Book Review: Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG's Corporate Suicide by Roddy Boyd
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By Roddy Boyd
Wiley; 349pp; $27.95
As he drove home from his meeting with Hank Greenberg, Gary Davis recalled the hours he'd just spent with one of the world's most powerful chief executives. At Greenberg's behest, the two men had niggled ad nauseam over the software costs and secretarial salaries for Davis's unit. And while the commodity-trading division was only a sliver of mammoth American International Group (AIG), this was 1997, and nothing moved at the world's largest insurer without Greenberg's relentless nitpicking. "[Davis] couldn't decide whether it was the smartest thing he had ever encountered," Roddy Boyd writes, "or the silliest."