Customer Reviews

Testosterone Inc.: Tales of CEOs Gone Wild

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Much needed antidote to all of those nauseating Jack Welch cheerleaders that we had to endure during the bubble and afterward. This book is funny and entertaining. My favorite part is when Jack Welch gets drunk for a party thrown in his honor as the new CEO of GE. Amazing! For their "trophy wives", these guys paid more in their divorce settlements than even a very lucky CEO could could make in his whole career. Kudos to Byron for finally exploding the Jack Welch myth.

Amazing, hilarious, and downright scary!! The behavior of the men who ran the world in the 1990s exposed from the Oval Office to the corner office. Apparently these guys were most interested in getting more money for themselves, more power, and laid more -- by women other than their wives. How sad that this behavior was masked or applauded and got a free pass from the press. What is so noble about giving the market what it wants while treating so many with such disrespect whether from layoffs or abusive treatment of employees? That's not providing shareholder value but simply lining the pockets of a few at the expense of many. Byron should get a medal for exposing men in power behaving badly. No wonder the 1990s ended in such a bust.

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.

I found it amazing to read the tales of these so-called "industry leaders" who may indeed be leaders in the boardroom, but surely not on the homefront. Granted some of these tales are not new, but this book still manages to satisfy the insatiable desire for gossip with more detail than we've heard through the media in many instances, all the while making you stop and seriously think about how all this "wild" behavior affects your investments in the companies the CEO's represent.

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?

Bravo to Chris Byron for finally telling the real story of these celebrity CEOs. The pillars that we placed these men on is chipping away and it is about time someone gave us another voice. Jack Welch and the men of GE should be ashamed of themselves. I found this book both entertaining and downright stunning at the same time. Read this book--you'll be shocked!

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.

It's about time someone got the goods on these pigs in suits. Byron nails them, and he also has a very funny way of telling their stories. Of course, I'd be laughing harder if it weren't so egregiously out of hand. I just read somewhere that Perelman (just as an example) is on, what, his fourth wife? Amazingly, as Byron points out, even one divorce used to be an indication of unfitness for leadership in a corporation. There's one rule that no longer applies! You'll be amazed by the behind-the-scenes stuff Byron has dug up for this book.

Read this book and you'll understand why these four American CEO's are in desperate need of a first rate psychiatrist! Each and every one of the men profiled in this book are an utter nightmare. Simply put, they a disgrace to our system regardless of how much money they've made for others. There is a solid arguement to be made that for every dollar they put in their own pocket, they took tenfold from someone else's. These icons of business, (at one point in time or another) are completely lacking in morals and ethics! What does it say about our culture that it promotes these types of personalities into such positions of power? This book will leave you feeling ashamed and angry at the decision makers. It seems our country is light years away from the very values our country was founded upon. How sad for the United States. How sad for Corporate America!

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.