Had Mr. Rossetto's refusal to buy his staff pens made it in? His raising of the men's room urinal (much to the chagrin of the shorter fry)? Or how about the old kitchen policy? (For years, Wired prepared its staff three vegetarian meals a day, and each week a different department drew clean-up duty. This devolved into a grumpy dish-washing caste.) Was there any mention of the editorial retreats held in a yurt, or the brainstorming on brand extensions carried out in the hot tubs at Esalen?

Or what about that middle-aged idler, said to be in charge of "real estate," but who, instead of finding new office space, spent his days wandering around with his two Jack Russells chatting people up, right up until the day of the big move to the new digs-which were right downstairs?

For myself, I wondered how Mr. Wolf handled "the fall": the 1998 break-up of Wired Ventures into two companies, Wired magazine and Wired Digital, and their sale-over Mr. Rossetto's violent objections-to Condé Nast and Lycos, respectively. ("It's like taking a Ferrari and selling it for scrap!" Mr. Rossetto said of the Lycos deal.) Had Mr. Wolf cast former Wired chief financial officer Jeff Simon in the Judas role, as some alleged in '98? And did he uncover S.I. Newhouse's mole-the one who had enabled Condé Nast to buy Wired even after the Wired board of directors had reached terms with Spin and Vibe magazine owner Robert Miller?

Finally, one Bowler popped the $64K question: Beyond those who'd worked at Wired , who cares?

Weeks later, I can finally clear this thicket of queries. Of all the Bowler memories, only the ban on office pens rates Mr. Wolf's attention. Though he does report on Mr. Newhouse scooping Mr. Miller, and on Mr. Simon's brief stint as president of Wired (during a surreal week when Mr. Rossetto and Ms. Metcalfe, although terminated, continued to come into the office to work), Mr. Wolf has nothing to say about the identity of the Condé Nast spy, nor does he address the rumor about Mr. Simon's million-dollar windfall for undermining Rossetto's control of his company.

As to who might care, Mr. Wolf and his publisher clearly did give thought to broadening the audience for the book, and Mr. Wolf presents Wired 's story as a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs everywhere, armchair and otherwise-and successfully so. It's a masterful case study of how the ambition needed to launch a breakthrough company can also lead to its undoing. Where it falls short is in capturing Wired 's cultural moment.

That Mr. Wolf gets to be the one to tell this story is fitting. A perceptive, stylish writer, he established himself early as one of Wired 's top producers of revealing profiles. He also served as executive editor of HotWired, Wired 's pioneering Web site, though you'd hardly know how central a role he played, because his book is mostly told in a cool, worldly-wise third person.

Mr. Wolf's talent for distilling unusual personalities serves him well. He's especially effective at evoking Mr. Rossetto's "strangely affecting combination of certainty and vulnerability," and he expertly charts Mr. Rossetto's transformation from "a clueless ex-hippie parading around New York with a pamphlet about 'Hacking the Brain'" to the fanatical creator of a prototype for a "computer magazine with the feel of gun magazine," to the vindicated editor in chief of a white-hot publication that promised to give insight into "social changes so profound their only parallel is probably the discovery of fire."

Mr. Wolf does nearly as well with Ms. Metcalfe, an ebullient Kentuckian mistaken in Paris (where she met Mr. Rossetto) for an American railroad heiress, and with Kevin Kelly, the highly original and disarmingly dear founding editor of Wired , who once biked the United States convinced he'd die in six months. The trip impressed upon Mr. Kelly the dehumanizing effect of life without a future. Later, Mr. Wolf gives an affecting portrait of Carl Steadman, co-founder of the satiric e-zine Suck . Meeting Wired 's anti-careerists makes much of Mr. Wolf's book a breeze, and left me feeling nostalgic.

It's in the book's second half, where he details Wired 's rapid expansion online, that Mr. Wolf disappoints, and Wired-A Romance slouches towards Wired-A Dénouement . True, he nails the philosophical debates over how to make HotWired profitable, and brilliantly reconstructs an exchange over company-wide e-mail typical of the emotional round-robin discussions– cum –flame wars that consumed so much energy in that office. He recounts the comic scramble, too, each time Wired ran low on funds. But he gives short shrift to what, besides an Internet search engine, Wired spent its millions on. As such, Mr. Wolf's decision to background himself-which at first seems an act of admirable restraint-becomes disingenuous.

Consider one notable omission. In late '96, Messrs. Rossetto, Kelly and Wolf got a look at Pointcast, technology that allowed a company to send data and images across a network to a connected desktop computer-continuously, like television. The Wired brain trust seized on Pointcast's "push" technology (as opposed to the "pull" of online search and retrieval) as the next big thing, and touted it in a March 1997 cover story. Co-written by Mr. Wolf, the article notoriously began by telling readers to "kiss your browser goodbye." At the same time, Mr. Wolf set to work putting Wired 's money where its mouth was, and committed tens of thousands of dollars to creating LiveWired, Wired 's short-lived push media service.

The point of recalling this is not a gotcha! on Wired or Mr. Wolf's false prophecy. Even then, there were heads at Wired who dissed push media. Pointcast, they sniped, amounted to a souped-up screensaver, and what was the point of a mass medium that only turns itself on when you're not watching?

By not sharing more of his own commitment to such experimental media, Mr. Wolf misses the chance to convey fully Wired 's absolute mania for breaking new ground-the core aspiration of the mid-90's San Francisco-and the instant ego gratification that came with it. This heady, history-in-the-making excitement was not the private reserve of Wired 's founders, or of individuals like Mr. Wolf who actively cultivated it.

Soon after the sale to Condé Nast, the magazine staff met their new bosses, including Mr. Newhouse, in the Wired kitchen. Someone-and it may have been Mr. Newhouse-made a crack about the push media cover story. Immediately, Mr. Wolf and Mr. Kelly, who were seated near one another, copped to it and, unrepentant, gave each other a high-five. It's that candor and insouciance, that spirit of "Hey, it wasn't pretty, but what a fuckin' ride," that Wired-A Romance sadly lacks.

Brad Wieners, a former Wired senior editor, lives in New York.

Although it substantially resembles the company's 2002 report, the accompanying brochure was clearly a hoax. The three globes adorning the report's cover have burst into flames. ExxonMobil's slogan has been rendered: "Still Staying the Course … Yesterday, Today and Last Century." (On closer inspection, Mr. Raymond's letter shows signs of mockery, too. It concludes: "It is no coincidence that my name is an anagram for Dr. Real Money.")

Inside the glossy brochure, the usual metrics and glowing references to the company's achievements have been replaced with satire. A list of "Performance Highlights" includes "Carbon dioxide emissions at an all time high"; "Challenges for the Year Ahead" features a snapshot of protesters occupying an Esso filling station in Luxembourg; ExxonMobil board of directors member Henry (Hank) McKinnell Jr. testifies that "I love my SUV and I love global warming"; and there's Mr. Raymond again, boasting that "our vision is a never-ending supply of fossil fuels, and we believe that we can extend the life span of oil, perhaps indefinitely, by drilling ever deeper into the earth's core."

Produced by Greenpeace (the activist organization 'fesses up on page 11), the faux annual report presents Exxon-Mobil, the world's top-grossing oil and gas company (and No. 2 petrochemical concern), as an environmentalist's nightmare, a corporation in deep denial about the risks posed by climate change, spending millions to prevent curbs on carbon-dioxide emissions, and misleading the public and elected officials on the subject. To Greenpeace, Exxon-Mobil presents "the best boycott target since Pepsi got out of Burma."

Not surprisingly, the report didn't go over too well at ExxonMobil's Irving, Tex., headquarters. "There were some who felt tricked by it, because they used envelopes with the ExxonMobil logo on it, but mostly what we've heard [from recipients] is real annoyance," says Tom Cirigliano, a ExxonMobil spokesman. "It's typical of Greenpeace. It's a cheap gimmick-long on publicity, short on fact." Lawyers for ExxonMobil, Mr. Cirigliano said, were "taking a look at" a possible lawsuit over illegal use of the company's trademark. But, he added, "We might be better off ignoring it, it's of so little value whatsoever. My only real concern was if they sent it to The New York Times . They might think it was the real thing."

Mr. Cirigliano dismissed Greenpeace's complaints. "Our position remains that climate change may prove to be significant," he said, "which is why it's critical that studies continue, and why, regardless of whether [global warming] is from man-made factors or cyclical factors, we're working to reduce air emissions." He said ExxonMobil supports the transparent reporting of carbon-dioxide emissions and has, over the last 25 years, reduced its own such emissions by 200 million metric tons. Mr. Cirigliano also said that the $200 billion firm was investing heavily in new, cleaner technologies. He noted that last year ExxonMobil donated $100 million to Stanford University for research into energy systems which "have the capability of substantially reducing greenhouse emissions"-including the hydrogen fuel cells mentioned in President Bush's State of the Union address. "While Greenpeace is spending money on fake reports and running around in tiger costumes," Mr. Cirigliano said, "we have already done more than Greenpeace ever will to reduce emissions." (Demonstrators dressed as tigers-remember the old Esso mascot?-attempted to disrupt ExxonMobil's May 28 shareholder meeting.)

Greenpeace research director Kert Davies said that he and his colleagues chose to target ExxonMobil's leadership and investors for two principle reasons: first, because government regulation seems improbable at this point ("The Bush administration's policy mirrors ExxonMobil's," Mr. Davies said); and second, because in the last two years especially, environmental activists pressuring ExxonMobil on climate change have been joined by a wide array of shareholder groups and economists, such as London's Claros Consulting, Boston's Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies and Austin's Campaign ExxonMobil. A few of these organizations provide research to shareholders on proxy-vote issues; others represent pension funds and other major institutional investors. All have turned up the heat on ExxonMobil.

"ExxonMobil, to its credit, has been very clear on its strategy regarding climate change," says Doug Cogan, deputy director of social-issue services at Washington, D.C.'s Investor Responsibility Research Center. "Where it's gotten into trouble is in its combative stance, and in challenging the science. That's what has made it a lightning rod." As a research analyst, Mr. Cogan declines to "take sides," but allows that he has detected a clear pattern in his scrutiny of the company. Alone among oil's big four (which also includes British Petroleum, Shell and ChevronTexaco), ExxonMobil and its chief executive continue to seize on obscure opportunities to discredit the consensus view among climate scientists that global warming is in large part caused by human activity, and fossil-fuel combustion in particular.

Peter Altman, the national coordinator of Campaign ExxonMobil, is less impartial. He contends that the oil giant's position on climate change places shareholder value at risk. "The financial community is becoming aware of this issue, so it concerns their reputation as well as their long-term profitability," he said. For example, insurance firms, Mr. Altman asserts, have begun to recognize that global warming will impact agribusiness. As such, it represents staggering liability potential. What's more, he says, ExxonMobil has been losing ground to B.P. and Shell on sustainable sources of energy, such as solar and wind power. Mr. Altman characterized the company's grant to Stanford as "spit in a puddle …. It's one-tenth of 1 percent of what they will spend exploring for new oil. And the contrast tells you what their pre-set agenda is."

Mr. Altman, who says he's in this for the long haul, championed three resolutions on the proxy card at the May 28 shareholders meeting, two of which specifically addressed climate change and renewable energy.

Pat Daly, executive director of New York's Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, attended the meeting. Her organization backs Campaign Exxon-Mobil. She voted in favor of the resolution calling for a report on climate-change risks. It received 22.2 percent of the vote-not enough to pass, but enough to keep it on the ballot for 2003. Ms. Daly considered this "a win," but noted that the resolutions are nonbinding, and that it would likely take 90 percent of the vote to persuade ExxonMobil's board to take action. She also said a campaign for divestiture on this issue didn't seem likely any time soon.

Ross Gelbspan, a former Boston Globe reporter and the author of The Heat Is On , an exposé of how coal and oil interests have funded junk science to "refute" those industries' contribution to global warming, says that it's clever of Greenpeace to parody ExxonMobil's official communications. In 1998, he notes, a report designed to look as though it had been issued by the National Academy of Sciences was circulated by the Washington, D.C.–based Marshall Institute. The report raised doubts about climate change, and was taken seriously by journalists and members of Congress-until, that is, the N.A.S. saw it and denounced it.

"ExxonMobil continues to act like there's a debate over this-and because the press is used to giving both sides, it does," Mr. Gelbspan says. "But that's like giving the tobacco companies equal room in every story on the health effects of cigarette smoking." The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Mr. Gelbspan emphasizes, receives input from 3,500 scientists in 120 countries. "In what amounts to the world's most rigorously peer-reviewed research in history," he said, "they concluded that we need to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 70 percent." If ExxonMobil is as committed as Mr. Cirigliano says to reducing emissions, Mr. Gelbspan asks, why did it successfully petition President Bush to dismiss the IPCC president, Dr. Robert Watson? Mr. Gelbspan notes that the corporation still donates more than $1 million a year-as revealed in the Form 990 I.R.S. filings of Houston's ExxonMobil Foundation-to "greenhouse skeptics."

In response, Mr. Cirigliano points out that ExxonMobil and the Bush administration were not the only ones opposed to the IPCC's recommendations and the Kyoto Protocol: "The U.S. Senate voted against it, too, 95 to 0. And when does that ever happen?" He added that ExxonMobil supports independent organizations that "broaden the debate" on climate change. (On May 28, he told The New York Times that those, like Ross Gelbspan, who consider the debate closed are guilty of "the kind of dark-ages thinking that gets you into a lot of trouble.") Mr. Cirigliano also called Mr. Altman's suggestion that ExxonMobil had fallen behind B.P. and Shell on alternative energy "extremely naïve."

"We were the first major energy company to pursue renewables 25 years ago," he said. "But we found they had too many disadvantages. The future is not going to come from these ancient technologies, like the solar panels B.P. is spending $5 billion on, or wind farms.

"The future," Mr. Cirigliano continued, "is going to come from new technologies, and that's what we're investing in and continue to be a leader in. Other companies try to say the right things, but no other company is placing more time and money and effort in the technologies that will reduce emissions, and be economically and socially acceptable. If you go to the developing world, which is a priority for us, you have to provide a sound economy first. Concern over the environment falls to the bottom of the list."

Brad Wieners is a columnist for Business 2.0 and correspondent to Outside . He lives in New York.

Reclaiming narcissism as a good thing might seem an odd cause célèbre , but that's the very restoration project that psychologist and business guru Michael Maccoby has taken up in his latest book. As Mr. Maccoby sees it, in the three years since the boom lowered on the bubble and once-admired CEO's like Steve Case, Bernie Ebbers, Jean-Marie Messier, Martha Stewart and Jack Welch all fell to earth, the business press, Wall Street and, significantly, other business theorists like Jim Collins (author of Good to Great ) have learned the wrong lesson from the crash and scandals: that the failings of these high-flying, iconic and, yes, narcissistic CEO's only prove that we don't need self-styled visionaries running things.

"The lack of understanding of narcissistic leaders has already led to a backlash, a pendulum swing to conservative, value-based, bottom-line CEOs," Mr. Maccoby writes. He allows that these more self-effacing, weekends-spent-puttering-in-the-family-garage execs have their place. They're ideally suited to run a retail empire such as Walgreens or Circuit City. But when it comes to the kinds of rapidly changing high-tech and entertainment enterprises The New York Times calls the "information industries," he insists you want a narcissist at the helm.

"In the 80's and 90's, a whole school of leadership thought emerged that can be summed up by Daniel Goleman's concept of 'emotional intelligence,'" Mr. Maccoby says. "This leadership theory … equates successful leadership with empathy, listening to others, sensitivity to feelings, anger and impulse control, and working through consensus. This is the business equivalent of wishful thinking-I've found that it may make for a nicer place to work, but emotional intelligence does not guarantee success." What does-and this is the meat of his book-is narcissism coupled with what Mr. Maccoby calls "strategic intelligence," a set of skills that keeps the obnoxious aspects of narcissism in check.

From the get-go, Mr. Maccoby is careful not to appear an apologist for self-absorbed prigs. Aware that the colloquial use of narcissism evokes a negative stereotype, he swoops to the semantic rescue.

"If you're like most people, you think a narcissist is a vain, self-centered egomaniac. But this is a description of behavior-and most likely, bad behavior-rather than portrait of a personality type …. A true narcissist is the kind of person who (1) doesn't listen to anyone else when he believes in doing something and (2) has a precise vision of how things should be. A narcissist possesses this dual combination of traits, not one or the other; plenty of people who aren't narcissists never listen to anyone else (they are negativistic, closed-minded or arrogant), and plenty of people have an idea of how things should be (they are often just know-it-alls or big-talkers). It is the combination of a rejection of the status quo, along with a compelling vision, that defines the narcissist."

As a term, narcissism dates to 1908; it was first used by Sigmund Freud, who took it from the first-century poem by Ovid, found in Metamorphoses , about a boy, Narcissus, who stares at his own reflection in a pond until he drowns. The myth of self-destruction, Mr. Maccoby notes, has long eclipsed Freud's later, more subtle definition of narcissism as one of three "Libidinal" types: the erotic (seeks love above all), obsessive (upholds ideals-a.k.a. totally anal) and narcissistic (fulfills himself). Mr. Maccoby's broader agenda with The Productive Narcissist is to promote recognizing and managing relationships based on these types-along with a fourth, Erich Fromm's "marketing personality," which describes those who readily adapt to new circumstances.

Mr. Maccoby has always liked categories. In a previous best-seller, The Gamesman, 1976, he delineated four: the Craftsman, the Organizational Man, the Jungle Fighter and the Gamesman. (The representative gamesman of the title, Richard Hackborn, later recruited Carly Fiorina to Hewlett-Packard). But Mr. Maccoby confesses that he, too, succumbed to the vogue in emotional intelligence and leaders-as-facilitators, and now it's really Freud's and Fromm's categories you ought to master. He even includes a personality questionnaire at the end of Chapter 1 so readers can take a little journey of self-discovery. "The best way to illustrate to clients that personality type actually exists," he explains, "is for them to determine their own personality type."

(Full disclosure: your reviewer scored as a Narcissist-Marketing, which, naturally, is a walking contradiction. By nature and nurture, the marketing type tries to get along, while the narcissist does it his way. The weaknesses of the marketing personality proved an especially harsh toke: "No center, no inner core that directs them. No lasting commitments to their work or to people. Anxiety hangs over them. Pervasive anxiety turns into depression." Might as well dial up some Xanax now.)

No doubt some will find these categories immensely useful; at the same time, personality types such as Obsessive-Erotic suggest a scary personals ad. There's also an echo of the Vanity Fair horoscope here, as Mr. Maccoby does his best to cite individuals who embody the various personality types he describes. Narcissistic-Erotic? Oprah Winfrey. Narcissistic-Obsessive? Jack Welch, sure, but also Larry Ellison. Narcissistic-Marketing? (Hey, that's like me!) Jan Carlzon, the former CEO of Scandinavia Airlines.

Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Craig McCaw? Narcissists all. Also: Napoleon Bonaparte, F.D.R. and Mohandas Gandhi.

Much of The Productive Narcissist reads like it began life as a speech or two. Since in speechwriting, the rule is to say what you're going to say, say it, then sum up by saying what you just said, Mr. Maccoby repeats himself. Like any good consultant, he also never misses a chance to interject something about his 30 years' experience or his former illustrious client So-and-So.

Ignore the usual self-help business foibles and the ever-dubious use of personality surveys, and you may find that The Productive Narcissist delivers some useful insights, especially if you have a narcissist boss. Or if you happen to be one yourself (ever suffer from paranoia, overcompetitiveness, isolation, grandiosity?).

Michael Maccoby will never recruit an army to defend narcissism as a virtue, but he's convincing when he agues that for many firms, it's a mistake to hire a do-it-as-it's-always-been-done-only-cheaper obsessive: A narcissist is the right egomaniac for the job.

Brad Wieners is a columnist for Business 2.0 and correspondent for Outside. He lives in New York.