Book Notes: From Three Cents a Week: The Story of the Prudential Insurance Company of America

I read this book after my parents discovered that the president of Prudential in the 1940s, Carroll Shanks, grew up just down the street from where they live in rural Minnesota. I have worked for Pru for many years but didn't know much about the Company's history prior to the 1980s.

This book is not especially interesting and focuses way too much on the lives of various boring executives and corporate reorganizations and too little on the economics of what Pru was doing. I did really enjoy reading about Shanks, who the book calls an "astonishing business genius." He was a lawyer who was hired by Pru in the 1930s to do workouts for railroad bonds. As president, he made the dramatic move to regionalize Pru by establishing a series of regional home offices, a model that in spirit still persists within many parts of the organization today.