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1218 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 15, 2007 Monday

Late Edition - Final

Bertelsmann Is Days Away From Naming a New Chief
BYLINE: By DOREEN CARVAJAL
SECTION: Section C; Column 4; Business/Financial Desk; MEDIA; Pg. 5
LENGTH: 930 words
DATELINE: PARIS, Jan. 14
Hartmut Ostrowski is the sober son of a North Westphalian plumber whose favorite corporate dictums run the range from ''Just do it!'' and ''Keep it simple!'' to ''Put your fish on the table.''

The fish saying refers to Mr. Ostrowski's penchant for displaying a wooden fish on a gleaming conference table as a signal to staff members at Arvato, the printing company he runs, to speak candidly. But when it comes to his own future, Mr. Ostrowski is keeping the fish under wraps.

Many insiders and outsiders alike agree that Mr. Ostrowski, 48, has emerged as the probable new chief executive of Bertelsmann, the privately owned behemoth that counts Arvato among a portfolio of media companies, including the publisher Random House, the pan-European broadcaster RTL and a half-interest in Sony BMG, the music label.

Mr. Ostrowski declined to discuss his prospects in advance of a management congress in Germany at which the new chief executive is expected to be introduced.

The choice is expected to be made after a meeting this week of a four-member supervisory board personnel committee. As the only family member on that committee, Liz Mohn, 65, the wife of Bertelsmann's 85-year-old patriarch, Reinhard Mohn, will play a decisive role in the handover of power.

It will be the second time that Mrs. Mohn will be pivotal in the selection of the company's new chief executive. Her clash with the former chief, Thomas Middelhoff, over his ambitions to take the company public ultimately ended in his ouster in 2002.

Bertelsmann would not comment about contenders for the top spot, but there has been plenty of public speculation in the German news media. Another name often cited is Ewald Walgenbach, 47, the chief executive of Bertelsmann's book club business, Direct Group.

Mr. Walgenbach, who took the helm of the struggling book club in 2002, was the subject of a series of positive news articles in Germany after he invited a group of journalists to Portugal in September to learn more about his company. In a well-timed leak last week, Handelsblatt, the German newspaper, cited anonymous company sources as saying that Mr. Walgenbach's book club had reaped its first profit before taxes in eight years.

A Direct Group spokesman declined to comment on the report and said that Mr. Walgenbach was not available for interviews on the succession issue.

But the news provoked some smirks among insiders and former employees at Bertelsmann, who said that Mr. Ostrowski's ascension appeared inevitable for a variety of reasons -- most notably for his discreet, unglamorous profile and his steady progress in building Arvato into one of the most reliable earners in Bertelsmann's portfolio.

The discreet charm of a new chief executive is an important characteristic in a company that has sought to distance itself from the hard-charging Mr. Middelhoff. Bertelsmann paid $5.8 billion this year to avoid taking the company public by buying out the 25 percent stake owned through a holding company by Albert Frere, the Belgian financier.

Gerd Schulte-Hillen, the former chairman of Bertelsmann's supervisory board, who resigned in a power struggle in 2003, said in an interview that Mr. Ostrowski's rise could be a positive step for the company because of his proven entrepreneurial abilities and cost-cutting style at Arvato, where he has pushed the printing company into new areas like call-center services.

But the new chief executive will inherit some challenges. Bertelsmann's debt swelled to more than $10 billion after it agreed last May to buy out Mr. Frere, leaving the company with little money to expand through acquisitions. And its top-earning company, RTL, with annual revenue of more than $7.5 billion, faces pressure as advertisers and viewers move funds and attention to the Internet.

So far, Mr. Ostrowski has been careful to avoid the limelight, except for a notable profile and interview in March, when he revealed the existence of the fish as a corporate motivator. He also emphasized his corporate dedication by saying that he works 70-hour workweeks. The interview was granted to the Neue Westfalische, the newspaper in Bertelsmann's home town, Gutersloh, which happens to count Mr. Mohn among its readers.

Although Mr. Mohn is not as active today in the family-owned company that he helped shape from 1971 to 1981 as chairman and chief executive, he remains an important figure.

Historically, he played a vital role in the selection of chief executives, even using handwriting analysis to determine desirable personality traits -- a practice that endures today, according to former employees.

The new chief executive must also be a diplomat, respecting the informal power of Mrs. Mohn, who maintains an office at Bertelsmann headquarters in Gutersloh and the company's satellite administrative offices in Berlin. Her daughter, Brigitte, is also an executive in the Bertelsmann Foundation and her son Christoph was appointed to the company's supervisory board in November, leading to more speculation that the younger Mohn might emerge someday as a candidate.

One of the rituals of the congress where the chief is introduced is that participants receive a memento. One year it was a crystal paperweight etched with the company's core values. In 2005, it was an electronic picture frame loaded with photographs of top executives, including Mr. Ostrowski, sportily dressed in a Team Arvato soccer uniform, and a smiling Mr. Walgenbach.

Asked if this year Bertelsmann would distribute souvenir wooden fish, a company spokesman issued a terse response: No.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: EXECUTIVE MOVES (90%); PRIVATELY HELD COMPANIES (78%); TALKS & MEETINGS (76%); CONFERENCES & CONVENTIONS (76%); INTERVIEWS (74%); RECORD REVENUES (73%); PRINTING INDUSTRY (71%); MUSIC INDUSTRY (68%); JOURNALISM (74%); PUBLISHING (74%) Biographical Information; Appointments and Executive Changes
COMPANY: BERTELSMANN AG (92%); ARVATO AG (85%); SONY-BMG (69%)
ORGANIZATION: Bertelsmann Ag
INDUSTRY: NAICS515120 TELEVISION BROADCASTING (92%); SIC4833 TELEVISION BROADCASTING STATIONS (92%); NAICS334612 PRERECORDED COMPACT DISC (EXCEPT SOFTWARE), TAPE & RECORD REPRODUCING (85%); NAICS334611 SOFTWARE REPRODUCING (85%); NAICS323119 OTHER COMMERCIAL PRINTING (85%); NAICS323117 BOOKS PRINTING (85%)
PERSON: THOMAS MIDDELHOFF (54%) Hartmut Ostrowski; Doreen Carvajal
GEOGRAPHIC: GERMANY (90%); PORTUGAL (79%); CENTRAL EUROPE (71%); EUROPE (76%)
LOAD-DATE: January 15, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos: Ewald Walgenbach, top, and Hartmut Ostrowski, middle, are likely to be the front-runners to become chief executive of Bertelsmann. Liz Mohn, above, the wife of the company's patriarch, is expected to play a decisive role in the appointment. (Photo by Daniel Hintersteiner/Bloomberg News)

(Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images)

(Photo by Jose Giribas/Bloomberg News)
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1219 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 14, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Nice and Ambitious: Either, Neither or Both?
BYLINE: By LIESL SCHILLINGER
SECTION: Section 9; Column 3; Style Desk; BOOKS OF STYLE; Pg. 8
LENGTH: 760 words

THE POWER OF NICE

How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness.

By Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval.

144 pp. Currency (Doubleday).

$17.95.
AMBITCHOUS

By Debra Condren.

320 pp. Morgan Road Books.

$23.95.

MAKING up your New Year's resolutions? Looking for a battle plan for world conquest? Consider the strategy recommended by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, two kind-eyed, shaggy haired advertising executives who would like to introduce golden-retrieveresque sunniness to the dog-eat-dog world of business. In ''The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness,'' they attribute the success of their firm, the Kaplan Thaler Group, to their you-first philosophy. Be complimentary, they adjure. Be kind to doormen, assistants, cabbies and moguls. Listen, admire and praise.

Their book is a potent compendium of humorous and shrewd personal anecdotes, dedicated to the proposition that niceness is ''a powerful force,'' which ''can literally save your life.'' The index reads like a stand-up comic's list of bits, like ''Vampire bats'' (a wise Vampire bat doesn't hoard its blood feast, but shares it); ''Listening: Being quiet and''; basic ''Principles'': for instance, ''Negative impressions are like germs.''

The authors have lectured around the country and have been championed by influential and voluble optimists, like Jay Leno, who writes in the foreword that ''doing good things will improve your life,'' and Donald Trump, who rewarded their solicitous treatment of his wife, Melania, during the filming of an Aflac commercial by returning the favor when Ms. Kaplan Thaler appeared on ''The Apprentice.''

The two women won the account for Aflac, by the way, by thinking to ask its chief executive, Daniel Amos, ''What really bothers you the most?'' It turned out that Mr. Amos was fed up because nobody could pronounce his company's name. One talking duck later, the problem was solved.

But you do not need to hobnob with hotshots to partake of the authors' theories. In little snippets labeled ''nice cubes'' they provide constructive tips for general use. When they advise ''Exercise your niceness muscles,'' they assign repetitions like an entrepreneurial personal trainer: ''Every day for the next week, do five nice things that have no immediate payoff for you,'' they instruct. The smallest good deed, ''Can have a multiplier effect strong enough to change the world.''

Let's hope the golden rule pays off for Ronald M. Shapiro and Mark A. Jankowski, who wrote a similarly titled volume a few years ago, ''The Power of Nice: How to Negotiate So Everyone Wins -- Especially You!'' (True to form, the two women mention the earlier book right after their title page.)

IN the 1880s, when the chief achievable career goal for nice girls, apart from marriage and motherhood, was teaching school, a young woman named Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote an essay in praise of ambition. It appeared later in ''These Happy Golden Years,'' part of her ''Little House'' series. The essay read in part, ''Without an ambition to excel others and to surpass one's self there would be no superior merit.''

Since then, as the laurels women can win in the working world have multiplied, female ambition has received a bad rap.

The book, ''amBITCHous,'' by the psychologist and career coach Debra Condren, is a defiant charge to women to ''reclaim ambition as a virtue.''

Ambitious men are seen as go-getters, she writes, but there is a public distaste for smart, aggressive, successful career women, who are too often labeled with the insulting epithet in the book's title.

Why can't women admit they are ambitious, she asks. ''Wouldn't it be inspiring if you could acknowledge straight up, to yourself and to others, that you have big, wild and precious professional goals?''

In 16 strongly worded chapters, Ms. Condren's corrective manifesto urges women to pry apart the bars of ''common self-imposed traps,'' which cause ambitious women to ''sell themselves short'' unwittingly by acts of ''socially sanctioned self-sabotage'' like giving away credit, not asking for advice, downplaying accomplishments, refusing awards, avoiding confrontation and ''being too responsible to others -- and irresponsible to our own needs.'' In other words, falling into the ''nice'' trap.

Of course, stinting on niceness can also backfire, as Judith Regan has lately discovered. But Ms. Kaplan Thaler, Ms. Koval and Ms. Condren, who have been paying attention all along, have worked out a way to make charm and ambition pay. Nice work if you can get it.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com
SUBJECT: ENTREPRENEURSHIP (78%); ADVERTISING ACCOUNTS IN REVIEW (76%); EXERCISE & FITNESS (64%); MARKETING & ADVERTISING (56%); BOOK REVIEWS (78%); LITERATURE (77%) Books and Literature; Reviews
COMPANY: AFLAC INC (53%)
TICKER: AFL (NYSE) (53%); 8686 (TSE) (53%)
INDUSTRY: NAICS524114 DIRECT HEALTH & MEDICAL INSURANCE CARRIERS (53%); SIC6321 ACCIDENT & HEALTH INSURANCE (53%)
PERSON: JAY LENO (54%); DONALD TRUMP (53%); DANIEL P AMOS (53%) Liesl Schillinger; Linda Kaplan Thaler; Robin Koval; Debra Condren
LOAD-DATE: January 14, 2007
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
GRAPHIC: Photos
DOCUMENT-TYPE: Review
PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

1220 of 1258 DOCUMENTS

The New York Times
January 14, 2007 Sunday

Late Edition - Final

Ayn Rand No Longer Has Script Approval
BYLINE: By KIMBERLY BROWN
SECTION: Section 2; Column 1; Arts and Leisure Desk; FILM; Pg. 9
LENGTH: 1975 words
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
BACK in the 1970s Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of ''The Godfather,'' first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel ''Atlas Shrugged.'' But Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.

''I told her, 'The Russians aren't that desperate to wreck your book,' '' Mr. Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.

Rand's paranoia, as Mr. Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie that it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywood's mediocrity.

Of course Rand herself had a hand in blocking some of those attempts before she died in 1982. Her heirs in the Objectivist school of thought helped sink some others. And plans for at least a couple of television mini-series fell to the vicissitudes of network politics and media mergers.

But Rand's grand polemical novel keeps selling, and her admirers in Hollywood keep trying, and the latest effort involves a lineup of heavy hitters, starting with Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace, who wrote ''Braveheart'' and ''We Were Soldiers,'' is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of ''Ray,'' are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.

Whether Ms. Jolie, who has called herself something of a Rand fan, will bring the novel's heroine, Dagny Taggart, to life on screen, or merely wind up on a list with other actresses who sought or were sought for the role -- including Barbara Stanwyck, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone -- remains to be seen. Until now, at least, no one in Hollywood has figured out a formula that promises both to sell popcorn and to do justice to the original text, let alone to the philosophy that it hammers home endlessly, at times in lengthy speeches. (The final one is 60 pages long.)

But Mr. Baldwin said he believed that Mr. Wallace and the rest of their team were up to the task. ''We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book,'' he said.

Easier said than done. Published in 1957 and set in the near future, ''Atlas Shrugged'' plots the collapse of American society after thinkers, industrialists, scientists, artists and other innovators -- Rand's kind of people -- go on strike and disappear, refusing to contribute to a collectivist world. Dagny, a railroad heiress, tries to save the country from starvation and total collapse, while falling in love with the mysterious John Galt, who she later learns was the man who started the strike. The novel ends after an apocalypse.

During Rand's lifetime, her Objectivism, which celebrates rational self-interest and capitalism, was widely dismissed by academia and disparaged by both the political right and left. The reviews for ''Atlas Shrugged'' were not much kinder. ''It howls in the reader's ear and beats him about the head in order to secure his attention,'' Granville Hicks wrote in The New York Times, ''and then, when it has him subdued, harangues him for page upon page. It has only two moods, the melodramatic and the didactic, and in both it knows no bounds.''

Yet ''Atlas'' was a best seller. Six million copies have been sold over the years, and it remains a popular title, particularly among college students, according to Penguin Group, its publisher. Many of those copies wind up on shelves on Wall Street, where the book has been affectionately referred to as ''the Bible of selfishness.''

Hollywood took notice of the novel's popularity from the start, but Rand refused to consider movie offers: she had been burned, she felt, by the experience of turning her earlier (and, at 720 pages, comparatively short) novel, ''The Fountainhead,'' into the 1949 film starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal.

Rand had adapted it herself, but she battled with the director, King Vidor, over changes to her screenplay. In the end a single line was cut from a six-minute speech by Cooper's character, Howard Roark, reportedly leaving Rand embittered by the experience. She vowed that Warner Brothers would not be permitted to adapt ''Atlas'' unless the studio recut ''The Fountainhead,'' returning the edited line to its rightful place, said her biographer Jeff Britting.

In 1972, 15 years after the novel's publication, Mr. Ruddy, fresh from producing ''The Godfather,'' decided to make a run at Rand, who was already in her late 60s. '' 'Atlas Shrugged,' let's face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film,'' he said.

Rand's agents warned him to expect rejection, he said, but reluctantly set up an appointment. He recalled meeting her in a room with one small love seat and many empty chairs. Mr. Ruddy, 6-foot-4, squeezed in next to the petite aging writer on the small couch and commenced to woo her.

''I knew from 'Atlas Shrugged' that she dug men, that she was a lusty woman,'' he recalled in a telephone interview. ''We start talking. It's instant love.'' Before long, he said, Rand was telling him, in her heavy accent, ''I want you to do 'Atlas Shrugged.' ''

Mr. Ruddy said he warned Rand that it was not her ideas that interested him. ''Forget philosophy,'' he said. ''The abstract of the story is quite lovely: the power and the sustainability of the great individual, of the creative person, of the entrepreneur.'' Rand, he said, ''thought that was brilliant, because that's how she saw her book,'' as a story first.

Mr. Ruddy said he looked past most of her eccentricities; she insisted on flying only by private plane, for example, because she feared that ''if the Russians found out that she was on a commercial airliner, they'd hijack it,'' he said.

But Mr. Ruddy refused to grant Rand final script approval, and their courtship quickly broke off. ''It's a fool's game to spend a lot of money and time only to have her say, 'I think you should take this out,' '' he said. So, he recalled, he told Rand that he would wait for her to ''drop dead'' and then make the movie on his own terms.

With Mr. Ruddy out of the picture, Rand began fielding new offers from movie and television producers. In 1978 Henry Jaffe and his son Michael negotiated a deal for an eight-hour mini-series on NBC. Michael Jaffe, now a partner at Jaffe/Braunstein Films, obtained script approval for Rand, and they hired Sterling Silliphant, the screenwriter of the Sidney Poitier movie ''In the Heat of the Night,'' to adapt ''Atlas Shrugged.'' Rand was unsatisfied with his script; she called Mr. Silliphant's writing too ''naturalistic'' and drew a line at his insertion of the word ''just'' into a single line of dialogue. (Mr. Jaffe, in an interview, took up Rand's defense: ''It made the sentence become ambiguous,'' he said. ''Her characters didn't say ambiguous things.'')

Yet it was a regime change at NBC -- specifically Fred Silverman's ascension to the network presidency -- that killed the project in 1979. The network suddenly viewed ''Atlas Shrugged'' as too burdened with philosophy, its characters as too black-and-white, its subject too ponderous.

At the end of her life Rand tried to write her own script, as she had done for ''The Fountainhead,'' but she died with only a third of her hoped-for mini-series finished.

Rand left her estate to a longtime student, Leonard Peikoff, who eventually sold an option to Michael Jaffe and Ed Snider, a friend of Rand's who owned the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. But Mr. Peikoff refused to approve the script they developed. ''Leonard had huge problems with it,'' Mr. Jaffe said. ''He wasn't Ayn. But he wanted to exercise her control.''

Other producers came and went, and in 1992 a New Jersey investor and Objectivist, John Aglialoro, bought an option to make ''Atlas Shrugged,'' eventually paying Mr. Peikoff more than $1 million in exchange for full creative control.

Under Mr. Aglialoro's sponsorship a succession of writers and producers developed at least four scripts. One writer was Mr. Peikoff's ex-wife, Cynthia Peikoff, who had been Rand's typist. Some of the scripts, she said, were too sci-fi, others reduced the novel's characters to caricatures, and she was told that her own attempt was no better than ''workmanlike.''

In 1999 Mr. Ruddy resurfaced, cutting a deal with TNT for a four-hour mini-series version. ''A dream come true,'' he called it at the time. But a threatened actors' strike delayed production, and the project was dropped after AOL and Time Warner merged.

Then 9/11 worsened the climate for films with apocalyptic visions. ''I could have stayed with it and kept pushing it,'' Mr. Ruddy said. ''But now people start jumping out of their seats when a building blows up.''

Mr. Ruddy's exit opened the door to the Baldwins, who optioned the rights to ''Atlas Shrugged'' from Mr. Aglialoro while running the billionaire Phil Anschutz's Crusader Entertainment. (Mr. Baldwin, oddly enough, had once been a ticket manager for Mr. Snider's Flyers.) James V. Hart, who had written ''Contact,'' developed a draft of the first installment of a three-movie series, but the Baldwins could land neither stars nor financing.

There was also some thought that Mr. Anschutz, whose movies are often designed to accommodate a religiously devout audience, may have lost enthusiasm for the project when he learned that Rand was an outspoken atheist, but an Anschutz spokesman called this a misunderstanding. In any case, when the Baldwins left Crusader in 2004 to set up their own production company, they took the rights to ''Atlas Shrugged'' with them

Last spring in a twist that might have amused Rand and Mr. Anschutz, the latest deal for an ''Atlas Shrugged'' film project had its inception during Mass at the Church of the Good Shepherd, in Beverly Hills.

Mr. Baldwin said that a fellow parishioner, Michael Burns -- the vice chairman of Lions Gate -- approached Mr. Baldwin and his wife ''right under the nose of the priest,'' whispering to them about the rights to Rand's novel and asking to ''meet right away.''

Mr. Burns -- who remembered the conversation taking place outside, after Mass -- said he had first read ''Atlas'' in high school and has given as many as 100 copies as gifts over the years.

''I think it solidified my capitalistic thinking, in that I believe very strongly that people are generally selfish, but that selfishness can ultimately benefit many, many people,'' Mr. Burns said.

The Baldwins used Mr. Hart's script to interest Ms. Jolie in the project, through her manager, Geyer Kosinski. (Mr. Kosinski said Ms. Jolie declined to comment.) Together the Baldwins, Mr. Burns and Mr. Kosinski, who is also to be one of the producers, quickly approached Mr. Wallace about a new adaptation. And in what Mr. Wallace called an uncanny coincidence, he had recently read ''Atlas'' for the first time, when he and his college-age son had swapped their favorite books.

The challenge, Mr. Wallace said, was immediately tempting. As for how he is distilling Rand's novel and its Castro-length monologues to a two-hour screenplay, Mr. Wallace insisted he had the material under control and was on course to deliver a finished draft this month.

''I can pretty much guarantee you that there won't be a 30-page speech at the end of the movie,'' he said. ''I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read 'Atlas Shrugged.' And the movie has to work.''

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