Please join us at the Riverrun Bookstore, 20 Congress Street, Portsmouth, NH this Wednesday evening, March 24th at 7:30 pm when John Gillespie, the co-author of Money for Nothing: How the Failure of Corporate Boards Is Ruining American Business and Costing Us Trillions (Simon & Schuster's Free Press

John Gillespie was an investment banker for 18 years with Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and Bear Stearns and served as the executive vice president and CFO for a nationwide human services company with 24,000 employees. Prior to his career in business, he worked in Massachusetts state government and as a speechwriter. He graduated from Harvard College where he studied American history and literature and was an editor of the Harvard Lampoon. He has an MBA from the Harvard Business School. He lives in New York’s Hudson River Valley with his wife, New Yorker writer Susan Orlean and his five-year-old son Austin.

Money for Nothing is the first book ever written for general readers about the weakest yet most important link in our capitalist system: the place where we own stock, but lose our voice and our control over the destiny of our companies, and consequently our economy and our future. This is the story of America's most powerful elite, a cloistered group seemingly elected by everyone but accountable to no one, charged with protecting our interests, but in reality perpetuating a system that has literally brought us to the brink of ruin. 

Gillespie and David Zweig (who created a Portsmouth newspaper in the 1980s with Herald publisher John Tabor) expose an interconnected, self-perpetuating system of corporate control that often ignores the owners while squandering or siphoning off much of the earnings. In the most recent economic collapse, almost all attention has focused on the greed, recklessness or incompetence of CEOs rather than the negligence of boards, who ought to be held equally, if not more accountable because the CEOs theoretically work for them. The book argues that the mess we’re in is just as much the fault of the corporate boards and they need to be held equally accountable.  

Outrageous examples from the book include:  

* The Bank of America director who questioned the CEO's $76 million pay package in a year when the bank was laying off 12,600 workers and found herself dropped from the board without notice a few months later.

* The General Motors board rubber-stamping a 64 percent raise to $15.7 million for CEO Rick Wagoner in 2007 when the company lost over $38 billion and went bankrupt two years later at a cost to shareholders of $52 billion and an expected additional $50 billion to taxpayers.

* The Shaw Group's "golden coffin" deal for its chairman that actually gives him over $15 million not to compete with the company after his employment ends "by death or otherwise."

* Lehman Brothers' unqualified, elderly and asleep-at-the-switch board which was handpicked by the CEO, included the 83-year-old actress and socialite Dina Merrill on its compensation committee, and paid itself a third of million each for attending only eight full board meetings a year, while the shareholders lost $45 billion.  

Money for Nothing takes readers deep inside the collusive, elite world of these corporate leaders to reveal its inner workings and show how the failures of the system have imperiled our economy. As Gillespie and Zweig – both Harvard MBAs with 30-plus years of Fortune 100 experience at investment banks and media companies – note, more than half of the world's 200 largest economies are not nations; they are corporations. The leaders of these giants exercise a remarkable degree of power over us, and boardrooms are the one place where we could rightly exert power over them.  

The New York Times review says "The authors write in a nonpedantic, readable style, and they don’t mince words…They also offer a valuable new perspective by focusing on the tragicomic miscues of the people who were ostensibly meant to "govern" out-of-control managements."