Heads: Business Lessons from an Executive Search Pioneer

CHAPTER 2EARLY YEARS

In October 1929, less than a month after the stock market crash that brought on the Great Depression, readers of the local newspaper in bucolic and prosperous Greenwich, Connecticut, may have been astonished to learn that all was well. The Greenwich News and Graphic boasted on its front page that the town’s Grand List of all real estate was up 25 percent from the prior year, and prophesied a “continued healthy increase.”

Even as the catastrophe unfolded, news about national events remained hidden in the back pages of the paper. In mid-November, industrial stocks on the New York Stock Exchange had fallen by 50 percent, but the News and Graphic was unimpressed. A week before Christmas, it proclaimed, “Holiday Trade Biggest ...