SLATER, Robert 1943-

PERSONAL: Born October 1, 1943, in New York, NY; son of Joseph George (a business executive) and Gertrude (a homemaker; maiden name, Levy) Slater; married Elinor Resnik, June 13, 1966; children: Miriam Blessing, Joseph Adam, Rachel Abigail. Education: University of Pennsylvania, B.A., 1966; London School of Economics and Political Science, London, M.S., 1967.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins, 10 E. 53rd St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Journalist, author. Bucks County Courier Times, Levittown, PA, reporter, 1968–70; United Press International, Trenton, NJ, reporter, 1970–71, bureau chief, 1971; Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jerusalem, Israel, reporter, 1972–73; United Press International, Jerusalem, reporter, 1973–74; Newsweek, New York, NY, reporter in Jerusalem, 1974–76; Time, New York, reporter in Jerusalem, 1976–. Military service: Israel Defense Forces Reserves, 1978–.

MEMBER: Israel Foreign Press Association (chairman, 1987–90).

AWARDS, HONORS: Warrior Statesman: The Life of Moshe Dayan was nominated for the 1992 National Jewish Book Award in the Israel category.

WRITINGS:

Rabin of Israel, Robson Books (London, England), 1977, revised edition, HarperPaperbacks (New York, NY), 1996.

Golda: The Uncrowned Queen of Israel, Jonathan David (Middle Village, NY), 1981.

Great Jews in Sports, Jonathan David (Middle Village, NY), 1983, revised edition, 2000.

The Titans of the Takeover, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1987, revised edition, BeardBooks (Washington, DC), 1999.

Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1987.

This … Is CBS: A Chronicle of Sixty Years, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1988.

Warrior Statesman: The Life of Moshe Dayan, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1991.

The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution, Business One Irwin (Homewood, IL), 1993.

The Jewish Child's Book of Sports Heroes, Jonathan David (Middle Village, NY), 1993.

Get Better or Get Beaten: Thirty-one Leadership Secrets from GE's Jack Welch, Irwin Professional (Burr Ridge, IL), 1994, revised and reprinted as Get Better or Get Beaten!: Twenty-Nine Leadership Secrets from GE's Jack Welch, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2001.

(With wife, Elinor Slater) Great Jewish Women, Jonathan David (Middle Village, NY), 1994.

(With Elinor Slater) Great Jewish Men, Jonathan David (Middle Village, NY), 1996.

Soros: The Life, Times, and Trading Secrets of the World's Greatest Investor, Irwin Professional (Burr Ridge, IL), 1996.

Invest First, Investigate Later: And Twenty-three Other Trading Secrets of George Soros, the Legendary Investor, Irwin Professional (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Ovitz: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Most Controversial Power Broker, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1997.

John Bogle and the Vanguard Experiment: One Man's Quest to Transform the Mutual Fund Industry, Irwin Professional (Chicago, IL), 1997.

Great Moments in Jewish History, Jonathan David (Middle Village, NY), 1998.

Jack Welch and the GE Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1999.

Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of IBM's Lou Gerstner, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1999.

The GE Way Fieldbook: Jack Welch's Battle Plan for Corporate Revolution, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2000.

Blue Chip of the New Economy: John Chambers and the Cisco Systems Way, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2001.

The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco through the Internet Collapse, HarperBusiness (New York, NY), 2003.

Magic Cancer Bullet: How a Tiny Orange Pill Is Rewriting Medical History, HarperBusiness (New York, NY), 2003.

The Wal-Mart Decade: How a Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy into the World's Number One Company, Portfolio (New York, NY), 2003.

Microsoft Rebooted: How Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Reinvented Their Company, Portfolio (New York, NY), 2004.

No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump, Prentice-Hall (Upper Saddle River, NJ), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Journalist Robert Slater spent a great many years based in Jerusalem, and he wrote a number of histories and profiles of Jewish political and sports figures for both adults and children. The majority of his writings, however, have focused on American business, its successes and failures, but most significantly, on its leaders.

Soros: The Life, Times, and Trading Secrets of the World's Greatest Investor is an unauthorized biography of the legendary George Soros, a Hungarian emigrant who waited tables in London before studying at the London School of Economics. When he arrived in New York in 1956, he was fully versed in European finance and went on to earn a fortune, including 2 billion dollars on one particular trading day, and become a generous donor to causes he has chosen to support.

Michael Ovitz is the subject of Ovitz: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Most Controversial Power Broker, and Ovitz cooperated with Slater in its writing. People contributor Alex Tresniowski wrote that "Slater's best material is his take on Ovitz's stormy tenure at Disney, which culminated in a mind-boggling 128 million dollars severance package." Ovitz, who had previously been incredibly successful during his association with Creative Artists Agency, surrendered his position to Michael Eisner. Bernard Weinbraub noted in the New York Times Book Review that "not only did Mr. Slater extensively interview Mr. Ovitz, which is unusual, since the former agent has terrible relations with the press, but he was also given access to Mr. Ovitz's family, associates, and some top clients, like Mr. [Dustin] Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Barry Levinson, and Magic Johnson."

General Electric's (GE's) Jack Welch is the subject of several of Slater's volumes, the most recent of these being Jack Welch and the GE Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO and The GE Way Fieldbook: Jack Welch's Battle Plan for Corporate Revolution. In the former, Slater documents Welch's business philosophy, described by a Publishers Weekly contributor as "an amalgam of Zenlike axioms, bromides, and tough-minded pragmatism." Welch, who led for approximately two decades the company that was ranked by Fortune as the "most-admired company in America," and Business Week as the number one company worldwide in market value, cooperated with Slater for this very complimentary profile. Library Journal reviewer A. J. Sobczak felt that "the most valuable chapters here focus on GE's future and Welch's perspective on the economy in the twenty-first century." The GE Way Fieldbook is divided into two sections. The first focuses on the business, and the second on the man.

Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of IBM's Lou Gerstner follows the 1990s turnaround of International Business Machines under Gerstner's stewardship, and how he took the company's stock to nearly ten times the value it had been when he assumed the position of CEO. Slater did not receive direct assistance from Gerstner in writing this book. G. Bennett Stewart, III, wrote in Directors and Boards that Slater "knows how to pick his subjects. The rise, demise, and resurrection of IBM makes for one of the biggest business stories of all time."

Slater first wrote about Cisco Systems, Inc. in his Blue Chip of the New Economy: John Chambers and the Cisco Systems Way, which documents the company's meteoric rise during the internet boom. He was researching The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco through an Unexpectedly Quick Recovery just as the company had reached its height at the peak of the dotcom frenzy. In March 2000, it was the number one market-cap company in the world, and when the bottom fell out, Cisco fell with it and laid off some 8,000 employees, thereby requiring Slater to rewrite this phase of the company's history and slower climb back, along with his title. Slater next published Magic Cancer Bullet: How a Tiny Orange Pill Is Rewriting Medical History, a study of the development of Gleevec, manufactured by Novartis, and its use for a rare cancer known as chronic myeloid leukemia.

In The Wal-Mart Decade: How a Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy into the World's Number One Company, Slater shows how the team that Sam Walton picked to succeed him, including CEO David Class, tripled revenues in the years from Walton's death in 1992 to 2001. This was largely due to the restructuring that included selling groceries and pursuing the international market. Library Journal reviewer Patrick J. Brunet felt that Slater "skates over" reports of unpaid overtime and the effect of Wal-Mart on small business. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that Slater "shows how Class and his colleagues stayed true to Walton's idiosyncratic management style while investing in the technologies and logistics operations that a multibillion-dollar company needs." The reviewer felt that the chapters that note Wal-Mart's opponents, including small businesses, attorneys, and the writers of derogatory stories, are "some of the most compelling."

Microsoft Rebooted: How Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Reinvented Their Company brings the Microsoft story up-to-date with Ballmer becoming CEO and the company's recovery after the economic downturn. Slater writes that the redirected Microsoft is the result of a new corporate culture, new strategies, new products, and new ways of doing business worldwide. Both Gates and Ballmer gave Slater extensive interviews, giving the book and the company an authentic feel.

In 2005, Slater published No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump. Slater interviewed Trump for over 100 hours, resulting in a book that covers Trump's work habits, background, personality, fame, and self-promotion. Booklist contributor Barbara Jacobs wrote: "The man himself is not so easily understood, but this book helps."

Slater once told CA: "For as long as I can recall, I have loved books: the feel of them, the way they look, and especially what's written inside of them. At the age of twenty-eight, I moved from the United States to Israel to work in journalism. Deep down, I shared the common itch of most reporters—the itch to write a book. My biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Rabin of Israel, appeared in October, 1977, shortly after he resigned from the prime ministership under the cloud of a minor scandal.

"Since then, I have written many more books, including biographies of two other Israeli leaders, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan. Because my reporting chores for Time magazine absorbed me on a minute-by-minute basis with the Arab-Israeli conflict, I decided to branch out in my book writing and work on American-oriented subjects. Hence, I have also written books on American business takeover personalities, computer pioneers, the CBS television network, and General Electric's chairman and CEO, Jack Welch.

"The most peculiar turn of events in my book writing career occurred in 1992 when, thanks to Yitzhak Rabin's re-election as Israeli prime minister, I was able to publish an updated version of my very first book. Back in 1977, when Rabin left the prime ministership, he could have had little hope of returning. I also could have had little hope that the biography would ever reappear in an updated version. On July 13, 1992, the day Rabin presented his new government to the Knesset, I received word from Robson Books, publisher of Rabin of Israel, that I should update my book—fifteen years later. What a happy turn of events, I thought, for Rabin and for me!"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, August, 1995, David Rouse, review of Soros: The Life, Times, and Trading Secrets of the World's Greatest Investor, p. 1918; August, 1998, Mary Whaley, review of Jack Welch and the GE Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO, p. 1940; September 1, 1999, Mary Whaley, review of Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons and Turnaround Tactics of IBM's Lou Gerstner, p. 48; January 1, 2000, Mary Whaley, review of The GE Way Fieldbook: Jack Welch's Battle Plan for Corporate Revolution, p. 846; January 1, 2003, David Siegfried, review of The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco through the Internet Collapse, p. 819; February 15, 2005, Barbara Jacobs, review of No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump, p. 1035.

Business Horizons, May, 1999, Henry Beam, review of Jack Welch and the GE Way, p. 83; March-April, 2005, Mimi Dollinger, review of Microsoft Rebooted: How Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Reinvented Their Company, p. 182.

Business Week, September 13, 1999, Doug Garr, review of Saving Big Blue, p. 17.

Chief Executive, December, 1999, review of Saving Big Blue, p. 74.

Contemporary Review, September, 1996, Norman Berdichevsky, review of Rabin of Israel, p. 159.

Directors and Boards, fall, 1999, G. Bennett Stewart, III, review of Saving Big Blue, p. 12.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 1993; February 15, 2005, review of No Such Thing as Over-Exposure, p. 221.

Library Journal, June 1, 1993; September 1, 1998, A. J. Sobczak, review of Jack Welch and the GE Way, p. 195; December, 2002, Stacey Marien, review of The Eye of the Storm, p. 144; May 15, 2003, Patrick J. Brunet, review of The Wal-Mart Decade: How a Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy into the World's Number One Company, p. 100; February 15, 2005, Carol J. Elsen, review of No Such Thing as Over-Exposure, p. 141.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 3, 1982.

New York Times, January 26, 2003, Tim Race, review of The Eye of the Storm, section 3, page 6.

New York Times Book Review, June 8, 1997, Bernard Weinraub, review of Ovitz: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Most Controversial Power Broker, p. 9; October 24, 1999, Fred Andrews, review of Saving Big Blue, p. 49.

People, June 2, 1997, Alex Tresniowksi, review of Ovitz, p. 41.

Publishers Weekly, May 31, 1993; July 13, 1998, review of Jack Welch and the GE Way, p. 70; July 12, 1999, review of Saving Big Blue, p. 83; December 16, 2002, review of The Eye of the Storm, p. 56; March 24, 2003, review of Magic Cancer Bullet: How a Tiny Orange Pill Is Rewriting Medical History, p. 65; May 12, 2003, review of The Wal-Mart Decade, p. 58; January 31, 2005, review of No Such Thing as Over-Exposure, p. 57.