Book Audits

By John Greenwald

AN EXECUTIVE ENIGMA

One of the largest and most profitable corporations in the U.S. has been run for nearly 20 years by an avowed Socialist. The company is Schlumberger (1983 revenues: $5.8 billion), a leading oilfield-services firm. The executive is Frenchman Jean Riboud, who is profiled in The Art of Corporate Success (Putnam; 184 pages; $15.95) by Writer Ken Auletta. Riboud, 64, is a corporate enigma. A hardheaded capitalist in business matters, he is nevertheless a confidant of Socialist French President Franc,ois Mitterrand.

Under Riboud, Schlumberger has adopted "strive for perfection" as a corporate credo. "If you want to innovate, to change an enterprise or a society," he says, "it takes people willing to do what's not expected." That policy has paid off in the constant technological improvement of Schlumberger's exploration techniques during his tenure, and a jump in the firm's annual profits from $27.1 million to $1 billion.

Riboud and his company, however, now face stiff challenges. The drop in oil prices has pared Schlumberger's profits, and the firm is still struggling to digest its 1979 acquisition of Fairchild Camera & Instrument, an ailing semiconductor maker. Riboud, who has been granted the right to stay on beyond 65, may face his toughest test when he finally steps down. Says he: "To leave Schlumberger would be like trying to shake an oyster off a rock."

THE LIFE OF MAYNARD

When the official biography of John Maynard Keynes appeared in 1951, an acquaintance remarked, "This is the biography of Lord Keynes. Someone else must write the life of Maynard." That someone is Charles Hession, author of John Maynard Keynes (Macmillan; 400 pages; $22.95). His ambitious treatment draws on previously unavailable material to portray the private life of the man who forever changed the nature of capitalism by asserting that deficit spending could cure business slumps. The unique angle and breadth of Keynes' vision, Hession argues, were rooted in a combination of intuition, poetry and bisexuality.

In discussing Keynes' impact on the world economy from the Versailles peace conference after World War I to the monetary system set up toward the end of World War II, Hession dwells on Keynes' sexual proclivities. Born in 1883, Keynes was the first and favored child of an intellectual Victorian family. He had his first homosexual experience at Eton, and later pursued what was then called "the friendship that dare not speak its name" with Artist Duncan Grant, among others.

As part of London's bohemian Bloomsbury group, Keynes dined with such luminaries as Novelists Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster. Those gatherings sharpened his Renaissance restlessness. For most of his life Keynes was simultaneously a don, a diplomat and a highly successful currency speculator. As his stature grew, his sexuality shifted. In 1925 Keynes wed the beautiful Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Their marriage endured for the rest of his life. So full were his days on earth that Keynes was able to recall only one regret shortly before his 1946 death: he was sorry, he said, not to have drunk more champagne.

IN PRAISE OF BIG LABOR

Once proud and powerful, American unions now seem hounded on all sides. Denounced as featherbedding outfits that help jack up prices, they have seen both their membership and their bargaining clout dwindle. Now, in What Do Unions Do? (Basic Books; 293 pages; $22.95) Harvard Economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff have come not to bury unions but to praise them. Their key finding: unions are good for society as a whole but bad for individual companies.

In explaining that paradox, the authors note that Big Labor uses its power in both positive and negative ways. They readily concede that collective bargaining can drive up wages and thus eat into corporate profits. But that harmful impact, they argue, is more than offset by the improvements that unions make in working conditions. Among the beneficial results: better morale and increased productivity.

The Harvard professors are intent on correcting many negative stereotypes about unions. They insist that most are democratically run, and that there is probably less crime and corruption in the labor movement than in the business world. But they do not expect their statistic-packed book to settle any arguments. Write the authors: "Age-old debates do not often end with a bang, even with computerized evidence." --By John Greenwald