Casey's law

Murphy's Law tells us that if something can go wrong, it will. Nonsense! says Al Casey, who maintains: If things can go right, they should. But you've got to make them go right, he adds, by hard work, focusing on key problems, and believing in the people around you. One of the most successful - and original - American businessmen of our time, Al Casey is a no-nonsense turnaround specialist who loves nothing more than the big challenges, whether in the private or the public sector. As president of the Times Mirror Corporation, he was instrumental in taking that West Coast company, whose main "product" was the Los Angeles Times, and turning it into a multifaceted media giant, with interests in magazines, newspapers, book publishing, forest products, radio, and television. As chairman of American Airlines for eleven years, he took that ailing giant - heavily in debt and losing money when he became CEO early in 1974 - and made it into the highly profitable, preeminent company it still is today. As postmaster general he attacked the problems of the country's largest government agency - with almost a million employees - and left it leaner, more motivated, for the first time truly competitive, and - to the great surprise of Washington insiders - both efficient and profitable. When the savings and loan debacle unfolded in the late 1980s, with hundreds of thrifts having failed and hundreds more under siege, Al Casey was named chairman of the Resolution Trust Corporation, with the impossible job of bailing out a situation that was threatening the entire banking system of the United States. In this book Al Casey tells his fascinating latter-day Horatio Alger story, from boyhood days in Arlington, Massachusetts, where he grew up during the Great Depression, through his fifty-year business career, to his current role as Distinguished Professor at SMU's Cox School of Business, where he is helping form a new generation of business leaders and managers. In these pages he relates, with great charm and wit, the saga of his long and varied business career and offers practical advice on where and how American business needs to simplify and focus if it is to maintain its position as global leader in the twenty-first century.