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Rating: 
Summary: The Dish on the deals, the debauchery, and the dysfunction!
Review: As a fan of Christopher Byron's prior book, Martha Inc. and his New York Post column, I anxiously awaited the publication of Testosterone Inc. I was not disappointed. I absolutely loved this book !!! It is a total page-turner. I read it in 2 days. The rise and fall of the American CEO is a culturally defining moment and no one tells the story better than Christopher Byron. The money, the women, the greed ... while we were admiring these "all powerful CEOs", they were acting like drunken frat boys behind our backs. Thank you Christopher Byron for telling us the inside story - the very entertaining yet very scary true story.
Rating:
Summary: It Doesn't Get Better!
Review: At long last! Someone has taken the time to write a definitive and authoritative text on the abusive and destructive leadership of a few heralded CEOs from a (hopefully) bygone era. The research in this book is superb. It is exhaustive and painstaking in its determination to be fact-based, detailed and accurate. I think the author and his team deserve gold medals for truth seeking, accuracy, insightful observation and analysis. Thank you, Mr. Byron, for knowing who to go after, and for having a sense of humor as you do.
Rating: 
Summary: Flesh and the Mammon
Review: C. Byron depicts the 4 main characters in this book (business managers J. Welsh, D. Kozlowski, A. Dunlap and R. Perelman) as angry self-servers and tenacious wive-dumpers with babe-magnet fantasies.
Their main common feature is frustration, with parents, jobs, pay and spouse ... even after they reached the top. It was (is) never enough.
Out of this frustration grew their aggression and immense drive for power and dominance, their savage cost-cutting and childish jealousies, which were fatal even for their most loyal collaborators.
For J. Welsh, company loyalty was a weakness and pure hypocrisy.
Unless you consider these people as the most brilliant specimen of the homo sapiens species (they are all falling from their horse in this book), this is an unimportant book about uninteresting people (I agree, not for their employees who were fired).
This book has its bouts of gags and vitriolic comments, but also some unnecessary outburst, dragging in e.g. Bill Clinton's escapades.
All in all, an extended somewhat better gossip column.
Rating: 
Summary: hidden envy fuels the pen
Review: Christopher Byron is a barely-contained little nut of rage whose transparent drive to make fun of or denigrate the powerful, seems his way of touching the hem of powerful, successful people. He appears to be in great need to vent his envy and impotence. Worthless read.
Rating: 
Summary: Footnotes Long and Annoying
Review: Each page is 1/2 copy, and 1/2 footnotes. The author uses so many different footnotes, that he has to revert to sometimes as many as 5 different sybmols on a single page. A (not literal) example:
The greed was born early in* Jack Welch * Here, I use the classical "in". You may think I mean "With the characteristic, attribute, or property of: a tall man in an overcoat.", but I really mean "Located inside; inner.". More information about the word "in" can be found in Fred Smith's, 1998 book, "The History of the Word 'In'", published by Harper & Collins, 2nd edition paperback. I apprectiate the depths of your research, Byron, but this is really annoying and hard to read.
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Summary: Nice angle, terrible book....
Review: Hoping to gain some insight into the behavior of Corporate Exec gone bad, I picked up this book........ MISTAKE! This book is the National Enquirer of books. Ridiculous pop psychology that would make a first-year psych. student howl with laughter (It was the testosterone! No. Wait. It was because his mother called him a punk!) The footnote system is insane. Memo to Mr. Bryon: the use of metaphors (such as Lillith) typically do require footnotes to explain them. Conclusions and assumptions made by others are pushed aside to give more room to Mr. Byron's equally fallacious assumptions and illogical conclusions. Poorly written. Poorly edited. All this, plus, Mr. Byron sets the men's movement back 20 years with his male-bashing biological reductionism and stereotyping. Too bad. An insightful book on this topic is sorely needed. Anyone know of one?
Rating:
Summary: Nice angle, terrible book....
Review: Hoping to gain some insight into the behavior of Corporate Exec gone bad, I picked up this book........ MISTAKE! This book is the National Enquirer of books. Ridiculous pop psychology that would make a first-year psych. student howl with laughter (It was the testosterone! No. Wait. It was because his mother called him a punk!) The footnote system is insane. Memo to Mr. Bryon: the use of metaphors (such as Lillith) typically do require footnotes to explain them. Conclusions and assumptions made by others are pushed aside to give more room to Mr. Byron's equally fallacious assumptions and illogical conclusions. Poorly written. Poorly edited. All this, plus, Mr. Byron sets the men's movement back 20 years with his male-bashing biological reductionism and stereotyping. Too bad. An insightful book on this topic is sorely needed. Anyone know of one?
Rating:
Summary: This book is a scream!!!
Review: So funny that you might not be able to breath - unless you are one of the many CEO's described in the book! But who can say. Maybe they can laugh at themselves, maybe not.
I am reading a number of books at the moment and just received five new books from Amazon.com including this book. Needless to say, I dropped everything and read this book. It is simply a very funny and enjoyable book 375 pages long, but in large to medium font so you can read it in one or two evenings. Do not be put off or fooled by the book jacket that has an amateurish yellow photo and a girl in a short skirt. This is a well-researched and well-written book.
I read Martha Inc. by the same author Christopher Byron and thought it was a solid well-written book, that rang true, had a lot of research and interviews and was a page turner to read. He is a writer for the New York Post and very skilled as a writer. This book is a bit faster read and a bit lighter, and it jumps around to cover a variety of famous CEO's. I have just finished reading a series of longer books including "Stalin" by Montefiore plus some others and interestingly here Byron uses the same literary techniques as does Montefiore in his large and serious biography of Stalin. What he does is first look at many public sources on the CEO's, then he does interviews (90) to try and piece everything together and give context plus add new information, then he inserts black and white photographs into the book as we proceed, such as photos of Dennis and Karen Kozlowski, Ron Perelman's fourth wife Jack Welch together with Suzy Wetlaufer, etc. It makes it all very entertaining and a compelling light read.
There are many things that stick out in the book and I will not repeat those here, but in one case he compares different versions (hard cover and soft cover) of "Straight From the Gut" by Jack Welch and the author points out how the "soul mate" has changed in the book, and how the credit for Jack's second wife Jane was reduced from some fraction of a chapter in the first hard cover edition to one or two lines in the soft cover version a few years later. But the accolades in one book are transferred to a new woman in the second version. It is amazing how one man's biography can quickly and retroactively change!
There are too many stories to repeat here but it is all very entertaining. The men come of as out of control classless fools, but in some cases they are aided and abetted by some wily or equally foolish women.
I am giving it 4 stars because of the humorous nature of the book, and light read. Strongly recommend and very funny.
Jack in Toronto
Rating:
Summary: Great cover, but inside mediocre
Review: This book has an important message for all women who aspire to the corner office, and those who already sit there: You still have a chance to make a difference by NOT taking lessons in management and leadership from "CEOs Gone Wild." Stay in control of your own destiny by having a clear understanding of who you are, what you have accomplished (or want to accomplish), and what strengths as well as weaknesses you possess. And don't forget to remember the many wonderful folks who show up every day at work and who put their hearts and souls into making the company strong. YOU represent them as well as the stockholders! Public image can make or break a company, and it can make or break YOU as its CEO. If you strive to be an "Icon," keep in mind that someone may write your story one day. What do YOU want it to say? (Reviewed by Marion E. Gold - author of the "Personal Publicity Planner: A Guide to Marketing YOU" and "TOP COPS: Profiles of Women in Command).
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Summary: an entertaining little hissy fit
Review: This was an entertaining little hissy fit on the part of the author. I have never read, even in college texts a book with such lengthy footnotes. Sometimes I felt like I was reading two different books on the same page. I finally gave up reading the footnotes, and that made for a very fast read. This book is about 75% trash Jack Welch, 25% trash everyone else. I'd like to have learned what ultimately became of Al Dunlop, the most loathsome of the bunch. No cancer or raging impotence stories to cheer us up? This is the kind of book to take to the beach to read, but you might want to put a different jacket on it so no one knows of your guilty pleasure.
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