Writes the King

And you thought King Kilts, who pocketed $165 million in the sale of Gillette Co. to Procter & Gamble Co., was the big winner in that epic Boston mega-deal. Not so, says the King.

"Employees would be perhaps the biggest beneficiaries," the King writes in his coming self-congratulatory book on how you too can turn around, sell off, and get rich on a global icon, all in five years. It's yours in hardback, if you can stomach it, for $27.50 this fall.

"Doing What Matters" (Crown Publishing) is your standard CEO how-to manual, written in the standard quick-read style, full of management dos and don'ts and harrowing corporate war stories about how he dealt with the great "cheese crisis" at Kraft. The man is an expert on overpaid performers. "Manny was more trouble than he was worth," the CEO writes of the Sox left fielder.

Kilts is a rock star of the consumer products business, having revived Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft. (The New York Times Co., which owns this newspaper, was so impressed it put him on the board.) And there is no doubt he is a brilliant executive. His mantra: "Continuous dissatisfaction with the status quo is the best way to keep growing as an individual, an organization, or company."

While there is not a hint of personal dissatisfaction in the book, only of the broken companies he fixed, Kilts does stuff his book with numbers and B-school charts. (Did you know men shave an area of 48 square inches; women shave 412 square inches -- nine times larger!) One number I missed was 6,500, the number of positions Gillette cut in Kilts's five years. Another missing number was 6,000, the jobs P&G expects to cut as a result of the merger. But employees -- and Boston -- are the winners, he says.

"Gillette employees would become part of an organization that valued people, treated them well, and placed their development and growth as one of the company's highest priorities," Kilts writes.

Kilts, Boston's "piñata," as he once infamously called himself, never actually discusses his own compensation.

"Did we know I would be pilloried day after day in the local press as a world-class, villainous, greedy capitalist? Of course, we did. So the questions we faced were: Should we move forward with the merger? Or should we avoid the attacks by putting things on hold, and hope that something else would come along? For me, there never was a question. But faced with such unpleasant consequences, not everyone would make the same call."

With 165 million unpleasant consequences, the man is a regular profile in courage.

(In a telephone conversation yesterday, Kilts, now a partner at Centerview Partners in New York, defended his big payday: "It was a performance-based compensation system we had. If the shareholders didn't make money, I wasn't going to make any money.")

Read the book from the back, where he explains the rationale behind the deal and takes shots at the press. He reserves his harshest criticism for "Boston politicians, noted as being among the most business-unfriendly in the nation."

Secretary of State William Galvin rates five pages all by himself. Galvin "used our announcement for utterly ulterior motives. And he did so with a callous indifference to the concern, worry, and anxiety that he caused thousands of Gillette retirees," Kilts writes. "Totally baseless and irresponsible," "the outlandish allegation," he goes on. You get the idea. Mayor Tom Menino and our MIA former governor, Mitt Romney, were the exceptions to the Boston rule, he says.

Responds Galvin: "Who does he think is going to buy it?"

Neighborhood news: Linda Whitlock, who has done a first-class job as president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, will step down next June, ending almost a decade of heading the nonprofit. "Every organization benefits from change and the infusion of new ideas and energy," Whitlock said in a letter. "This feels like the right time for me to purse new professional challenges and for the organization to bring in new leadership." Search to follow.

Steve Bailey is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at bailey@globe.com or at 617-929-2902.