
gage-backed securities bubble.19 They are outsiders by personality and
circumstance, not profession or nationality: a one-eyed doctor with
Asperger’s Syndrome turned money-manager (Michael Burry); a spec-
tacularly abrasive former Wall Street analyst fueled by moral disgust and
personal tragedy (Steve Eisman/Baum); a pair of twenty-something West
coast “garage band investors” sneeringly dismissed as amateurs by the
prestige investment houses and scarcely able to believe the extent of the
financial catastrophe they anticipate (Charlie Ledley/Geller and Jamie
Mai/Shipley).20 And all of them unhesitatingly use their awareness of

18 Ferguson’s first documentary was the highly acclaimed No End in Sight (2007), an

examination of the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq war. It was nominated for
an Academy Award and made many critics’ lists of best movies of the year. In contrast,
McKay’s previous work includes cowriting and directing the determinedly low-brow, and
very successful, comedies Anchorman and Talledega Nights, starring the former Saturday
Night Live performer Will Farrell.
19 The outsider/nonconformist/misfit who sees what others do not was also a narrative

trope for Lewis in his lengthy review of Schroeder’s biography of Buffett which appeared
in The New Republic on June 3, 2009, under the title “The Master of Money.” In Lewis’s
assessment, the personality and behavior of the young Buffett, as recounted in detail by
Schroeder, add up to “the portrait of a universal loser,” and yet “Warren Buffett saw deals
no one else saw,” a talent he combined with an early-acquired “ability to believe that the
universe was wrong and he was right.” Lewis uses very similar language to describe Michael
Burry, one of the “shorts”: “It was one of the fringe benefits of living for so many years
essentially alienated from the world around him: He could easily believe that he was right
and the world was wrong” (Lewis 2010, 120). The review can be found at https://newre-
public.com/article/62328/the-master-money, accessed September 13, 2017.
20 Lewis uses the real names of the “shorts” in his book. Some of the surnames were
changed for the movie version at the request of the individuals themselves. Their reasons
are discussed in a New York Times interview with cast members of the movie published
November 24, 2015, “Actors of ‘The Big Short’ Talk About the Debt Crisis, in Beverley
Hills.” Within the text, the second surname indicates the film character.
52 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

the “atomic bomb of fraud and stupidity that’s on its way to decimating
the world economy” to profit, hugely.21
This is the narrative trap Lewis and McKay lay. First, they equip their
“heroes” with humanizing backstories (each has a psychic or emotional
wound or mark of difference), each is beset by doubters, denigrators,
critics, and blocking figures, each has staked reputation, fortune, and
future on his “bet,” each is appealingly embodied by a charismatic actor
on screen. Most importantly, each is portrayed as deeply troubled by the
looming disaster and his investment in it. Lewis repeatedly quotes “the
shorts” on this subject. There is an email Burry sends to a friend: “I have
a job to do. Make money for my clients. Period. But boy it gets morbid
when you start making investments that work out extra great if a tragedy
occurs” (Lewis 2010, 180). There is Charlie Ledley’s recollection of their
looming sense of disaster in late March 2007: “‘We were pretty sure one
of two things was true,’ said Charlie. ‘Either the game was totally rigged,
or we had gone totally fucking crazy. The fraud was so obvious that it
seemed to us it had implications for democracy. We actually got scared.’”
(166). And there is the virtual epigraph Lewis allows Eisman near the end
of the book: “‘Being short in 2007 and making money from it was fun,
because we were short bad guys,’ said Steve Eisman. ‘In 2008, it was the
entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t
want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and
you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you are not happy
looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah’” (227).
There are direct counterparts to all these passages in McKay’s screenplay.
Having differentiated “the shorts” from the system and its typical partic-
ipants and embodiments, Lewis and McKay then launch them into a series
of encounters with personifications of the arrogance, greed, venality, cal-
lousness, shamelessness, and sheer stupidity both their narratives present as
pervading the financial services industry. Readers/viewers very quickly align
their narrative sympathies, identifications, and desires with the “shorts”
against the rogue’s gallery of hypocrites, swindlers, and fools in bespoke
suits they confront. And the trap is sprung, because now we, too, are

21 The words are Steve Baum’s and come in his climactic speech to an industry forum as
the bubble finally bursts. He continues: “And as fun as it is to watch pompous, dumb Wall
Streeters be wildly wrong – and you are wrong, sir – I just know that at the end of the day,
average people are going to be the ones who are going to have to pay for this. Because they
always, always do.”
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 53

“betting against the American economy,” as Ben Hockett/Rickett, Charlie

and Jamie’s mentor, “a former derivatives trader with an apocalyptic streak”
(Lewis 2010, 125) reminds them, and us. “Which means,” Rickett con-
tinues, “which means, if we’re right … if we’re right, people lose homes.
People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings. People lose pensions.” As
A.O. Scott notes in his review of the film, it is an economic collapse for fun
and profit: the shorts’, the filmmakers’, and the viewers.’
A scene late in the movie, as the apocalypse looms, encapsulates the
narrative/moral dilemma that is at the heart of the film. Baum and his
colleagues confront an officer of the rating agency Standard and Poor’s,
demanding to know why the ratings on the mortgage-backed securities
have not been downgraded despite the ever-increasing waves of mort-
gage defaults and housing foreclosures. They accuse the firm of selling
their industry clients the ratings they now need to unload their own
exposure, of acting as shills for the very companies they claim to be
impartially evaluating, colluding in fraud. The officer, unable to refute
the charge, flashes back: “And I wonder, I wonder, what your incentives
might be? Is it maybe in your best interests to see the ratings change?
Is it, perhaps? How many credit default swaps do you own?” There is a
long silence before Baum answers. “It doesn’t make me wrong,” he says.
“No,” she tells him. “It just makes you a hypocrite.” McKay’s singular
accomplishment, achieved largely through the film’s focus on individu-
als who choose to exploit the fraudulence of the system, is to produce a
narrative of financial crisis that is, in Scott’s apt description, “a terrifically
enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea and despair.
What is to be done with those feelings is the great moral and political
challenge Mr. McKay has set for the audience” (Scott 2015).
J.C. Chandor’s feature film Margin Call activates a similar narrative
challenge. Set in a fictional investment firm, the narrative unfolds dur-
ing the 36 hours in which the knowledge passes up the hierarchy that
the firm’s exposure to mortgage-backed securities is so great that a 25%
loss in their value would force it into bankruptcy. And the securities are
losing value. The decision is made to hold a “fire sale,” that is, to unload
the risk and the toxic securities on unsuspecting clients. Confining the
action almost entirely to the offices and hallways of the unnamed invest-
ment bank, closely following the handful of executives, analysts, and
traders involved in making and executing the decision, Chandor shrinks
the system to a microcosm, drawing viewers into the logic of what that
system and its core assumptions prompt these individuals to do. David
Denby in the New Yorker, called Margin Call “easily the best Wall
54 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

Street movie ever made” (Denby 2011). In his director’s commentary,

Chandor himself makes constant reference to other cinematic genres:
thrillers, Westerns, and war movies. And the film is as engrossing as any
of these, its atmosphere of steadily rising tension subtly maintained, with
strong performances from a heavy-weight ensemble cast and a spare,
intelligent script. As viewers, we may be repelled by the logic, and the
“values,” that motivate the characters, but our investment in their
“mission” implicates us too. The narrative does not allow for the easy
response of moral condemnation, the “good dose of outrage.” We have
been drawn into the narrative and, therefore, into the system and its inex-
orable calculus of winners and losers, profit and loss.
Unlike Ferguson’s narrative, the financial crisis Margin Call dramatizes
does not represent a unique rupture, an unprecedented corruption of the
system as it should be. It is only the latest iteration of an inevitable cycle
of bubble and crash, rise and fall, gain and loss. This, too, is business as
usual. In a final encounter in an empty executive dining room, the firm’s
CEO John Tuld, played by Jeremy Irons with silken understatement,
dismisses the moral qualms of his Head of Trading, Sam Rogers (Kevin
Spacey) who has orchestrated the fire sale and now wants out, though
with his options and bonus intact. “I just don’t know how we fucked this
up quite so much,” Rogers says flatly. “It’s not wrong,” Tuld replies, “and
it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been.” He then progresses
through a litany of historical crashes to end with the entire inevitability of
the story they have just enacted, and likely will again:

1637. 1797. 1819. 37. 57. 84. 1901. 27. 1937. 1974. 1987. Jesus, didn’t
that one fuck up on me good. 92. 97. 2000. And whatever you want to
call this. It’s all just the same thing over and over. We can’t help ourselves.
And you and I can’t control it, or stop it, or slow it, or even so slightly
alter it. We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And
we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong. And there have
always been, and there will always be, the same percentage of winners and
losers ... There may be more of us today than there’s ever been, but the
percentages, they stay exactly the same.

Christopher Orr, writing in The Atlantic commends Margin Call for

its deep understanding of what he calls the “economic implacability” of
financial markets that are “vast and evolving entities in their own right,
often inscrutable even to their purported custodians” (Orr 2011). But
an equal strength of the film is its refusal to grant anyone immunity from
 4 “A GOOD DOSE OF OUTRAGE”: FINANCIAL TRADING FABLES 55

involvement. Again, unlike Ferguson’s, Chandor’s narrative explicitly

implicates those ostensibly outside the system. The senior trader Will
Emerson makes the point in a speech that Chandor calls “a great and
kind of emotional and divisive description of how capitalism works and
the hypocrisy that we all participate in”:

If you really want to do this with your life, you have to believe that you’re
necessary. And you are. People wanna live like this, with their cars and
their big fucking houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The
only reason they get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our
fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off, well, then the whole
world gets really fucking fair, really fucking quickly. And nobody actually
wants that. They say they do, but they don’t. They want what we have to
give them, but they also want to, you know, play innocent and pretend
they have no idea where it came from.

The strength of Margin Call’s narrative strategies, like those of The Big
Short, whose rhythms and energies could not be more different, is that
neither film allows its audience to play innocent.
In very different ways, the narratives of the Enron texts, Inside Job,
The Big Short texts and Margin Call organize themselves thematically
and structurally around the troubled interactions of individuals with
the complex networks that constitute the twenty-first-century American
financial system, raising fundamental questions of agency and implica-
tion. In the case of both Enron texts and Inside Job that structure gen-
erates a tension that seems at times to pull against apparent objectives
of the narratives: explanation, critique, and reform. In The Big Short and
Margin Call, however, that same structure makes the critique more pow-
erful, and more unsettling, by aligning readers/viewers’ narrative invest-
ments with individual actors who are profiting from the dysfunction of
the system itself. The challenge these texts pose then becomes whether it
is possible to imagine an alternative narrative outside of it.
 CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Narrative Templates and Social

Negotiations

Abstract The rationale for this study is that texts it considers and the
narrative fables they instantiate have important social effects. By codify-
ing genre conventions and expectations, these texts can influence the cre-
ation and reception of further narratives, reproducing certain tropes and
norms, while potentially making it more difficult for counter-narratives
to be developed or distributed. The narratives these texts repeat-
edly frame then become an important source of influence on how we
understand, respond to, and engage with the industries they represent.
Narratives circulating within popular culture actively, if unconsciously,
influence our cognitive architecture, determining how we make sense
of the agents, institutions, and events shaping our world. The analytic
approach used in this monograph could be extended to texts from other
countries and other industries.

Keywords Narrative · Fable · Clustering · Impact · Industry sector

The introduction to this study cited psychologist Jerome Bruner’s

influential 1990 exploration of narrative, Acts of Meaning, specifically
Bruner’s characterization of stories as “especially viable instruments
for social negotiation.” Bruner uses the phrase during an extended dis-
cussion of the way narratives work within a culture to establish norms

© The Author(s) 2018 57

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
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58 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

(what he calls “canonicality”) and, equally importantly, to make sense of,

and therefore contain, their rupture (Bruner 1990, 47). Bruner’s word
choice (instruments, negotiation) is particularly apt: his implicit meta-
phor is commercial. And the business narratives we have been consider-
ing all negotiate issues of norms and rupture specific to their respective
industries, but with much wider cultural implications.
We began our investigation with an inductively derived analytic model
of private sector narrative that includes both inverse cases, Nirvana or
Nightmare fables, as well as a range of mixed or compound fable types.
This model was used to analyze more than 60 US texts produced in a
range of media forms during the preceding four decades, all of which fit
readily into its typology. The texts consisted of three sets, each dealing
with a highly significant, and significantly different, US industry. This, in
itself, demonstrated clearly that narratives about “business” differ sharply
by industry, in ways that reflect their particular histories, technologies,
conditions of production/operation, intellectual and physical capital,
regulatory regimes, market structures, and challenges, and that there is
much to be gained in differentiating such narratives for closer analysis.
Having classified narratives within the three sets of industry texts,
we were able to identify recurring patterns (themes, structures, agents,
tensions), to compare these patterns across industrial sectors, and to
question their possible implications. This allowed us to trace the ways
in which the repeated narrative instantiation of an increasingly codified
information technology fable (the successful startup) channeled the
potentially disruptive ideology of digital innovation into the institutions
of late twentieth-century venture capitalism. Applying the same meth-
odology to narratives of the automobile industry uncovered a struc-
tural focus on singular agents (the transformative CEO) within highly
complex systems and pointed to an unresolved anxiety around the role
of individuals in an increasingly impersonal and diffuse globalized and
corporatized economy. Exploring a highly concentrated cluster of nar-
ratives of financial malfeasance revealed deep ambivalences and tensions
regarding late twentieth-century transformations of the American finan-
cial system, its foundational inequities, and the moral agency of individu-
als participating in it.
Not all industry narratives leave as visible a cultural imprint as Wall
Street or Iacocca: An Autobiography. But the rationale for this study is
that texts like the ones we have considered here, and the narrative fables
they instantiate, do have important social effects. By codifying generic
 5 CONCLUSION: NARRATIVE TEMPLATES AND SOCIAL NEGOTIATIONS 59

conventions and expectations, these texts can influence the creation and
reception of further narratives, reproducing certain tropes and norms,
while potentially making it more difficult for counter-narratives to be
developed or distributed. And the narratives these texts repeatedly frame
then become an important source of influence on how we understand,
respond to, and engage with the industries they represent, both as indi-
vidual agents (“Hey man, you’re the reason I got into Wall Street”) and
as a society (“Some things are worth fighting for”).
Can such influence be measured or indeed proved? The University
of Southern California’s Annenberg School launched its Media Impact
Project in 2013 to address this issue. Partnering with organizations like
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, PBS, and Participant Media,
the Project is developing tools, metrics, and methodologies to measure
the effect of media representations on audiences/consumers, with a par-
ticular interest in the ability of media narratives to effect change, both
in personal beliefs and as a means of inspiring individual and collective
activism. The project’s website, www.mediaimpactproject.org, makes its
foundational assumption clear: “We believe media makes a difference.
We want to help you prove and improve it.”
This study has not sought to “prove” the social impact of the narra-
tives it analyzes. It has focused, rather, on identifying and probing nar-
rative patterns within sets of widely circulated texts. But it has done so
out of the belief that there is, indeed, a “universal human affinity for
narrative” (Green and Brock 2000), and that the narratives circulating
within popular culture actively, if unconsciously, influence our cognitive
architecture, determining how we make sense of the agents, institutions,
and events shaping our world. It has also identified in these industry nar-
ratives cultural tensions, anxieties, and conflicts which individual texts
may resolve, contain, or simply bear witness to, the currency of Bruner’s
social negotiation.
The methodology employed here could clearly be extended more
widely. Analysis of comparable industries in other countries (British texts
about trading and “the City,” German texts of the automobile indus-
try, Japanese business novels) could provide important insights into the
culturally specific nature of such representations. Other US industrial
sectors would also be fruitful areas of investigation: advertising and mar-
keting; the nuclear industry; resource extraction and processing (coal
mining, the oil industry). A particularly resonant area of investigation
would be print and broadcast media, given the enormous technological
60 S. BORINS AND B. HERST

and structural changes both continue to experience and the renewed

importance of investigative journalism as a practice straddling the worlds
of private sector profit and public interest. In all these instances––and
others could obviously be added to the list––the premise is the same.
The more we analyze rigorously selected sets of texts representing spe-
cific industries, the more empowered we can be to engage critically with
the stories we are licensing these powerful social agents to enact.
 APPENDIX: TABLES OF TEXTS

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Text Creator Date Format

1 Soul of a New Machine Kidder 1981 History
2 Startup Kaplan 1995 Autobiography
3 Triumph of the Nerds Cringeley 1996 TV documentary
4 Pirates of Silicon Valley Burke 1999 TV docudrama
5 Startup.com Noujaim 2000 Film documentary
6 E-Dreams Chin 2001 Film documentary
7 Who Says Elephants Can’t Gerstner 2002 Autobiography
Dance?
8 The Accidental Mezrich 2009 History
Billionaires
9 The Facebook Effect Kirkpatrick 2010 History
10 The Social Network Fincher, Sorkin (Aaron) 2010 Film docudrama
11 In the Plex Levy 2011 History
12 Something Ventured Holland 2011 Film documentary
13 Steve Jobs Isaacson 2011 Biography
14 Steve Jobs Stern 2013 Film docudrama
15 Silicon Valley PBS 2013 TV documentary
16 The Everything Store Stone 2013 History
17 Hatching Twitter Bilton 2013 History
18 The Circle Eggers 2013 Novel
19 Silicon Valley Judge 2014 Fiction TV series
20 The Intel Trinity Malone 2014 History

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 61

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2
62 APPENDIX: TABLES OF TEXTS

Text Creator Date Format

21 Steve Jobs Sorkin 2015 Film docudrama
22 Steve Jobs: The Man in the Gibney 2015 Film documentary
Machine

AUTOMOBILE MANUFACTURING
Text Creator Date Format
– My Life and Worka Ford 1922 Autobiography
– My Years with GMa Sloan 1963 Autobiography
1 Iacocca Iacocca 1984 Autobiography
2 Gung-Ho Howard 1986 Feature film
3 Tucker Coppola 1988 Film docudrama
4 Roger & Me Moore 1989 Film documentary
5 The Fog of War Morris 2003 Film documentary
6 Who Killed the Electric Car? Paine 2006 Film documentary
7 Flash of Genius Seabrook 2008 Film docudrama
8 Overhaul Rattner 2010 History
9 Once Upon a Car Vlasic 2011 History
10 Revenge of the Electric Car Paine 2011 Film documentary
11 Car Guys Lutz 2011 Autobiography
12 American Icon Hoffman 2012 History
13 Elon Musk Vance 2015 Biography
aPredates period of this study

FINANCIAL TRADING

Text Creator Date Format

1 Wall Street Stone 1987 Feature film
2 Liar’s Poker Lewis 1989 Autobiography/History
3 Barbarians at the Gate Burrough, Helyar 1990 History
4 Den of Thieves Stewart 1991 History
5 Barbarians at the Gate Burrough, Helyar 1993 TV docudrama
6 When Genius Failed Lowenstein 2000 History
7 Boiler Room Younger 2000 Film docudrama
8 The Smartest Guys in the McLean, Elkind 2003 History
Room
9 24 Days Smith, Emshwiller 2003 History
10 Enron Gibney 2005 Film documentary
11 Wolf of Wall Street Belfort 2007 Autobiography
 APPENDIX: TABLES OF TEXTS 63

Text Creator Date Format

12 The Snowball Schroeder 2009 Biography
13 Too Good to be True Arvedlund 2009 History
14 Too Big to Fail Sorkin (Andrew) 2010 History
15 Inside Job Ferguson 2010 Film documentary
16 The Big Short Lewis 2010 History
17 The Quants Patterson 2010 History
18 No One Would Listen Markopolos 2010 History
19 Margin Call Chandor 2011 Feature film
20 Money and Power Cohan 2011 History
21 Why I Left Goldman Smith 2012 Autobiography
Sachs
22 Dark Pools Patterson 2012 History
23 Wolf of Wall Street Scorsese 2013 Film docudrama
24 The Billionaire’s Raghavan 2013 History
Apprentice
25 Flash Boys Lewis 2013 History
26 Stress Test Geithner 2014 Autobiography/History
27 The Big Short McKay 2015 Film docudrama
28 Madoff De Felitta, Robbins 2016 TV docudrama
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 INDEX

A B
Accidental Billionaires, The (Mezrich), Bal, Mieke, 6
17 Barra, Mary, 28
Acts of Meaning (Bruner), 57 Belfort, Jordan, 41, 47
alternative narratives, 21, 40, 55. See benefits, 7, 8, 14, 43
also counter narratives Bezos, Jeff, 16
Amazon.com, Inc., 16, 22 big business, villification of, 1
American Axis, The (Wallace), 27 Big Short, The (film), 10, 40, 42,
American Icon (Hoffman), 5, 25, 32 50–52, 55
“American Global Dream, The” Big Short, The (Lewis), 10, 40, 42,
(Skapinker), 29 50–52, 55
American Myth, American Reality Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 39,
(Robertson), 24 59
Anastakis, Dimitry, 30, 31 billionaires, 45
Anderson, Chris, 35 Billionaire’s Apprentice (Raghavan), 41
anti-business bias, 2 Bilton, Nick, 16
Apple Inc., 11, 15 Bloomberg.com, 33
“artefactual response”, 9 Boesky, Ivan, 41
Arvedlund, Erin, 41 Boje, David, 3
Atlantic, The, 54 Bordwell, David, 3, 5
auto manufacturing, 28. See also elec- Borins, Sandford, 5
tric cars; names of corporations Bowling for Columbine, 33
auto manufacturing narratives, 23–35 Bradshaw, Peter, 45
dominant fable, 7, 58 Brand, Stewart, 19
leadership, 24–26, 29 Bruner, Jerome, 2, 57
text selection, 10–11 Buffett, Warren, 38

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 73

S. Borins and B. Herst, Negotiating Business Narratives,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77923-2
74 INDEX

Burry, Michael, 51, 52 Denby, David, 53

Business @ the Speed of Thought (Gates), Denning, Stephen, 3
27 Den of Thieves (Stewart), 40
business celebrity, 24 Detroit Free Press, 33
business narratives. See narratives Dickens, Charles, 45
“Did Iacocca Ruin American
Business?” (Surowiecki), 30
C digital startups. See start-up fables
capitalism, 2, 19, 32, 33, 49, 50, 55. digital utopianism, 19
See also venture capitalism “dominant fables”, 11
Capitalism (film), 22, 33 Douglas, Michael, 38, 42
Carnegie, Andrew, 24
Carter, James Earl Jr. (Jimmy), 31
CEOs. See also leadership E
lifestyle, 47 Eberhard, Martin, 17
superhero, 14, 30, 42 Ebert, Roger, 33
villain, 2, 33 E-Dreams, 20
Chandler, Alfred, 27 Eggers, Dave, 22
Chandor, J.C., 42, 43, 53, 55 Eisman, Steve, 51, 52
Chaos Monkeys (Martinez), 20, 21 electric cars, 34
Chrysler, 25, 26, 29–31, 34 Elkind, Peter, 41, 44, 46
Churchill, Caryl, 10 Elon Musk (Vance), 33–35
Circle, The (Eggers), 22 emplotment, defined, 6
Circle, The (film), 22, 33 Enron (film), 44, 45–47
Close to the Machine (Ullman), 21 Enron Corporation, 5, 45–47, 55
cognitivists, 4 Epstein, Edward, 2
Cohan, William D., 42 Everything Store, The (Stone), 16
compensation, 21, 30, 42, 43
Coolidge, Calvin, 26
corporate boards, 30, 35 F
corporate greed, 33, 38, 41 fables. See also start-up fables
corporations, as evil, 1 typology, 7–10
“counter fables”, 11 Facebook, 16
counterculture, 19, 22 Facebook Effect, The (Kirkpatrick), 16
counter narratives, 59 FCA US LLC. See Chrysler
“crafted narratives” (Mar), 4 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
38
Ferguson, Charles, 43, 47–50
D fiction, 5, 45
Damon, Matt, 49 finance capitalism, 19, 49, 50
Dark Pools (Patterson), 40 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission,
Data General, 18 48
 INDEX 75

financial system, 49, 51, 55 H

Financial Times, 34 Hackers (Levy), 18, 19
financial trading narratives, 37–55 Halperin, Sue, 16
dominant fable, 9, 37–38, 40 Hasted, Nick, 50
gender and, 46 Hatching Twitter (Bilton), 16
patterns in, 44 Haywood, Susan, 5
tensions in, 44, 55, 58 Herman, David, 4, 6
text selection, 10–11 Herzog, Werner, 50
Flash Boys (Lewis), 40 Hockett, Ben, 53
Fog of War, The, 25 Hoffman, Bryce G., 5, 25, 32
folk tales, Russian, 5 Ho, Karen, 44, 50
Forbes, 30, 33 Hornaday, Ann, 48
Ford, Henry, 26 Hubbard, Glen, 48
Ford Motor Company, 5, 25–28, 33
Fortune, 33, 41
From Counterculture to Cyberculture I
(Turner), 19 Iacocca (Iacocca & Novak), 25, 29
Iacocca, Lee, 25, 29, 30, 35
IBM, 14, 18
G IBM Redux (Garr), 14
Garr, Doug, 14 Independent, 45, 50
Gates, William Henry III (Bill), 10, information technology narratives, 13-
16, 17, 27 22. See also start-up fables
Geithner, Timothy, 43 dominant fable, 11, 14
Gekko, Gordon, 38, 41 function of, 24, 55
gender, 21, 46 text selection, 10, 11
General Motors (GM), 25–28, 30, Insanely Great (Levy), 16, 18
31, 33 Inside Job, 42, 47, 49–51, 55
Gerstner, Louis, 14 In the Plex (Levy), 16, 18
Gibney, Alex, 45, 46 Isaacson, Walter, 16
Gnaizda, Robert, 47
Go Corporation, 20
Google, 16 J
government bailouts, 28, 31, 38 Jobs, Steve, 11, 16, 17, 35
GovWorks, 20
Graham, Paul, 19
Great Recession (2008), 28. See also K
subprime mortgage crisis Kael, Pauline, 33
greed, corporate, 33, 38, 41 Kaplan, Jerry, 20
Guardian, 30, 45 Kendall, Lori, 22
Khurana, Rakesh, 31
Kidder, Tracy, 18
76 INDEX

Kirkpatrick, David, 16 Miley, Leslie, 22

Kozmo, 20 “mind-narrative nexus” (Herman), 4
Money and Power (Cohan), 42
Moore, Michael, 26, 33
L morality tales, 26, 40, 46
leadership, 23–26. See also CEOs Morris, Errol, 26
in auto industry narratives, 26, 28 Move Fast and Break Things (Taplin),
in start-up fables, 17, 24 22
transformational, 30, 33 movies, 2. See also specific titles
Ledley, Charlie, 51, 52 Mulally, Alan, 5, 25, 28, 32, 33
Levy, Steven, 16, 18, 19 Musk, Elon, 16, 17, 33–35
Lewis, Ken, 43 My Years with General Motors (Sloan),
Lewis, Michael, 40, 42, 51, 52 27
Lewis-Kraus, Gideon, 20
Life in Code (Ullman), 21
Liquidated (Ho), 43, 50 N
Long-Term Capital Management, 41 narrative clustering, 11, 58
Lopate, Philip, 1 narrative research
Lowenstein, Roger, 41 analytic matrix, 5, 6, 8, 9, 58
context, theoretical, 3–5
methodology, 2, 10, 11
M possibilities, 59
Madoff, Bernie, 41 narratives
Madoff (film), 41 defined, 3
Mai, Jamie, 51 influence of, 59
management theory, 29 patterns in, 2, 44, 58
Mar, Raymond, 4 social negotiation, 3, 57, 59
Margin Call, 42–44, 53–55 Narrative Theory (Herman et al.), 6
Markopolos, Henry, 41 new economy, 19, 20, 45
Marrs, Audrey, 48 New Republic, The, 51
Martinez, Antonio Garcia, 20 Newsweek, 16, 18
McDonald, John, 27 New Yorker, 33, 53
McKay, Adam, 50, 53 New York Review of Books, The, 40
Mckenna, Christopher, 27 New York Times, 1, 29, 51
McLean, Bethany, 41, 46 Nocera, Joe, 33
McNamara, Robert, 26 No End in Sight, 51
media, 4, 16, 21, 22, 29, 45, 59. See No One Would Listen (Markopolos), 41
also specific publications
Media Impact Project, 59
methodology, 3, 10–11, 59 O
Mezrich, Ben, 17 O’Hehir, Andrew, 50
Microsoft Corporation, 11, 15, 49 Once Upon a Car (Vlasic), 26
 INDEX 77

Oremus, Will, 34 Roubini, Nouriel, 43, 47, 48

organizational outcomes, 23 Rudd, Kevin, 37
Orr, Christopher, 54
Outlaw Blues (Taplin), 22
Overhaul (Rattner), 26 S
Salmon, Felix, 40
Salon, 50
P Saverin, Eduardo, 17
Paine, Chris, 34 Schroeder, Alice, 38
“patterns of salience” (Plantinga), 5 Scott, A.O., 53
patterns, narrative, 2, 44, 58 Searching for a Corporate Savior
Patterson, Scott, 40 (Khurana), 31
Paulson, Hank, 38, 39, 43 Serious Money, 10
“pay for performance” principle, 43 shareholders, 7, 43
PayPal, 16, 34 Silicon Valley, 14
“pen computing”, 20 Skapinker, Michael, 29
Pirates of Silicon Valley, 15 Slate, 2, 34, 40
Plantinga, Carl, 5 Sloan, Alfred P., 26, 27
Plot Against America, The (Roth), 27 Sloan Management Review, 30
private sector narratives, 6, 58 Smartest Guys in the Room, The
profit motive, 6, 18, 43 (McLean & Elkind), 5, 41, 45, 46
Propp, Vladimir, 5 Smith, Roger, 26, 33
public sector narratives, 5–6 Snowball, The (Schroeder), 38, 51
public service video, 38 social costs/benefits, 7–9, 14
social effects of narratives, 58, 59
socialization, 4
Q social media, 22
Quinn, Anthony, 45 Social Network, The, 17, 38
social novels, 45
Sorkin, Aaron, 17, 38
R Sorkin, Andrew, 38, 43
Raghavan, Anita, 40 Soul of a New Machine, The (Kidder), 18
Rajan, Raghuram, 47, 48 SpaceX, 34
Rajaratnam, Raj, 40 Spotlight, 50
Rattner, Steve, 25 Startup.com, 20
research methodology, 2, 10–11, 59 Startup (Kaplan), 20
Revenge of the Electric Car, 34 start-up fables
Ribstein, Lawrence, 2 about, 16, 17
Riccardo, John, 31 counter-fables, 22
Robertson, J.O., 24 examples, 16
Roger and Me, 26, 33 function of, 19
Roth, Philip, 27 leadership, 16, 24
78 INDEX

Steve Jobs (Isaacson), 16 V

Stewart, James B., 40 Vance, Ashlee, 34, 35
Stone, Brad, 16 venture capitalism, 21, 58
Stone, Oliver, 38, 41 Vermeer Technologies, 49
story, defined, 3. See also narratives victims, 45
storytelling, organizational, 3 villain, corporate, 2, 33
Strategy and Structure (Chandler), 27
structuralists, 2, 5
subprime mortgage crisis, 28, 37, 40, W
48 Wagoner, Richard, 25, 28, 30
Suckfüll, Monika, 4 Wait But Why?, 34
“superhero CEOs”, 14, 30, 42 Wallace, Max, 27
Surowiecki, James, 2, 30, 32, 40, 42 Wall Street (film), 40, 42
Washington Post, 33, 48
West, Tom, 18
T When Genius Failed (Lowenstein), 41
Taplin, Jonathan, 22 Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
Telegraph, 38, 47 (Gerstner), 14
Tesla Motors, 16, 17, 33–35 Winklevoss, Cameron and Tyler, 17
Thain, John, 43 Wired, 18–21
Thompson, Kristin, 3, 5 Wolf of Wall Street, The (Belfort), 41,
Time, 16, 29 42
Too Big to Fail (Sorkin), 38, 43 Wolf of Wall Street, The (film), 40–42
Too Good to Be True (Arvedlund), 41 women
trading, 2. See also financial trading in auto industry, 28
narratives in Enron story, 46
authors’ use of term, 2 in IT sector, 21
transformational leadership, 30, 33 Wozniak, Steve, 16
Triumph of the Nerds, 15
Trollope, Anthony, 45
turnaround narratives, 7, 14, 25 Y
turnaround strategies, 32 Y Combinator, 19
Turner, Fred, 19
24 Days (Smith & Emshwiller), 41
Twitter, 16 Z
Zuckerberg, Mark, 17

U
United Kingdom, 6, 10
Urban, Tim, 34, 35