OUT OF THE CRACKER BARREL: THE NABISCO STORY, FROM ANIMAL CRACKERS TO ZU ZU'S.

By WilliamCahn '34. New York: Simon & Schuster,1969. 367 pp. $8.95.

The average book shopper is likely to yawn his way over a jacket with a Uneeda Biscuit boy and a title that includes Animal Crackers to Zu Zu's. He might recognize that the book is a story of the National Biscuit Company and promptly dismiss it as a public relations rags-to-riches story of just another American business firm.

But let him start to read beyond the first page. He will surely be caught up in a story that is as exciting as it is educational. Let him read about the lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Adolphus W. Green, founder of the National Biscuit Company, whose financial machinations and sense of product innovation easily matched the manipulations of the more famous Carnegies, Goulds, Morgans, and Rockefellers. Here was the prototype of the brilliant, energetic autocrat who, at the turn of the century, amalgamated hundreds of small bakery businesses into one of the great food giants. Its products were to become household words thanks to packaging and advertising techniques that quickly set the pace for many other consumer businesses.

Green's extraordinary successes generated a kind of "great man" dependency that nearly put the Company on the rocks for his successors. True, the Company paid dividends all through the Depression years but, after Green's death, there was lacking the kind of dynamism built into the total management structure that is so essential if a company is to innovate, if it is to respond to the needs of its own employees and to its consuming public. By the end of World War II "the Company faced a dim future. All it had was money. Nobody advanced: nobody retired."

New blood was brought in. Or more accurately, younger men in the Company were given free rein to put into practice what has come to be known as the skills of modern professional management. The analysis of the subsequent success is matched only by William Cahn's own ability to tell about it.

Mr. Guest is Professor of OrganizationalBehavior at the Tuck School.