Kategoria BISAC: Business & Economics >> Corporate & Business History - General

Organizations pour billions of dollars into programs that in the end prove to be nothing but fads--short lived enthusiasms with little purpose other than to make those who initiate and promote them rich. Brindle and Stearns take a look at these vogues and fashions, and find that over a history of at least a century, there is continuity to, and similarities among them. Fads are both product and process, they find, tied to tensions in the workplace and to those who too quickly profess solutions to problems these tensions cause. The authors shed new light on such fads, examining how they...

The story of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., is exciting--full of struggle, determination, crisis, and heroic endeavor. Air Products grew out of the vision and drive of one individual, Leonard Pool. In the course of fifty years, Pool's precarious project has become a major, multinational corporation. Words like entrepreneurship, sales, finance, engineering, and technology are central to the history of Air Products. So too are concepts like being a late entrant to an established business, struggling to find market niches, moving into fields of endeavor, developing human resources, and...

Beer connects commercial, social, and political history in this sobering look at the culture of drinking in South Africa. Beginning where stories of colonial liquor control and exploitation leave off, Anne Kelk Mager looks at the current commerce of beer, its valorizing of male sociability and sports, and the corporate culture of South African Breweries SAB], the world's most successful brewing company. Mager shows how the industry, dominated by a single brewer, was compelled to comply with legislation that divided customers along racial lines, but also promoted images of multi-racial...

Part travelogue, part inspiring social commentary, and part motivating business model, Brewing Change is about one middle manager's quiet, dogged crusade to change the world of coffee. During his 27 years at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Rick Peyser was a persistent voice advocating for a better quality of life in coffee growing communities. He has teamed up with long-time friend and writer Bill Mares to tell the story of his career and of his travels throughout the coffeelands of Latin America and East Africa. Eye-opening and heart-wrenching, Brewing Change is a story that shows us the...

Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world

It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people.

The merchant kings...