Corporate History

How can companies succeed over time? To learn the source of enduring greatness, author Christian Stadler directed a team of eight researchers in a six-year study of some of Europe's oldest and most stellar companies, targeting nine that have survived for more than 100 years and have significantly outperformed the market over the past fifty years. Readers may wonder, "Why European companies?" Yet Europe is the ideal place to seek the key to long-term success; half of the Fortune Global 500 companies that are 100 years old or older can be found in Europe, as can 72 of the 100 oldest family businesses in the world.

Control of the country is up for grabs - and Republicans have been rigging the game in their favor. Twenty-two states have passed restrictions on voting. Ruthless gerrymandering has given the GOP a long-term grip on Congress. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, boosting candidates backed by big money. It would be worrying enough if these were just schemes for partisan advantage. But the reality is even more disturbing.

The decade after the First World War saw a period of growing prosperity and new freedoms for the average American. With help of clever bankers, brokers, and a supply of easy money the average man and woman found their path to wealth – the stock market. As moths are drawn to a flame, so were the gullible investors lured to the securities exchanges seeking to turn their pennies into dollars. For years the market just went up and up, and as the lyrics of the song of the time echoed, “Blue skies, Smiling at me, Nothing but blue skies, Do I see.” By the end of the decade the cracks in the ...

Herbert Hoover led one of the most fascinating lives of an America in the twentieth century. Orphaned as a young boy he would graduate from Stanford University, build a fortune as a mining engineer, and become the most accomplished humanitarian of his era. His complex personality led many to view him as aloof and uncaring, though ironically through his extreme generosity he helped feed millions of starving Europeans during two World Wars. After a brilliant career as Secretary of Commerce he became president of the United States in 1928 which was at the high point of America’s prosperity. ...

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

It may be hard to believe in an era of Walmart, Citizens United, and the Koch brothers, but corporations are on the decline. The number of American companies listed on the stock market dropped by half between 1996 and 2012. In recent years we've seen some of the most storied corporations go bankrupt (General Motors, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak) or disappear entirely (Bethlehem Steel, Lehman Brothers, Borders).

Eddie Tipton went to prison in 2017 for masterminding the biggest lottery fraud in U.S. history. In a twisting and bizarre tale, he somehow mixed a cocktail of greed, Bigfoot hunting, deception, cybercrime, and a love of hot dogs on his way to a felony conviction after he and several accomplices scored a series of jackpots from rigged drawings but fell short on the biggest "score" of them all. It's a wild story of greed and misplaced confidence, and a study in public officials whose determination survived a nearly cold trail.

I Did It is the story of Gina Champion-Cain, the mastermind behind the largest woman-led Ponzi scheme in US history—$400 million. This real-life story includes a multitude of participants, banks, hedge funds, egomaniacs, and small-time crooks, all fueled by greed, stupidity, and a keen desire to look the other way. And even when they were looking in the right direction, all of these people and entities saw nothing.

In October 2022, Elon Musk marched through Twitter’s front doors carrying a kitchen sink, tweeting a message to his millions of followers: ‘let that sink in’. His takeover came with the promise of fundamental changes, but nothing could prepare the company for the chaos to come – brutal, sometimes arbitrary mass firings, an exodus of advertisers and ‘blue-tick’ celebrities, and a vicious Shakespearean battle for control.

Lloyd Constantine began his career in legal services, representing impoverished clients in civil rights and constitutional cases. Decades later, he would make headlines for representing retailers and consumers against a cartel that undermined one of the fundamental tenets of commerce in America: competition. A man who thrives on competition himself, Constantine now gives us the insider's story on the biggest antitrust lawsuit in history - a case that pitted his small firm against financial-industry giants Visa and MasterCard, along with Clifford-Chance, the largest law firm in the world.

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States after the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, and was nearly appointed to that august body in 1922. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.

In Circle of Friends, award-winning journalist Charles Gasparino chronicles the massive federal crackdown that has already put some of the biggest names on Wall Street behind bars. Circle of Friends is not a defense of insider trading, but it does offer an account of the politics of Wall Street crime fighting, revealing the behind-the-scenes ambitions that motivate headlines and burnish political careers. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction, as engrossing and explosive as fictional thrillers of the finest magnitude.

Août 2007, dans les médias apparaît un mot nouveau : "subprimes".

Die Geschichte liest sich wie ein Hollywood-Thriller, ist aber wahr: Am 7. April 2018 verschwindet der deutsch-amerikanische Milliardär Karl-Erivan Haub im Gletschergebiet am Matterhorn. Der bestens trainierte Extremsportler hinterlässt keine einzige Spur, keinen Hilferuf, kein Zeichen eines Überlebenskampfes. Im Oktober 2018 wird die Suche nach ihm offiziell eingestellt, seine Leiche wird nie gefunden. Ein Bruder Haubs lässt den Unternehmer für tot erklären, was seine Macht in einem Firmenimperium sichert, zu dem unter anderem OBI, KiK und Teile von Zalando gehören.

Erskine’s book is a history of the Studebaker Corporation’s early years, the wagon and carriage businesses, the transition to the automotive business, plus selected corporate financial information.

Donald Trump may be the last of a breed - the businessman as brand. When Warren Buffett formed his investing company he did not follow the lead of E.F. Hutton or Merrill Lynch and name the enterprise after himself. Bill Gates did not name his software publishing business after himself like Little, Brown or Simon and Shuster. Sergey Brin and Larry Page did not become Hewlett-Packard. Elon Musk named his car company after a real person, but it was not himself. It has not always been that way. In fact, the business history of America has been mostly that of people who became brands. We all ...

You’ve probably heard that famous 'Well may we say' speech made by Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam on the day he was sacked by the queen’s representative, or seen the grainy footage from the steps of old parliament house. But do you properly understand the extraordinary events leading up to the most dramatic day in Australian political history? How did The Dismissal actually happen? This audio series takes you inside the highest circles of power to uncover pieces of this story that have never been told before.

You can’t escape the corporation! In the year 2028, a massive online corporation called Everest.Com will control everything we buy, including books, food, medical care, police protection, religion, political affiliations...Everything! Tanya Teal, is fired from the last remaining NYC publishing house due to overwhelming competition from Everest.com. After rekindling her love affair with an old boyfriend, Tony Smart, they drink a few too many and decide to visit one of their old haunts, Gus's Hotdog Shack. They know it's illegal, but what can one hotdog hurt?

This is a true story of personal greed and downfall, corporate greed fueled with economic and social treachery, shareholder waste and discrimination at AIG, 70 Pine Street in the heart of the financial district. This address is known as the AIG Tower, hence the title Tower of Thieves. The central character is a man with a wife, a family, who has cheated his way to the top by doing good. He is responsible for leading a 60 billion dollar organization with over 40,000 employees worldwide at one of the largest companies in the world. What he sees and what he does validates what unchecked power ...

Empires of Steam and Rust marks a new series with the short novel First Passage: Gateway to Rust and Ruin. Sir Francis Barstow has unlimited funds from the alchemist's dream--he can transmute lead into gold with a special ray confined to a Cornish coal mine. To exhaust generated fumes from the electrical equipment, he uses a strange black portal only a foot in diameter--the portal opens onto an entire new dimesnion, the World of Rust. Other, larger holes have appeared across the world. The Kaiser uses one to smuggle contraband from the United States into Switzerland in preparation for ...