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

Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a battle between two different conceptions of the company: the stakeholder ideal that holds that companies are responsible to a wide range of social groups and the shareholder ideal that holds that they are primarily responsible to their shareholders.

Perhaps as early as 1340, they introduced double-entry bookkeeping, largely to keep their foreign offices honest. A Genoese merchant would record money sent to his agent in Bruges as “paid” in his accounts, while the latter put down the amount as “received.” And rather than sending coins, the bigger merchants began to trust each other with letters

Companies in Germany and Japan were there to serve “society,” while their Anglo-Saxon competitors chased profits.

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

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

Early joint-stock companies were instruments of rampant financial speculation as well as economic imperialism.

Consensus management often became an excuse for paralysis; lifetime employment not only proved impossible to maintain but also was a formidable barrier to promoting young talent. Clever young Japanese bankers and businesspeople migrated to Western firms that were prepared to give them more responsibility, not to mention money.

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

Companies have proved enormously powerful not just because they improve productivity, but also because they possess most of the legal rights of a human being, without the attendant disadvantages of biology: they are not condemned to die of old age and they can create progeny pretty much at will.