Customer Reviews

Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin (Harvard Studies in Business History)

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Have you ever wondered why some people succeed in the workplace and others just seem to plod along? Have you ever questioned the "rags-to-riches" myths that portray the founding fathers as self-made men? If so, Pamela Walker Laird's magisterial study, PULL, is a must read for you!

Laird is an internationally acclaimed business scholar who set the record straight on marketing's formative years in her first book, ADVERTISING PROGRESS. Now, this prodigiously research new study examines the history of the self-made man, providing an important corrective to the Horatio Alger stories that resonate in the American imagination.

This is not a "how-to book," so if you are looking for step-by-step instructions on how to be successful, you had best look through Amazon for something else. However, if you are looking for a thoughtful, carefully researched analysis that talks about the history of success and failure, you will find much here. Was Benjamin Franklin a "self-made man"? No, says Laird. Franklin, like many others in PULL, was a smart guy, who knew how to work the system and make it work for him. He recognized the importance of developing friends in the right places, and those sponsors PULLed him up the economic ladder.

While Laird starts with Franklin, she brings her story into our own time, with a careful analysis of the pros and cons of equal opportunity and affirmative action initiatives, and a discussion of the real importance of mentoring and sponsorship in the corporate world. Fashionable theorists cited by other Amazon.com reviewers of PULL might speculate on the roots of success, but Laird has rolled up her sleeves, dug through the world's best libraries, and provided the most comprehensive study of success and failure that we have by drawing on real-life examples from the distant and recent past. Theorists and their fans would do well to open their minds to Laird's approach, and to borrow a bit of her elbow grease. Laird acknowledges that theory can suggest new ideas, but it is no substitute for judicious historical research and analysis.

PULL gets an A Plus from this reader!

I usually get better ratings for my reviews if I give books good reviews, but I found this one disappointing and would suggest that readers might better spend their time on other books about networks and networking.

The book presses the unremarkable point that social cohesion can exclude people, but it has an angry tone that makes this wrong. Rather than shedding light on the psychological and social forces that replicate these structures, it reads more like a catalog of the injustices that this have been metted out. The philosophical issue of what makes an ideal world where everyone is the best off is complex, and this book does not address this. Most importantly, it references very few of the books and studies that have been done on social networks for the past 70 years. I would recommend that readers look at the works of Mark Granovetter, Charles Tilly, Harrison White and others who have made significant contributions to our undersanding of social structure, much of it based on empirical research and not opinions. The only network researcher she mentions, Wayne Baker, she does in a negative light. I, personally, find Baker's empirical research much more compelling that Laird's.