How MBAs Learn Finance: The Story Behind A Best-Selling B-School Textbook

Over all that time, Brigham has worked with ten different co-authors. His top selling MBA textbook, Financial Management: Theory and Practice, has been co-authored with Ehrhardt, who teaches finance at the University of Tennessee’s business school, since 1998. “Gene is a phenomenally effective writer,” says Ehrhardt. “When I first joined him on the textbook, I had a book published by Harvard Business School Press and about 25 articles in academic journals. But Gene would take some of the work I gave him and when he added to it, the result was humbling.”

Brigham says he’s never had an argument with any of his co-authors over royalties. (Weston died in 2009 at the age of 93.) With each revision, he took down his percentage of the take by 10%, giving more to his co-authors as he did less work. When the percentage fell to 50/50, the publisher wanted him more involved—and he stepped back in to become more active in the revisions.

Of course, there have been disagreements over the years with his collaborators. One time, he notes, a co-author wanted to include Enron as an example of a forward-thinking company in finance. “Enron was praised to the high heavens by a lot of professors before it got shot down,” says Brigham. “They were using options and derivatives and saying how they could eliminate risk. Old guys like me didn’t think that could be done.” Brigham spotted a skeptical story in The Wall Street Journal and told his co-author, “’You’ve got to take it out.’ So it didn’t see the light of day.”

Using co-authors has greatly helped Brigham keep the textbooks relevant despite all the changes in the financial world. “My co-authors were getting better and better and more on top of new theory, while I was getting old and retired. I planned to retire around 1990 and was damn sure I wouldn’t work past 1995, but I found I missed it. I started playing golf. It turned out that I wasn’t very good at golf, but I was good at textbooks.”