Threshold Resistance

February 26, 2007
Unlike many successful businessmen who polish their legacy with treacly fables, Taubman has written a frank, engaging memoir with hard-earned lessons. Starting in the 1950s from humble Detroit roots, Taubman built an enormously successful property company by essentially creating the modern shopping mall. Taubman recognized that large, enclosed malls could thrive in the suburbs by providing a greater range of shops than city Main Streets and by offering a new sense of luxury. Refreshingly, he shares as many lessons about his failures as he does touting his successes. "People run businesses. Great people run great businesses," he ruefully concludes from his inability to save the famous Washington, D.C., retailer Woodward & Lothrop. In detailing his 1980s experiences with Sotheby's auction house, which he helped transform into a dynamic, profitable art world player, Taubman writes candidly if bitterly about how his role as chairman exposed him to an employee's illegal price-fixing scheme, leading to his trial, sentencing and time spent in federal prison. Unfortunately, the dreadful title (which describes consumers' reluctance to enter a store and sums up Taubman's theory of life) may create the very type of consumer trepidation the author has fought his whole life.