An oldie but a

JOHN BROOKS has been dead more than 20 years, but that doesn’t mean he’s past it.

As a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, Brooks made a name for himself with finely observed articles that shone a colourful light on the apparently grey world of Wall St. Last year a collection of his work originally published in 1969 was reissued with a recommendation from Bill Gates, who described it as ‘‘the best business book I’ve ever read’’.

Gates is spot on. Despite dealing with events that took place half a century ago, Business Adventures reveals Brooks as a deft, witty storyteller whose insights are as good today as they ever were.

One of my favourite chapters is about the corporate ritual of the annual general meeting.

In the northern spring of 1966 Brooks decided to attend a series of AGMs to observe how the enormous power apparently held by the professional managers of America’s corporates was exercised in their annual encounter with stockholders, who nominally held them to account. He chose that AGM season because it ‘‘promised to be a particularly lively one’’ after the previous year’s events featured shareholders being hectored and thrown out by hard-line chairmen.

The first thing Brooks noticed was that companies had started to shift their meetings away from New York, where most dissident shareholders tended to live. General Electric, for example, was going to Georgia, where it ‘‘appeared to have suddenly discovered 5600 stockholders . who were badly in need of a chance to attend an annual meeting.’’

After tracking AT&T’s meeting to Detroit, the next thing he noticed was that the hall was far from full, despite the company having almost 3 million stockholders. ‘‘The Yankees in their better days would have been disgusted with such a turnout on any weekday afternoon.’’

The event was attended by two people he came to be familiar with – Mrs Wilma Soss, who represented an association of women stockholders, and Mr Lewis Gilbert, a wealthy private investor. They were ‘‘professional stockholders’’ who made it their business to be well-informed and ask questions of management, contrasting with the majority of non-professionals, whose contributions ‘‘run strongly to ill-informed or tame questions and windy encomiums of management.’’

Hence the pros were ‘‘by default, the sole representatives of a huge constituency that may badly need

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