The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 12)

Procter & Gamble pioneered disability and retirement pensions (in 1915), the eight-hour day (in 1918) and, most important of all, guaranteed work for at least forty-eight weeks a year (in the 1920s). During the Depression, the company kept layoffs to the minimum and the company’s boss, Red Deupee, cut his own salary in half and stopped his annu

an organization that has been uniquely effective in rendering human effort productive.

In 1867, E. L. Godkin produced an explanation of why America lacked the intense class consciousness of Europe that probably remains true to this day: “The social line between the laborer and the capitalist here is very faintly drawn. Most successful employers of labor have begun by being laborers themselves; most laborers … hope to become employers

Right from the beginning, it was a place where ties were optional, and first names compulsory.

The other way in which Silicon Valley changed the company was by pioneering an alternative form of corporate life.

Meritocracy was crucial: youth was promoted on ability alone, and the Valley was unusually open to immigrants. In 2001, one resident in three was foreign-born.

The first businesses to coordinate their activities across borders on a large scale were banks. In the Middle Ages, Italian bankers representing the papacy collected part of the English wool crop in Church taxes, transferred it overseas, and took their cut from the transaction. In the sixteenth century, German bankers, such as the Fuggers and the H

The experiment of making managers behave more like owners had been perverted, via excessive use of stock options, into a get-rich-quick scheme for bosses.

In the 1840s, politicians finally made real headway with Britain’s confused company laws. Early in the decade, legal obfuscation helped produce an outbreak of fraudulent scams, involving not just railways but also the assurance companies that Dickens pilloried in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843).