Business and Corporate History
How firms, industries and managerial capitalism were actually built.
37 books · 6 people behind it
Start here
- Business AdventuresJohn Brooks, 1969
- The CompanyJohn Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge, 2003
- The Visible HandAlfred D. Chandler Jr., 1977
The people behind it 6
Each person holds a book in this entry or names it in their own tags.
Academics 1
Journalists 5
RC
Ron Chernow1 book hereFL
Frederick Lewis Allen1 book hereJB
John Brooks1 book hereWI
Walter Isaacson1 book hereCR
Charles R. Morris1 book hereBooks 37
Benjamin Franklin · 1791 · Franklin's self-improvement system; the origin of thrift and deferred reward
Adolf A. Berle, Gardiner C. Means · 1932 · Named the separation of ownership and control; every governance argument descends from it.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1962 · Structure follows strategy, established from four company histories.
John Brooks · 1969 · Twelve New Yorker case studies; the reason Buffett lent it to Gates.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1977 · The managerial hierarchy replacing the market; the field's founding text.
Tracy Kidder · 1981 · Pulitzer-winning account of building a minicomputer against the clock
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1990 · Comparative industrial capitalism in the US, Britain and Germany.
Ron Chernow · 1990 · One bank across four generations of American finance.
William Cronon · 1991 · Chicago, grain elevators and futures: how a commodity market got invented.
Katharine Graham · 1997 · Washington Post publisher's Pulitzer-winning memoir of running a company
T1 Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari · 2011 · Big history of money, trade and the shared fictions that organise markets
Andrew WilkinsonBill GatesMohnish PabraiNat EliasonNaval RavikantShane ParrishVinod KhoslaAlfred LinAli AbdaalAna FabregaAnthony PomplianoBrett AdcockChangpeng ZhaoDaniel EkDaniel PetreDemis HassabisJames CameronJulian ShapiroJulie ZhuoKeith RaboisMark ZuckerbergMatt MullenwegMelinda GatesNiki ScevakNir EyalPatrick O'ShaughnessyPaul BassatPeter AttiaRaoul PalRay DalioReid HoffmanRichard BransonRyan SheaScott FarquharThe Rational WalkTrevor NcubeZoë Foster Blake
Matthew Josephson · 1934 · The hostile classic on the Gilded Age capitalists; shaped a century of opinion.
Carl Van Doren · 1938 · The standard mid-century Franklin biography; Munger's model of a working life
Frederick Lewis Allen · 1952 · How American life and incomes changed between 1900 and 1950
William H. Whyte · 1956 · What the corporation did to the people inside it, written at its peak.
Alfred D. Chandler Jr. · 1962 · Where 'structure follows strategy' comes from; DuPont, GM, Standard Oil, Sears.
Alfred P. Sloan Jr. · 1963 · Insider account: the CEO who invented the multidivisional corporation.
Thomas K. McCraw · 1984 · Four regulators and how American regulatory doctrine was actually formed.
Thomas K. McCraw · 1997 · National business systems compared through the firms that defined them.
Walter Isaacson · 2003 · Isaacson's Franklin: printer, investor and builder of durable institutions
T2 The Company
John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge · 2003 · Short history of the limited-liability corporation as a legal invention.
John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge · 2003 · The limited-liability company from Rome to the present, in 200 pages.
T2 The Tycoons
Charles R. Morris · 2005 · Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built
Rich Cohen · 2012 · Samuel Zemurray and United Fruit; the banana trade as empire
David Nasaw · 2012 · Joseph Kennedy: film, liquor, market operations and the first SEC chairmanship
Sven Beckert · 2014 · One commodity chain as the whole story of industrial capitalism.
Naomi R. Lamoreaux · 1985 · Why the first merger wave happened and why most of it disappointed.
Donald R. Katz · 1987 · Sears at the moment it stopped understanding its own business.
David E. Nye · 1990 · How a general-purpose technology diffused through everyday commercial life.
Roy R. Neuberger · 1997 · Memoir of a hedged-equity pioneer's seven decades on Wall Street
T3 The Supermen
Charles J. Murray · 1997 · Seymour Cray and the supercomputer business he built and lost
Arthur Herman · 2001 · Scottish Enlightenment as the source of modern commercial and economic thinking
Harvey S. Firestone, Samuel Crowther · 2003 · Founder's account of building Firestone; business sense from the tyre trade
Gordon S. Wood · 2004 · Franklin's reinvention from imperial gentleman into American businessman
Marc Levinson · 2011 · Scale economics in retail, and the politics that tried to stop them.
Irving Stone · 1956 · Narrative of the American West's mining and railroad fortunes
Sam Wyly · 2008 · Entrepreneur's memoir of building and selling successive companies