Since its founding in 1923, the Walt Disney Company has become an American institution and one of the most successful businesses in history. This book takes an in-depth look at the evolution of this iconic and sometimes controversial corporation. It's hard to imagine a childhood without the ubiquitous presence of Disney. From classics like Cinderella and Bambi to such modern blockbusters as Mulan and Frozen, Disney's animated features have captivated audiences for decades. Visiting CaliforniA's Disneyland or FloridA's Disney World has become the quintessential family vacation. Children dress as their favorite Disney characters for Halloween, while young-at-heart adults collect all manner of Disney memorabilia. But how much do you really know about this integral piece of Americana? Part of Greenwood's Corporations That Changed the World series, this book provides readers with a richly detailed history of a company that has become synonymous with what it means to grow up as an American. It chronicles Walt Disney's early years and the evolution of the Walt Disney Company from animation studio to entertainment powerhouse. It also explores how Disney changed the landscape of animation and movie making forever. An unbiased look at the controversies that have surrounded Disney over the years will help readers better understand these contentious issues and how the company has responded. Provides readers with a better understanding of the impact of Disney on American life, from movie making techniques to how modern-day Florida is governed Explores Walt Disney's early life and career, helping readers understand how they influenced his later success Traces Disney's enduring influence on animation and how the art form has evolved over the decades Examines the many controversies that have emerged over the years, from accusations that Walt Disney was anti-Semitic to concerns about sexist portrayals of women and girls

'Early in my research, a friend with excellent knowledge of the United Auto Workers internal operations told me, "Don't give up. They are hiding something"...' It's 1990, and US labour is being outsourced to Mexico. Rumours of a violent confrontation at the Mexican Ford Assembly plant on January 8 reach the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in the US: nine employees had been shot by a group of drunken thugs and gangsters, in an act of political repression which changed the course of Mexican and US workers' rights forever. Rob McKenzie was working at the Ford Twin Cities Assembly plant in Minnesota when he heard of the attack. He didn't believe the official story, and began a years-long investigation to uncover the truth. His findings took him further than he expected - all the way to the doors of the CIA. Virtually unknown outside of Mexico, the full story of 'El Golpe', or 'The Coup', is a dark tale of political intrigue that still resonates today.

Though Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail, its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, was never content with being just a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become `the everything store', offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To achieve that end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now...

Jeff Bezos stands out for his relentless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way that Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.

The fascinating journey from humble start-up to the web's biggest retailer demonstrates how Bezos's determination to make his dream a reality has also, for better or for worse, changed the way we live our lives today.

This book charts the history of Australian retail developments as well as examining the social and cultural dimensions of shopping in Australia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the shopping centre spread from America around the world. Australia was a very early adopter, and produced a unique shopping centre model. Situating Australian retail developments within a broader international and historical context, Managing the Marketplace demonstrates the ways that local conditions shape global retail forms. Knowledge transfer from Europe and America to Australia was a consistent feature of the Australian retail industry across the twentieth century. By critically examining the strengths and weaknesses of Australian retail firms' strategies across time, and drawing on the voices of both business elites and ordinary people, the book not only unearths the forgotten stories of Australian retail, it offers new insights into the opportunities and challenges that confront the sector today, both nationally and internationally. This book will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of retail, marketing, business history and economic geography, as well as social and cultural history.

Inspired by the fortunes and misfortunes of the Getty family, whose most extraordinary and troubled episode - the kidnap and ransom of grandson Paul Getty - is now a major motion picture, directed by Ridley Scott, from a screenplay written by David Scarpa and starring Michelle Williams, Christopher Plummer and Mark Wahlberg.

"The most interesting book ever written about Google" (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword. Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students-Larry Page and Sergey Brin-has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business. Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google's success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google's relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy-and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google's rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. In the Plex is the "most authoritative...and in many ways the most entertaining" (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers "an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world's most influential internet company function" (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

'The ultimate takedown' New York Times 'The problem of Facebook is Zuckerberg. And the question posed by this splendid book is: what are we going to do about him?' Observer 'A comprehensive account . . . drawn from first-hand testimonies. Thoroughly engaging' The Times 'What marks this book out is how it gets under the corporate bonnet . . . to build a picture of astounding corporate arrogance and irresponsibility' Sunday Times 'An explosive new book' Daily Mail __________________________________________ Award-winning New York Times reporters Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang unveil the tech story of our times in a riveting, behind-the-scenes expose that offers the definitive account of Facebook's fall from grace. Once one of Silicon Valley's greatest success stories, for the past five years, Facebook has been under constant fire, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users' data, allowing the spread of fake news, and the amplification of dangerous, polarising hate speech. Critics framed the narrative as the irreconcilable conflict between the platform's lofty mission to advance society by bringing people together while also profiting off of them. The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Drawing on their unrivalled sources, Frenkel and Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company, its growing political influence as well as its skirmishes with privacy groups and the FTC, to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability - this is how the platform was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Each has stood by as their technology is co-opted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.

Copper King in Central Africa offers a detailed account of the corporate history of the Rhokana/Rokana Corporation and its Nkana mine. Thematically and chronologically organised, it explores the discovery of viable ores on the Northern Rhodesian/Zambian Copperbelt in the late 1920s, which attracted foreign capital from South Africa, Britain and the USA, prompting the development of the Nkana mine and the formation of the Rhokana Corporation in the early 1930s. It follows through the evolution of the copper mining industry up to the re-privatisation of the Zambian mining sector in 1991. The book ties into a single narrative the disparate themes of corporate organisation, labour relations, and profitability of Rhokana, demonstrating how the firm was, for a time, the most important mining entity in the Northern Rhodesian/Zambian mining industry. Rhokana was both an investment firm on the Copperbelt and a mining company through Nkana mine. Thus, the Corporation was central to the development and profitability of the copper industry in Zambia. Its corporate and labour policies influenced the Copperbelt as a whole. Employing the largest labour force in the mining sector, Rhokana spearheaded the labour movement on the Copperbelt. Its Nkana mine was also the largest producer of copper in the Northern Rhodesian mining industry between 1940 and 1953, and contributed hugely to the war economies of Britain and the USA. Throughout its history, Nkana was also a major source of cobalt. After nationalisation of the mining sector in 1970, Rhokana surrendered its investments in the wider copper industry, but remained central to the Copperbelt's smelting and refining operations, owning the biggest metallurgical facilities in the industry.

This book offers a thoroughly researched and accessibly written account of the John Lewis Partnership. It describes what the JLP is, how it works, and what other businesses can learn from it. The US/UK model of the firm, with its emphasis on shareholder value and its openness to the market in the buying and selling of businesses, is prone to a number of problematic consequences for employees, suppliers, and sometimes share-holders. The JLP represents a contrast to this model - one that has implications beyond the small niche of mutually-owned firms. The JLP has lessons for organizations that are unlikely to move towards the Partnership's distinctive shared ownership. This book identifies these lessons. The key questions addressed include: how does the JLP work in practice? What is the link between co-ownership, the JLP employment model, and the performance of the businesses? What is the role of management in the success of John Lewis and Waitrose? Are mutuality, co-ownership and business performance at odds? What is the significance of democracy within the JLP? And probably most significantly: what are the implications, for policy-makers and for economic agents of the JLP? This book is based on detailed knowledge of the JLP and its constituent business gathered by the authors over a fifteen year period. Their conclusion: that the JLP is more complex, even more impressive, and more interesting than its admirers realise.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR A THE ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Brilliantly conceived and enlightening at every turn' Lawrence Wright We have long been suspicious of corporations recklessly pursuing profit and amassing wealth and power. But the story of the corporation didn't have to be like this. For most of history, they were not amoral entities, but public institutions designed to promote the societies that granted them charter. Magnuson reveals how the corporation has evolved since its beginnings in the ancient world. What happens in this next chapter of the global economy depends on whether we can return to their public-minded spirit, or whether we have sunk irrevocably into the swamp of high profit at all costs. Epic and compelling in scope, For Profit illuminates the roles corporations played, for good and evil, in the making of the modern world.

Emerging from what was a somewhat staid sub-discipline, there is currently a battle for the soul of Management and Organizational History (MOH), at the centre of which is a widespread concern that much recent work has been more about how one should or might do history rather than actually doing historical work. If ever there was a time for a new volume on MOH, this is certainly it. This Handbook affords space to both these perspectives, as well as uncovering unorthodox and unconventional topics and approaches to more familiar territory with an emphasis on new and revisionist viewpoints. MOH researchers, doctoral and other students and instructors working in this sub-discipline will discover cutting-edge work with novel treatments of familiar terrain in the Handbook. Contributors include: A. Barros, F. Bastien, A. Booth, T. Bridgman, K. Bruce, D. Coraiola, N. Cornelius, S. Cummings, G. Durepos, W.M. Foster, A.G. Gillett, M. Maclean, R. Marens, P.G. McLaren, A.J. Mills, J.H. Mills, J. Muldoon, E.S. O Connor, E. Pezet, R. Pistol, C. Quinn-Trank, H.L. Schachter, G. Shaw, K.D. Tennent, S. Wanderley, K.S. Williams, M. Witzel, T. Yu, Y. Zoller

A remarkable fifteen Nordic family businesses are among the 500 biggest companies in the world and the Nordic countries have more dynasties than most others per capita and in GDP terms. The willingness, often reluctant, of both the political system and labour movement to accept asset accumulation has helped these Nordic businesses survive. The top 1% of Swedes own close to 25% of the country's wealth, as opposed to 16.5% of Spaniards, where dynasties are also abundant. The pattern has held a firm grip on the Nordic countries since the Industrial Revolution and emergence of free enterprise. The trend is particularly pronounced in comparison with the Anglo-Saxon countries - somewhat less so relative to places like Italy, Japan, Germany and South-Asian countries. This book describes the factors and dynamics behind the ability of Nordic businesses to grow and thrive from one generation to the next in the process of becoming dynasties. Far from being commercial enterprises, they are a venue for power, philanthropy, passion, conflict, freedom and captivity. Like many other dynasties, the Nordic ones are a witch's brew of Machiavelli's Prince, Marx's belief in the potential of the meritocracy and Smith's baker who works to sustain his family. Topped by a spoonful of Weber's Protestant Ethic. This book will be key readings for students and scholars of entrepreneurship, corporate governance, business history, Scandinavian history, family business and enterprises and the related disciplines.

In the last two decades, innovation, data analysis and technology have driven a tectonic shift in the sports business. Game of Edges is the story of how sports franchises evolved, on and off the field, from raggedly run small businesses into some of the most systematically productive companies around. In today’s game, everyone from the owners to the marketing staff are using information—data—to give their team an edge. For analysts, an edge is their currency. Figuring out that bunting hurts your offence? That’s an edge. So is discovering metrics that can predict the career arc of your free agent shooting guard. Or combing through a decade of ticket-buying data to target persuadable fans. These small, incremental steps move a sports franchise from merely ordinary to the leading edge. Franchises today are more than just sports; they integrate a whole suite of other businesses—television and digital content, gambling and real estate, fashion and clothing, entertainment, catering and concessions and much more. But an optimised franchise has no room for error. Teams must do what the numbers say, reducing the element of chance, limiting those random moments of athletic heroism that make sports thrilling to watch. Optimisation also means the franchise’s main goal isn’t championships anymore; it’s keeping you, the viewer, engaged with the product. Drawing on extensive interviews with franchise owners, managers, executives and players, Bruce Schoenfeld introduces dynamic leaders who are radically reimagining the operations of these decades-old teams—and producing mind-boggling valuations. He joins the architects of the Golden State Warriors dynasty for an exclusive reception before tip-off. He stands among the faithful at Anfield, watching Liverpool’s analytics guru size up a prized midfielder. And he watches the president of the Chicago Cubs break ground on a new DraftKings gambling parlour at Wrigley Field, not ten miles from the site of the original Black Sox betting scandal. Essential reading for anyone interested in sports, business or technology Game of Edges explores a world where winning the game is only the beginning.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invented the model of the Silicon Valley start-up and set in motion a process of corporate becoming that made it possible for HP to transform itself six times over the 77 years since its founding in the face of sweeping technological changes that felled most of its competitors over the years. Today, HP is in the throes of a seventh transformation to secure its continued survival by splitting in two independent companies: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Based on extensive primary research conducted over more than 15 years, this book documents the differential contribution of HP's successive CEOs in sustaining the company's integral process of becoming. It uses a comprehensive strategic leadership framework to examine and explain the role of the CEO: (1) defining and executing the key tasks of strategic leadership, and (2) developing four key elements of the company's strategic leadership capability. The study of the strategic leadership of HP's successive CEOs revealed the paradox of corporate becoming, the existential situation facing successive CEOs (that justifies the book's empathic approach), and the importance of the CEO's ability to harness the company's past while also driving its future. Building on these novel insights, the book shows how the frameworks used to conceptualize the tasks of strategic leadership and the development of strategic leadership capability can serve as steps toward a dynamic theory of strategic leadership that animates an evolutionary framework of corporate becoming. This framework will be helpful for further theory development about strategic leadership and also offers practical tools for founders of new companies and CEOs and boards of directors of existing companies who intend to create, run or oversee companies built for continued relevance, longevity and greatness.

* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 * "A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience" (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)-an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class. This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down-but it's not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up. Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation's oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America's biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it's so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class. "Moving and magnificently well-researched...Janesville joins a growing family of books about the evisceration of the working class in the United States. What sets it apart is the sophistication of its storytelling and analysis" (Jennifer Senior, The New York Times). "Anyone tempted to generalize about the American working class ought to meet the people in Janesville. The reporting behind this book is extraordinary and the story-a stark, heartbreaking reminder that political ideologies have real consequences-is told with rare sympathy and insight" (Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Soul of a New Machine).

The service sector occupies a dominant position in the Japanese economy, yet few studies have looked at the way the industry developed. This book, first published in 1992, focuses on the growth and development of a major world security and communications corporation, SECOM. The success of the company has been rooted in the management strategies of Makoto Iida, who has shaped the company from a small localized business to an international industry at the forefront of innovation. The book first looks at the background of Makoto Iida, offering an insight into the nature of an entrepreneur and the issues this raises within the context of Japanese management styles. It then follows the company development stage by stage, assessing the importance of individual creativity in adapting and implementing traditional management techniques. It shows how strategies for human resources, service quality, new technology, globalization and corporate restructuring evolve within the context of a growing organization, and includes an analysis of the innovative marketing techniques and product development processes needed to sell security services to one of the world's safest countries.

In September, 2015 President Barack Obama informed The Forward, in a historic interview, of his shock at learning of the closing of his favorite NYC Bagel eatery, H&H Bagels, in January of 2012. While the President was shocked by the closing of the world's most famous, and recognizable, bagel brand, what was truly shocking were the underlying facts and circumstances surrounding the closing. While most people knew H&H as the iconic, Upper West Side Bagel Shop where the lines rounded the block, where celebrities loved to frequent, and where one of the most popular Seinfeld television episodes was created, few people knew about the drama and decadence that existed behind the scenes of this NYC landmark. The Rise and Fall of H&H Bagels takes you on a journey that starts with the fulfillment of the American Dream and ends in contested, five year Bankruptcy. This is the outrageous, true, story of a man who defied the odds and became an American legend, and then defied logic and the law by dismantling his beloved Empire. The story of H&H Bagels is not only the story of the rise and fall of a thriving American business, it is a story of intrigue, economics, corruption, and resiliency, as told, with humor, from the perspective of the one man who lived through it all-its National Business Manager and right hand to the man at the top of the H&H Empire, Helmer Toro.

Originally published in 1989 this study examines some new facets in the development of the iron industry in the USA between 1839 and 1921 through the study of an individaul form, namely the Thoms Iron Company, one of the leading merchant furnace companies. It charts the end of the anthracite iron age and the changes which brought about the advent of open-hearth steel and integrated steel works. The book discusses the problems the managers of the firm faced with the appearance of industrial innovations which tended to undermine their firm's very existence and provided a new set of optimal conditions necessary for the survival of the firm. It provides a clear understanding of the destructive forces of industrial innovation and the place of creative entrepreneurship in the survival of the firm.

This monograph narrates the decade-long struggle of workers, unions, and management in transforming one of the largest ailing family-owned jute businesses in India, into a sustainable worker-owned and governed cooperative. It focuses on the variation in the three groups' involvement in the transformation. It begins with the employees' struggles in taking over the business, deserted by its owners, to save their jobs. The study analyzes the tensions between the three groups in creating and maintaining democratic governance that would sustain the initial leap in employee participation in the transformation. The analysis reveals contradictions at multiple levels, starting with the unexpected outcome of information sharing with workers: increased information sharing by management resulting in decreased employee involvement. The study explains this paradox by showing that for workers, information has a symbolic nature and information sharing is a signal of their trustworthiness in the assessment of those who are privy to the information. This means involvement is contingent upon the feeling that the information that workers consider crucial is being shared with them. However, what workers consider crucial, and thus a symbol of trust, changes over time as the nature and breadth of their involvement evolves. Thus, worker expectation as well as management and union expectation of information sharing evolves. However, the evolution has the potential to create a mismatch between the two expectations that might lead to contradictions in employee involvement. While for management, information sharing is an instrument in eliciting involvement, and thus management's expectation of information sharing goes through an instrumental loop, for employees, information sharing is a matter of trust, and thus their expectation of information sharing goes through an institutional trust-based loop. To sustain high employee involvement, the organization should ideally institutionalize the trust-based loop and avoid engaging with the instrumental loop. The author proposes a collaborative approach to organizational transformation that will help deal with the contradictions more effectively, sustaining employee involvement in the transformation. The author also discusses the implications of these propositions for academic scholarship and organizational practices and situates them in the ongoing attempts to reform Industrial Disputes Act in India.