Items related to 50 Companies That Changed the World
Synopsis
A subjective list of the 50 Companies that had the msot profound impact on the world around them. The firms included are ranked by the author according to their influence and contributions. International in scope, the selections range from obvious choices like Microsoft, AT&T, Toyota, and McDonald's, to more provocative selections like CNN, The Walt Disney Company, and Ben & Jerry's Homemade. For each company, the author presents a lively, historical sketch and discusses its strengths and weaknesses in the context of each company's individual operation, historical context, and specific industry. Each sketch also entertainingly and informatively spotlights the distinctive personalities, along with the unique products or services, that set it apart from its competitors.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Howard Rothman has been a retail clerk, vending machine repairman, public opinion pollster, newspaper reporter, magazine editor, advertising agency president, newsletter publisher, business consultant, Internet content provider, television event scout, and book author. He has also been a Business & Investment book reviewer at Amazon.com since 1996.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
In the following pages, you will read about 50 outstanding companies that permanently and dramatically altered the way we live. In the process, you will also see how much of the business world and, along with it, our society has evolved over the past few centuries. Throughout it all, there are specific individuals with extraordinary vision, courage and commitment who struggled to realize their ideas and drive these companies to success. In a very real sense, they are the forces that have changed our world.
To find the companies that were ultimately included in this book, I began with the naturals like Microsoft and Ford. I then drew up a list of industries that often exhibited earth-shaking impact, like communications and transportation, and began circulating both to a circle of friends and colleagues that represented a broad range of interests. There were high-tech executives and teachers. Public relations professionals and engineers. Business writers and shopkeepers. All generously commented upon my selections and helpfully offered a few of their own. New lists were drawn up, recirculated, and refined. Eventually, a solid 50 companies surfaced that I feel accurately represent the breadth and scope if certainly not the totality of corporate impact on human life in the 19th and 20th centuries.
To read the stories, in order or otherwise, is to peel away the often forgotten details of our various cultural metamorphoses. Our transportation transformation, for example, from trains and cars to airplanes and rockets. Our communications evolution from newspapers to radio to TV to cyberspace. Our social conversion through electricity and telephones, chain hotels and fast food joints. The overall picture is one of business and societal alchemy at the hands of a select few far-sighted individuals, whose best ideas were usually copied and ultimately merged into the mainstream. But the individual pictures are even more fascinating, because they show how these individuals and those who followed stayed atop the changing world trends and altered their focus and direction accordingly. It is, therefore, not surprising to learn that most of the companies in this book are still major players in their fields.
As such, they continue to have impact on virtually everything we do. I wrote this book, for example, on an Apple computer with the assistance of a Netscape browser, Microsoft word processing software and Hewlett-Packard printer. During the process I purchased a card table and chairs from Wal-Mart, and a lawnmower from Sears. I got FedEx deliveries about three times a week, and regularly watched CNN, CBS and the National Football League on my AT&T cable. My very first car was from General Motors (1959 Chevy Impala), my first new car was a Toyota (1974 Celica GT), and my current car runs on Firestone tires (although, thankfully, not a model that the company recalled in the summer of 2000). I exercise in Nike footwear, unwind with a Sony CD player, take my kids to practically every movie released by the Walt Disney Company, and when they were younger felt that I lived at Toys "R" Us. When my wife and I first met, her roommate was engaged to a guy from Levittown. We flew People Express for the few years we could, and today have products at home too numerous to mention from Kellogg, Proctor & Gamble, Philip Morris, H.J. Heinz, L.L. Bean, Coca-Cola and, of course, Ben & Jerry's. The most unusual connection of all, however, came when I discovered that the scientist who founded a company responsible for both GE and RCA began his career as a chemistry teacher at the Philadelphia high school I attended a century later.
What's the point? These "50 Companies That Changed the World" obviously all made a tremendous impact on the business world, initiating such vital operational innovations as the assembly line, franchising agreement, brand extension, and temporary employee. At the same time, they made perhaps an even larger mark on the entire world, and on each and every one of us, by altering the food we eat, the entertainment we enjoy, the very ways we connect with one another. There have also been negative impacts, as evidenced by giant tobacco company-cum-consumer products conglomerate Phillip Morris and wartime armsmaker-turned-peacetime steelmaker Thyssen Krupp. But these firms and their visionaries, while rarely setting out to change the world, usually did so in a positive sense. And while all of them confront constant challenges to remain on that influential edge, they have usually faced similar threats successfully throughout their existence. That's one of the primary reasons they are included in this book. It is my hope that their stories will prove both instructive and interesting to all.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.