Excerpt from Glass House by Brian Alexander, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Finally, on the following Tuesday, Solomon was cleared to enter the offices and assume his duties. He could not have foreseen what awaited him as he walked across Pierce Avenue that morning toward the modest, low-slung one-story building. His new working home was a windowless, concrete cell of a room. Big photos of Anchor Hocking glasses and cake dishes and Oneida forks and knives didn't help much, nor did the agitated group of people who greeted him.

John Stewart, a Monomoy managing director, stood at a whiteboard, where he juggled some numbers on a chart with a couple of consultants from Alvarez & Marsal—an international "professional services" firm that deploys a gaggle of fix-its and charges enormous sums of money to tell companies how to get out of whatever swamp they've steered themselves into.

Solomon was a corporate gypsy with brands like Procter & Gamble, Coleman, and Sears on his résumé. He knew his way around a chart. So, within minutes of entering the room, he understood that EveryWare was in deeper trouble than he'd expected. Solomon came to find challenges: He was a challenges guy. This, though, was a shit storm.

Solomon could have turned around and walked out. The mess he found wasn't his mess. Besides, by any reasonable measure, he was rich. He could afford to go back to Illinois and wait for the inevitable—and probably better—next job offer.

But Anchor Hocking was an old brand, and Solomon had an affinity for old brands. An ambition to become the world's greatest brand manager drove him through Duke University's business school. The fact that anybody still recognized the anchor at the bottom of an Anchor Hocking measuring cup meant that generations of people had laid down geological layers of value. Anchor Hocking had survived two world wars, a depression, and a recession just short of another depression. Solomon wasn't sentimental about companies, and especially not about Anchor Hocking: His own corporate counsel would later call him Machiavellian, and would mean it as a compliment. Anchor Hocking appealed to his business aesthetic.

Flash was easy. No matter how useless a product, any bozo could make it flashy and fast and sexy, so that some venture capitalist in Silicon Valley would give you millions. It would trend on Twitter. And a year later—maybe two—when the product tanked? You'd still be rich. How hard could it really be to sell the Apple Watch? But a measuring cup? A pie dish? As a marketing guy, Solomon believed he could take a boring old industrial company, one still imbued with brand value, and get consumers, as well as businesses like restaurants and cruise ships and hotels, to flock to it again. If he could pull that off, he'd be a hero. Much more than a company depended on his success.

Solomon wasn't responsible for or to Lancaster. He was responsible to shareholders. At the moment, the majority shareholder was Monomoy Capital Partners. But as was true in a hundred other towns across the nation, Lancaster was a web of a community. Like it or not, the anchor thread in Lancaster was Anchor Hocking.

Excerpted from Glass House by Brian Alexander. Copyright © 2017 by Brian Alexander. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.