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Written by John A. Byrne - Abridged Nonfiction - 2 CASSETTES - 3 hours

Publisher, Bantam Doubleday Dell (August 1993)

Today, as we struggle to reinvent the meaning of success in Business, our biggest challenge is to break the decades' long hold of the legacy of ten powerful men.

The Whiz Kids were the brash Army Air Force officers who sold themselves in a package deal Henry Ford II at the end of World War H. Despite their lack of business experience, they arrogantly believed they could rescue the ailing Ford Motor Company, then hemorrhaging millions of dollars a month. Rescue it they did, and more. In a coup worthy of a conquering Caesar, they reshaped American business. Since they lacked product know-how, they minimized its importance and played up financial control. Uncomfortable with their intuition, they elevated numbers to the greater truth. Passion was unappreciated by them—they championed detached professionalism. It all added up to an agenda where making cars fell second in importance to making money. For a time, it worked, and by their mid-to-late thirties, the Whiz Kids virtually ruled Ford. Soon their success spread to other major U.S. corporations and became a key component in the nation's economic growth.

So why, author John A. Byrne argues, has their legacy helped us manage our way to decline? Why are we holding on to the culture the Whiz Kids instituted, in which we pay more attention to finance than to the products we build and the customers we serve?

Byrne tells us how each man's soaring success ricocheted into stunning failure. The group's charismatic leader, Tex Thornton, eventually left Ford to create Litton Industries, America's first major conglomerate—a doomed monument to numbers over quality; Robert McNamara, feared in Detroit as the human computer, and later as Secretary of Defense, tried to win the Vietnam War by sheer numbers—of enemy casualties; Jack Reith thought he could resist the Whiz Kids' science and build a car. That was all romance. Instead, he committed suicide after the car's failure cost him his career. Several others went on to lead major institutions culminating in what Byrne calls a "twilight of honor."

The Whiz Kids is much more than a group portrait of success gone bad. It's a call to get back to the basics—to return to the values that once made America great, and can again.