About the Author

Michel Villette is Professor of Sociology, AgroParisTech and EHESS (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales), Paris. He is the author of several books in French. Catherine Vuillermot is Assistant Professor of Business History at L'Université de Franche Comté. John R. Kimberly is the Henry Bower Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies and Professor of Management, Health Care Systems, and Sociology at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. George Holoch previously translated Smoke & Mirrors, Inc. for Cornell.

Reviews

"In From Predators to Icons, Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot set out to discover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. They present case histories of businessmen who built their own empires and chart what they consider the typical course of a successful entrepreneur's career... The truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot's telling, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting."-Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, 18 January 2010 "Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot provide a powerful and iconoclastic close read of the careers of spectacularly wealthy businessmen that stands both conventional and scholarly wisdom as to how fortunes are made, kept, and justified on its head. Meticulously detailed and tightly focused on situation, context and action, this is provocative sociology of the sort that Machiavelli, C. Wright Mills, and Pierre Bourdieu would approve. Theories of entrepreneurship, leadership, growth, innovation (and more) come up far short in this indelicate but sharp and highly suggestive account of how to succeed-dramatically so-in business."-John Van Maanen, M.I.T.