147 Posts Found

Firms around the world strive for disruptive leadership. Through a case study of Admiral Jacky Fisher, who completely disrupted the immensely powerful British Royal Navy at the beginning of the 20th century, preparing it for the onset, just four years later, of World War I, Jan-Benedict Steenkamp identifies six key characteristics of disruptive leadership.

Content: Article | Author: Jan-Benedict Steenkamp | Source: Management and Business Review (MBR) | Subjects: History, Leadership

Ronald Coase argued that corporations exist to avoid the transaction costs of the free market. Yet with transaction costs plummeting (spurred by rising connectivity) this rationale no longer holds up. Why, then, do companies exist?

The answer is identity. People long to belong, and they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Companies that fixate only on profits will lose ground to organizations that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Aaron De Smet, Chris Gagnon, Elizabeth Mygatt | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: General, History

Ten years after the first stirrings of the global financial crisis of 2007–09, economic historians are trying desperately to understand what has gone wrong. With remarkable frequency, writers and thinkers orient themselves and their stories around World War II, which seems entirely appropriate: What’s happening in the global economy and in politics certainly may feel like an unraveling of the postwar institutions and order. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Ryan Avent | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, History

Today’s economic and political upheavals reflect an ongoing misalignment between business and economies (on the one hand) and acceptable societal outcomes (on the other). There is still time to adjust, if we are willing to reexamine some long-held assumptions.

Content: Article | Authors: Blair Sheppard, Colm Kelly | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, History

It’s been a tumultuous 10 years. And the period has produced a bumper crop of excellent economics books by academics, journalists, and practitioners who have attempted to grapple with the extraordinary macroeconomic disaster. They have examined why it happened, how to fix it, what it means, and how to avoid a recurrence of anything even remotely as hellish.

But we may have arrived at a crossroads. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: J. Bradford DeLong | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, History

In business management, it is easy to fall victim to the buzzwords or trends of the day when historical understanding and consciousness are lacking. When that happens, authors and thinkers purport to create something new, when they are really only serving old wine in new wineskins. This recalls the comments of the philosopher George Santayana that history will repeat itself for those who do not … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Hermann Simon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: History, Innovation

History does not repeat itself, nor does it follow given laws, as Karl Marx or Oswald Spengler have suggested. Nevertheless, it can be said that the human being has changed very little during the known course of history. We gain, therefore, valuable insight when we interpret current developments and the future in light of historical analogies.

Content: Quotation | Author: Hermann Simon | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: History, Personality / Behavior

Rampant speculation. Record trading volumes. Assets bought not because of their value but because the buyer believes he can sell them for more in a day or two, or an hour or two. Welcome to the late 1920s. There are obvious and absolute parallels to the great bull market of the late 1990s, writes Galbraith in a new introduction dated 1997. Of course, Galbraith notes, … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: John Kenneth Galbraith | Subjects: Economics, History

In Strategy: A History, Sir Lawrence Freedman, one of the world’s leading authorities on war and international politics, captures the vast history of strategic thinking, in a consistently engaging and insightful account of how strategy came to pervade every aspect of our lives.

The range of Freedman’s narrative is extraordinary, moving from the surprisingly advanced strategy practiced in primate groups, to the opposing strategies of Achilles … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Lawrence Freedman | Subjects: History, Strategy

An interesting essay by finance luminary Eugene F. Fama, which touches on some of the important events in the evolution of the finance field.

Content: Article | Author: Eugene F. Fama | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Finance, History

In this, the first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil—the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States—Steve Coll reveals the true extent of its power. Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation’s recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Steve Coll | Subject: History

Simon Kuznets, winner of the third Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971, helped transform the field of economics into an empirically-based social science. An excerpt from Robert Fogel’s book on the great economist.

Content: Thought Leader | Author: Robert William Fogel | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, History

Most great figures in American history reveal great contradictions, and Henry Ford is no exception. He championed his workers, offering unprecedented wages, yet crushed their attempts to organize. Virulently anti-Semitic, he never employed fewer than 3,000 Jews. An outspoken pacifist, he made millions producing war materials. He urbanized the modern world, and then tried to drag it back into a romanticized rural past he’d helped … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Vincent Curcio | Subjects: History, People

Today, consumer credit, employee stock options, and citizen investment in the stock market are taken for granted–fundamental facts of American economic life. But few people realize that they were first widely promoted by John Jakob Raskob (1879-1950), the innovative financier and self-made businessman who built the Empire State building, made millions for DuPont and General Motors, and helped shape the contours of modern capitalism.

David Farber’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: David Farber | Subjects: History, People

In the 1950s, few economists thought of phenomena such as racial discrimination as under their purview. That changed in 1957, when Gary S. Becker, Professor of Economics and of Sociology at the University of Chicago and at Chicago Booth before his death in 2014, published The Economics of Discrimination, a book based on his 1955 PhD thesis.

Becker’s analysis would extend the reach of economics, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Gary S. Becker, Kevin M. Murphy | Source: Capital Ideas | Subjects: Economics, History

Future leaders will succeed by being entrepreneurial and by rethinking the balance between financial and social goals.

Content: Article | Author: Tim Laseter | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: General, History

Even as old ideas remain in use (and are still taught), management as it is practiced by the most thoughtful executives evolves. Building on ideas from my colleague Ian MacMillan, I’d propose that we’ve seen three “ages” of management since the industrial revolution, with each putting the emphasis on a different theme: execution, expertise, and empathy.

Content: Article | Author: Rita Gunther McGrath | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: History, Management

If one looks at the Western experience, one can distinguish several clear epochs: Antiquity, the Feudal order, and the capitalist order in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution. In Antiquity slave ownership was the source of power; those who owned the people had a right to the fruits of their efforts. In the Feudal period, the source of such power was the land; those who … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ahmet Aykac | Source: European Business Forum (EBF) | Subjects: Capitalism, Economics, History

If you want the imagination to see the future, then you better have the wisdom to appreciate the past. An obsession with the present—with what’s “hot”, and what’s “in”—may be dazzling, but all that does is blind everyone to the reality. Show me a chief executive who ignores yesterday, who favors the new outsider over the experienced insider, the quick fix over steady progress, and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Henry Mintzberg | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Decision Making, Experience, Future, History, Management

From both a practical and theoretical standpoint, senior executives are expected to provide insight and vision about how the world is evolving over the next 10 to 30 years. But Americans probably have less sense of history than almost any culture on the planet and we seem to be, if anything, hell-bent on having even less sense of history. Understanding the past is yet another … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Peter Senge | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Future, History