Product Description

Never has the World Bank’s relief work been more important than in the last nine years, when crises as huge as AIDS and the emergence of terrorist sanctuaries have threatened the prosperity of billions. This journalistic masterpiece by Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby charts those controversial years at the Bank under the leadership of James Wolfensohn—the unstoppable power broker whose daring efforts to enlarge the planet’s wealth in an age of globalization and terror were matched only by the force of his polarizing personality. Based on unprecedented access to its subject, this captivating tour through the messy reality of global development is that rare triumph—an emblematic story through which a gifted author has channeled the spirit of the age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #380824 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As portrayed by Washington Post columnist Mallaby, the charming, powerful, Australian-born millionaire James Wolfensohn works to transform the World Bank, of which he is president, from a Cold War dinosaur obsessed with regulations and procedures to an organization that is leanly and meanly focused on getting underdeveloped countries onto the economic grid on their own terms. Without a doubt, Wolfensohn makes great copy: he competed in the Olympics, refinanced Chrysler in 1980 and chaired a variety of top-flight cultural institutions. Mallaby (After Apartheid) efficiently relays anecdotes from each of these periods to reveal Wolfensohn's psychological, professional and intellectual complexion. The brilliant and deliberative leader who emerges has the "10-million-volt passion" of wanting the presidency of the World Bank, and where the book really shines is in Mallaby's ability to integrate the political, social and interpersonal narratives that lead to Wolfensohn's ascension to it in 1995. Mallaby presents Wolfensohn as forcefully advocating self-determination for poor countries (not unlike "feisty" NGO "tormentors" who oppose the Bank's version of globalization), but finds that Wolfensohn has been "obliged to reckon" with the U.S.'s varying agendas "and generally with the shifting appetites of his rich political masters." That's a characterization with which not everyone will agree, but Mallaby forges it with skill, opening his subject to further scrutiny by all sides.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
We often refer to Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when we want to suggest that someone has a dual personality, part of it charming, part of it monstrous. But we tend not to distinguish very clearly between people who cannot help swinging back and forth between the two and those who can alternate at will, and often do so in a quite calculated way.

I wonder if Sebastian Mallaby had Stevenson in the back of his mind when he was writing this book, for the World Bank President James Wolfensohn he portrays here appears to be almost exactly 50 percent Jekyll and 50 percent Hyde. Wolfensohn/Jekyll is the irresistible charmer seen at his vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyo., who can turn bitter foes into best friends (or at least "frenemies") with a single shot of his charisma. Wolfensohn/Hyde is the intolerable monster seen on Wall Street and in Washington, whose egocentric tantrums have just the opposite effect. The moral of Mallaby's story is that Wolfensohn's presidency of the World Bank would have been more successful had Dr. Jekyll been in sole charge. But that may underestimate the usefulness of Mr. Hyde.

Wolfensohn's career is an astonishing story in its own right, and Mallaby, an accomplished British journalist who is now a Washington Post editorial writer, tells it well. Born and raised in Sydney, the son of an unsuccessful Jewish businessman who had quit England for Australia during the Great Depression, Wolfensohn was an underachiever in high school but a renaissance man in college. He learned to fly. He learned to fence, captaining the Australian Olympic team. And then, at Harvard Business School, he learned to schmooze. Throughout the 1960s and '70s, he clawed his way up the greasy pole of global finance, working in New York for both Schroders and Salomon Brothers and accumulating not only a substantial fortune but also one of the world's classiest Rolodexes. One of the wizards of the age of relationship banking, Wolfensohn brought to finance many of the skills that his friend Bill Clinton brought to politics -- in particular, an ability to make every contact in a vast network feel loved.

Yet mere wealth was never enough for him. Wolfensohn also found time to nurture and then to display his musical gifts. At age 40 he was encouraged by his ailing friend Jacqueline du Pré to take up the cello. Ten years after his first lesson, he was sufficiently accomplished to perform in concert at Carnegie Hall. It did not hurt that he was then chairman of the Carnegie Hall board.

In Wolfensohn's philanthropy, too, he hankered after public performances -- and when it comes to doing good, the stages don't come much bigger than the World Bank. Getting there took him slightly longer than getting to Carnegie Hall. Wolfensohn was first considered for the job as early as 1980, but it was another 15 years before he got it.

As he pitched it to the key players in the Clinton administration, Wolfensohn plus the World Bank would be a marriage made in heaven: His charisma and boundless energy would be wedded to its resources and global aegis. But despite being called a bank, the institution he yearned to run was in many ways much more like the financial division of the United Nations. Its cosmopolitan civil service culture was a thousand miles removed from the yelling, table-thumping style of the investment banks of New York and London. It was this cultural gap, Mallaby argues, that kept turning Jekyll into Hyde.

Outsiders only saw Jekyll. Confronted by the bank's increasingly vociferous critics among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), Wolfensohn listened, nodded, affected contrition, pledged repentance. Confronted by the bank's senior staff, he morphed into Hyde -- bullying, swearing, slamming doors, threatening resignation.

Mallaby is full of praise for Wolfensohn in his Jekyll guise. We see Wolfensohn wooing the NGOs, recoiling from the corruption of the Ivory Coast, smelling a rat in Suharto's Indonesia, spotting a success story in Uganda and brilliantly seizing an opportunity in Bosnia, ensuring that the World Bank played a decisive role in stabilizing that shattered country after the 1995 Dayton peace accords.

Perhaps most impressive of all is Mallaby's account of how Wolfensohn outwitted his critics in the Bush administration. With some sensationally deft footwork, he managed to weave around Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill (who allegedly wanted his scalp) and to reverse the president's stance on foreign aid (who else could have got Bush and Bono, the Irish rock star turned development activist, onto the same stage?). By 2003 he felt sufficiently secure to refuse requests for World Bank assistance with the reconstruction of U.S.-occupied Iraq.

But when he turns to the internal politics of the bank, Mallaby reveals Mr. Hyde. It is not a pretty sight. When Wolfensohn arrived at Jakarta's airport in February 1998, he greeted the bank's director for Indonesia by telling him, "You've really [expletive] this country up" -- no doubt a relatively affable salutation at Salomon Brothers in the roaring 1980s but not normal World Bank parlance. His staff came to dread such storms of profanity. To avoid them, they learned never to voice criticism when the boss unveiled one of his Big Ideas -- of the Bank as a "knowledge bank," of a new "Strategic Compact" with poor countries, of a "New Development Framework." The correct response to such grandiose visions was always: "Yes, Jim, absolutely, Jim."

As Mallaby tells it, Wolfensohn was not always wholly in control of his mood swings. I am not so sure. My guess is he was modeling his outbursts on those of the great financial maestro Siegmund Warburg, who had been Wolfensohn's mentor in the 1960s. After detonating himself in mid-meeting and storming back to his hotel, Warburg would coolly ask colleagues: "How did I do?" One can imagine Wolfensohn asking the same question after some of the suspiciously theatrical rages Mallaby describes.

Wolfensohn may have felt he needed such blasts to rouse the troubled institution he inherited. The Bank was under fire. Its "structural adjustment programs" -- which involved tightening the fiscal and monetary policies in borrower countries -- had earned it the enmity of many NGOs, which saw it and the International Monetary Fund as the two ugly sisters of globalization. There was disquiet on the other side of the political spectrum too. The Bank's role was to lend capital at affordable rates to help poor countries develop their economies, and since its foundation in 1944, it had made a great many such loans. Yet in many of the recipient countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, growth had been feeble or nonexistent. If critics on the left saw the Bank as too tough, critics on the right suspected it was much too soft, handing out money to corrupt Third World politicians who simply siphoned it into their Swiss bank accounts.

Assailed on all sides, the Bank's bureaucrats -- thousands of economics PhDs from all around the world -- hunkered down and got on with what they did best: generating an awesome quantity of reports and statistics. Nothing illustrates more strikingly what a rut the Bank was in than its snail-like slowness to grasp the magnitude of the HIV-AIDS epidemic. In short, the institution needed a shakeup, and Wolfensohn's job was to administer it. This was not something Dr. Jekyll could do. It called for Mr. Hyde.

One episode in particular illustrates what Wolfensohn was up against. It occurred at a 1997 meeting of the bank's board, which represents the rich countries that are its shareholders. Wolfensohn went along expecting to give an ornamental clock and utter a few valedictory banalities to Marc-Antoine Autheman, the outgoing French representative. Instead, he was the recipient of an earful of Gallic invective. Having denounced Wolfensohn's "obsessive reference to the exclusive and irrelevant model of the American private sector," Autheman proceeded to recite a bizarre allegorical poem:

Narcissus, you complain and praise your image
Which the mainstream mirrors
Only Echo Echo responds
But who . . . would follow you but Echo
If your motto remains
Follow me, Support me, and Repeat after me.

No one had any doubt who "Narcissus" was meant to be. But the image of Wolfensohn gazing fondly at his own reflection in the "pool" of the World Bank could be turned around. For if the Bank was a pool when Wolfensohn took it over, it was a distinctly stagnant one. And far from merely admiring his own reflection in it, Wolfensohn had made it his business to stir the pool up.

"I say yes, Jim," Autheman continued, "when you care for Africa; listen to the civil society; ask for a new, unprecedented debt relief. . . . But, I say no when you respond to dissent by the threats to resign [and] criticize staff to the point where they feel humiliated."

To which the only possible response must surely be: poppycock. If one of its senior directors could come out with drivel like this, the World Bank definitely needed as much Hyde as Jekyll from Jim Wolfensohn -- and maybe more.

Reviewed by Niall Ferguson
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Ninety-seven percent of Ugandans live without reliable electricity. One million Africans die from malaria every year, with 90 percent of those deaths in children under five. Those statistics of poverty and suffering were among the compelling reasons for the formation of the World Bank by Franklin Roosevelt, now more than 60 years old and with 10,000 employees. Journalist Mallaby interweaves the story of this nobly conceived effort with the ambitions of Australian-born charismatic leader James Wolfensohn, former financier and the most recent Bank leader. It is the story of politics at its worst, when multimillion-dollar projects in developing countries do little to alleviate its citizens' woes. It is the story of a determined visionary who, without adequate HR and managerial skills, still reached his goals of achieving a truce with NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) and raising the stature of the institution. Celebrity names abound, from the Clintons to Harrison Ford; it is clear that the former invisibility of the Bank has now morphed into high-end prominence. Yet its future, as Mallaby hints, might be somewhat in doubt as he probes "what next?" Barbara Jacobs
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Surprisingly interesting and insightful.
This is a very interesting book with two main themes. The first one is a biography of James Wolfensohn, the President of the World Bank since 1995. The second one is about the inner workings of the World Bank, a not so well understood institution. The author covers both themes equally well.

James Wolfensohn comes across as a brilliant and irascible complex character. He exudes charm, vision, and eloquence in the outside world towards NGOs, other governmental institutions, States, and the Media. In this capacity, he is not unlike Bill Clinton. On the inside, he is a tyrannical, terrorizing manager displaying frequent tantrums to get the cultural changes and the results he wants from his staff. Here this boss from hell comes across more like a John McEnroe loosing it on a tough line call.

The author's description of the World Bank is equally interesting. At first, the Bank comes across as an autocratic institution which knows what is best for the country it lends to. Invariably, the solution to all the World's problem according to the Bank are mega projects where private consultants and Western companies make a ton of money, the Bank books huge loans, but the country in question can ill afford. Under Wolfensohn influence, the Bank has become more sensitive to the environmental and cultural impact of its financing activities. This is in part due to the Bank opening up a dialogue with NGOs. In this regard, Wolfensohn tenure at the Bank seemed to have been rather successful, as it has radically changed the culture of the Bank.

In view of the above, I strongly recommend this book. If you are interested about economics, institutions, and policy, I also recommend a couple of excellent books. These include "A Term at the Fed" by Lawrence Meyer. This book uncovers Alan Greenspan's management style, and the inner workings of the Federal Reserve (another not so well understood institution). The other book is the excellent "In an Uncertain World" by Robert Rubin, the brilliant former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

The World�s Banker
Sebastian Mallaby, editorial writer and columnist at the Washington Post, has come up with a page-turner on the challenges of promoting development, as seen through the eyes of World Bank President James Wolfensohn. Many success stories of the Bank's work are described in fascinating detail. In Bosnia, according to Mallaby, the Bank played an important role in brokering a peace deal between Serbs and Croats and was successful in quickly providing money and expertise for the reconstruction. In Uganda, the Bank was flexible enough to allow a home-grown poverty reduction strategy to take root and to nurture it. But the Bank's failures are also described unsparingly. Mallaby presents a detailed study of how the Bank's condoning of corruption in Indonesia was the root cause of many of the country's troubles during the Asian crisis. He also says that the Bank late and timid reaction to fight AIDS "remains inexcusable."

The portrayal of Wolfensohn is likewise two-sided. Mallaby credits his "instincts as being ahead of his peers" on the need for providing debt relief in the mid-1990s and on tackling corruption. Wolfensohn is also recognized as being instrumental in pushing for greater country ownership of reforms and for the decentralization of the Bank through the relocation of most country directors to the field. At the same time, the book has candid descriptions of what Mallaby considers to be Wolfensohn's failures, for instance his tendency to share "credit with no one."

North-based NGOs come across in Mallaby's portrayal as the villain of the piece, Lilliputians who tie down the Bank and keep it from doing good. The NGOs, says Mallaby, have killed worthy projects by overstating the likely labor and environmental impacts and insisting on standards that developing countries can ill-afford. For example, in Laos "the environmental standards that the Bank proposed for a megadam project matched those of a country like Sweden; this was like telling the Laotians that they must not travel in motorized vehicles unless they purchased brand-new Volvos with passenger air bags."

Not all Bank failures are the fault of NGOs; sometimes, says Mallaby, the Bank cannot succeed because of lack of cooperation by the client. In 1998, the Bank wanted to execute an project to combat AIDS in Russia, but the country's health ministry did not want to acknowledge the problem. When the ministry came around, Russian pharmaceutical makers blocked the Bank, fearing that it would open the drug market to foreign competitors. Russia's medical establishment was also opposed as "hospitals had a large and antiquated infrastructure for treating TB, which would be rendered redundant by the Bank's modernizations."

Mallaby's sympathetic portrayal of the Bank contrasts with some of the harsh characterizations of other observers. In his recent book Why Globalization Works, Martin Wolf calls the Bank a "fatally flawed institution," whose source of "failures was its commitment to lending." Describing the situation when he worked at the Bank in the 1970s, Wolf writes: "every division also found itself under great pressure to lend money, virtually regardless of the quality of the projects on offer or of the development programmes of the countries. This undermined the professional integrity of the staff and encouraged borrowers to pile up debt, no matter what the likely returns." The Meltzer Commission, appointed by the U.S. Congress in 1998, made a similar charge in its report. Mallaby alludes on occasion to this pressure to lend, particularly to middle-income countries, but does give it the importance ascribed by others.

Mallaby presents shifts in the types of lending favored by the Bank as an example of its learning from experience. He notes that the Bank started with the notion that "infrastructure was the route to human betterment." Then it moved from building physical capital into building human capital by funding education projects, then from human capital into social capital by funding projects to improve the quality of institutions. And, very recently, as Mallaby notes, the Bank has partially reverted to its early emphasis on physical capital. Others put a less positive spin on the Bank's intellectual journey. For example, in his book The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly-a former Bank staffer-treats the same evolution as a chase after fads that failed to deliver: "We thought that certain objects associated with prosperity in the industrialized world - dams, roads, schools - could bring success to the developing world. Later, fads changed to include institutional magical objects. Thus we urged governments to embrace democracy, constitutions, independent judiciaries, decentralization to local governments and other magic bullets. None of them worked."

While the book may not satisfy critics of the Bank, its accessibility and broad scope make it required reading not just for experts on development but for anyone with curiosity about global development, the Bank, and James Wolfensohn.

Brilliant
This is a wonderful book. It is really three stories. One is a story of how the West has tried to tackle global poverty, its failures, successes and U-turns. The other is a story about the West's principal instrument for these policies, the World Bank. Any large organisation, packed with interesting people, dysfunctional teams, and huge challenges will always have a good story inside it and this is no exception. The third is a biography of the leader of this organisation and his influence upon it. These three narratives, all interesting in their own right, are skillfully interwoven to produce a trully thumping read. A real page-truner.