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Business leaders crack the books for fun and profit

 
Published July 7, 2003|Updated Sept. 1, 2005

Summertime . . . and the business executives are reading.

Just before the July 4 holiday, I asked some Tampa Bay area and Florida business leaders what books they were reading that stood out from the crowd. The enthusiastic response? Books to escape the business grind. And books to grind up business competitors. These business folks know what they like in literature.

Everybody who delivered up a book favorite or a reading list also offered some strong recommendations. One of my personal favorites came from Tampa bankruptcy lawyer Michael Horan, who's commuting to work these days while listening to the audio tape of Jane Leavy's well-written baseball biography, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy.

"It qualifies as a great summer book," Horan volunteers, then jests: "However, it has little relevance to the Tampa Bay area because the Dodgers were actually good, and Koufax could really pitch."

Among the hottest endorsements in classic summer thrillers? The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, about a plot to uncover a secret that has been protected by a clandestine society since the days of Christ.

"I and several thousand others have just finished The Da Vinci Code and it is fantastic!" says Peter Rummell, the CEO of St. Joe Co. "How anyone can make a great mystery out of a 1,700-year-old theory about the Catholic church is something I would not have bet on."

Rummell heads Florida's biggest private owner of land, which has headquarters in Jacksonville. And St. Joe is on a warp-speed tear developing upscale beachfront and adjacent property along Florida's Panhandle, an area St. Joe's marketing machine now calls "Florida's Great Northwest."

Just starting The Da Vinci Code is Bill Habermeyer, Progress Energy's top executive in Florida. He would have begun the bestseller earlier but was finishing Operation Drumbeat by historian Michael Gannon. The book is critical of the U.S. Navy in World War II for underestimating the cost and damage to the war effort by the systematic assault by German submarines on merchant tankers and freighters along the eastern U.S. seaboard in 1942.

Small wonder. Habermeyer may not look the part these days as a utility executive, but he is a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who spent more than two decades as an attack submarine engineer, executive officer and skipper. By the late 1980s, he was commandant of midshipmen at the Naval Academy. He retired as a rear admiral in 1992.

In Raleigh, N.C., the headquarters of Progress Energy, another ex-Navy man just finished an action thriller titled Hawke, by Ted Bell. The reader? Bill Cavanaugh, Habermeyer's boss and CEO of Progress Energy, who happened to spend much of the 1960s operating nuclear-powered submarines. Hawke _ no surprise here _ is about a missing submarine with nuclear warheads.

A more reflective book about war and the nation is in the hands of Carol Cassara, an executive in California's Silicon Valley for Tampa's Tucker Hall public relations firm. Cassara says she finds Myra MacPherson's Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation, which includes interviews with Vietnam-era college students and soldiers, a serious but "riveting" summer read. And she sees parallels today.

"I'm particularly interested in the subject given how the current administration, citizens, media and world have responded to our most recent war," she says.

As this year's head of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, Deanne Roberts is trying to build on the business community momentum generated by the recent visit of Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class. She's reading a complementary The Cultural Creatives: How 50-million People Are Changing the World, by Paul Ray. "Very cool," Roberts says.

Area CEOs Steve Raymund of Clearwater's Tech Data Corp. and Don DeFosset of Tampa's Walter Industries run companies in completely different industries from different sides of Tampa Bay. But each executive latched on to the same management book this summer: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done, by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. The authors argue that the biggest obstacle to success is the absence of execution. Raymund says the book had "useful pointers."

When these CEOs are not buried in management techniques, they've chosen fiction. DeFosset's got a couple of Tom Clancy thrillers. Raymund says he's in the middle of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, "an extremely well-written novel about a couple of Jewish comic book writers" in circa 1939 New York City.

On the side, the already lean Raymund is skimming Eat Yourself Slim after making a recent trip to Europe and observing several Tech Data colleagues "sporting svelte physiques." Says Raymund: "It can't hurt."

At Fowler White Boggs Banker, lawyer and CEO Rhea Law is focused on expanding the Tampa law firm's business. To help, she's reading Mark M. Maraia's Rainmaking Made Simple. Any "recreational" reading suggestions are welcome, she says.

Jay Sasserath, CEO of Intelligent Micro Patterning in St. Petersburg, says he's two years late, but for vacation has just packed The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, by Michael Gerber. Katie Pemble, Bank of America's Pinellas County president, recently read Alice Seybold's fiction blockbuster Lovely Bones and just started John Irving's The Fourth Hand.

"On my list to read is an oldie," she says _ Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, a very funny story that happens to take place in the banking and real estate world of the South. "Of course," Pemble adds, "given the length of that book, I may still be reading it this winter!"

No problem. We'll listen for the laughter. Happy summer reading.

_ Robert Trigaux can be reached at trigauxsptimes.com or (727) 893-8405.