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John H. Burdakin and the Grand Trunk Western Railroad provides a look at the principles and personal values that guided John H. Burdakin through a long, successful career as a top manager at three railroads—the Pennsylvania, the Penn Central, and finally the Grand Trunk Western, where he was president of the regional carrier from 1974 to 1986. The book, written from interviews with Burdakin before his death in 2014, gives real-life examples of how Burdakin’s management principles and personal qualities helped him solve labor- management problems, update railroad technology, protect worker safety, and improve employee morale while managing a four thousand–person workforce. It introduces colorful characters who were involved in American railroads, as well as the serious, life-threatening issues that confronted railroads in the last half of the twentieth century in America. This book will provide insights for managers of any business as well as for those seeking to balance a successful career and a rewarding home life.
 
 

The son of a minister, James A. Joseph grew up in Louisiana’s Cajun country, where his parents taught him the value of education and the importance of serving others. These lessons inspired him to follow a career path that came to include working in senior executive or advisory positions for four U. S. Presidents and with the legendary Nelson Mandela to build a new democracy in South Africa. Saved for a Purpose is Joseph’s ethical autobiography, in which he shares his moral philosophy and his insights on leadership.  

In an engaging and personal style, Joseph shows how his commitment to applying moral and ethical principles to large groups and institutions played out in his work in the civil rights movement in Alabama and as a college chaplain in California in the turbulent 1960s. His time later as vice president of the Cummins Engine Company provided an opportunity to promote corporate ethics, and his tenure as Under Secretary of the Interior in the Carter Administration underscored the difficulty and weight of making the right decisions while balancing good policy analysis with transcendent moral principles.

In 1996 President Clinton selected Joseph to become the United States Ambassador to South Africa. His recollections of working with Nelson Mandela, whom he describes as a noble and practical politician, and his observations about what he learned from Desmond Tutu and others about reconciliation contain some of the book’s most poignant passages.

Saved for a Purpose is unique, as Joseph combines his insights from working to integrate values into America’s public and private sectors with his long engagement with ethics as an academic discipline and as a practical guide for social behavior. Ultimately, it reflects Joseph’s passionate search for values that go beyond the personal to include the ethical imperatives that should be applied to the communal.

What causes conflict among high-level American corporate executives? How do executives manage their conflicts? Based on candid interviews with over two hundred executives and their support personnel, Calvin Morrill provides an intimate portrait of these men and women as they cope with problems usually hidden from those outside their exclusive ranks.

Personal and corporate scandals, compensation battles, budget worries, interdepartmental rivalries, personal enmities, and general rancor are among everyday challenges faced by executives. Morrill shows what most influences the way managers handle routine conflicts are the cultures created by their company's organizational structure: whether there is a strong hierarchy, a weak hierarchy, or an absence of any strong central authority. The issues most likely to cause conflict within corporations Morrill identifies as managerial style, competition between departments, and performance evaluations, promotions, and compensation.

Among the people whose day-to-day lives we get to know are Jacobs, a divisional executive whose intuitive understanding of the corporate hierarchy enables him to topple his incompetent superior without direct confrontation; Fuller, who through a mix of brains, guile, and connections rises from staff executive secretary to corporate vice president in a large bank; Green, an old-fashioned accounting partner in a firm being taken over by management consultants; and the "Princess of Power," "Iron Man," and the "Terminator"—executives fighting their way to the top of a successful entertainment company.

Unprecedented in its direct access to top managers, this portrayal of daily life and conflict management among corporate elites will be of interest to professionals, scholars, and practitioners in organizational culture and behavior, managerial decision making, dispute, social control, law and society, and organizational ethnography.