Book Review: The Puritan Gift

Media Project member Promise Hsu reviews a bestselling business title. This review was originally published in Mandarin in Vista magazine.

What ties together the world-shaping events of the Toyota scandal, the financial meltdown, and the rise of the United States, Japan and China? Thanks to a lifetime of globe-spanning inquiry, two elderly Brits may have the answer.

“It is critically important for China to distinguish good capitalism from bad”, the 80-year-old William Hopper tells our reporter. With his brother Kenneth, 83, William has been creating a buzz in business and management circles, thanks to their 2007 book, The Puritan Gift: Triumph, Collapse and Revival of an American Dream, named by the Financial Times one of that year’s Top Ten Business Books.

For its 2009 reissue in paperback, the book was re-titled The Puritan Gift: Reclaiming the American Dream Amidst Global Financial Chaos. Not surprisingly, the financial crash has boosted interest this book. In an article for the magazine Strategy+Business, British management guru Charles Handy hailed the new version of The Puritan Gift as one of the top leadership books of 2009. According to Handy, leadership was in short supply in the year-long aftermath of the crisis on Wall Street and the Hoppers’ book served as an ideal reminder of where the business world truly stood.

In the January 2010 Harvard Business Review, executive editor Sarah Cliffe described it as “this astonishing book about American managerial culture.” She added, “I’ve never read a business book that packed so much information, history, and insight into one compact volume.”

Older brother Kenneth, once a department head at Procter & Gamble, has decades of industrial and management consulting experience under his belt. Younger brother William, an investment banker, has served in the European Parliament. The insights their book has to offer, though, are not simply a product of their professional lives. More importantly, the brothers are seeking an ultimate solution to the chaos that has engulfed the corporate and business sectors.

Today the Hoppers are busier than ever, constantly updating their blog, fielding lecture and interview requests, and corresponding with readers. Between February and March 2010, William was blogging almost daily. One item that caught his attention was Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda’s acknowledgment before a U.S. Congressional hearing that the company had “lost its way during a period of rapid growth.” The apology came as no surprise to William. He says Japan’s corporate sector began to lose its way years ago, when it retreated from the corporate system and workplace values imported during the U.S. occupation (1945–1952). “That,” William says, “was good capitalism.” As for the bad kind, the brothers blame post-war American business schools, particularly after the 1970s. As curricula became dominated by “financial engineering,” profit and performance were prioritized before all else.

A Foreseeable Crisis

When the book’s first edition came out three years ago, William and Kenneth made a point of raising concerns about Toyota. They believed the automaker -- like Sony, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Panasonic and other Japanese brands once synonymous with quality -- was losing its focus. As William points out, the evidence was emerging long before the brothers completed their book in 2006.

According to James P.