Word: america
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...land of opportunity. But the world's richest man made the classic hubristic mistake: building what one newspaper called the "new Xanadu" and bragging about it. Gates' high-tech haven would top even Hearst's epically garish San Simeon as the most grandiose castle in America. But as Hearst once quipped of his estate--which housed, among other things, a large zoo--"Pleasure is what you can afford to pay for it." And Gates is richer than Hearst ever dreamed of being, as his "tastes" reveal: an indoor pool; a 1 1/2-story trampoline room; a salmon stream; a movie theater...
...different from the reigning generation of bosses. They were classic outsiders--non-Eastern, non-American, non-Wasp and non-Ivy. Rebels such as James Ling, founder of Ling-Temco-Vought, Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries (satirized as Engulf & Devour) and Harold Geneen of International Telephone and Telegraph stormed America's corporate towers even as students and protesters were laying siege to the nation's ivory towers...
When the Dow peaked at 985 in 1968, the conglomerate movement comprised dozens of America's largest companies, including Textron, Litton, Teledyne, Raytheon, Walter Kidde & Co. and US Industries. The movement would sputter to a halt in the '70s, its oxygen cut off by rising interest rates and a falling market. A surprisingly anticonglomerate Nixon Administration crimped the most aggressive expansions in the interest of protecting what Ling calls "the smokestack-industry crowd" of old-line executives. Ling was forced out of LTV in 1970 as part of an antitrust settlement. Bluhdorn died on a company jet in 1983. Geneen...
Countries other than America have also grown superb business leaders. One legend in Japan is Konosuke Matsushita, whose company includes Panasonic and other well-known brands. Witnessing his father's bankruptcy as a small child prompted Matsushita to develop new values of how an enterprise ought to be run. Like Sam Walton, he paid attention to the consumer and sought ways to increase demand and reduce prices. He forced the competition to embrace this concept, making the market grow while creating more profit. He also showed that human well-being and making money are not inconsistent. In downturns he found...
...bleak mid-'30s, the Journal stirred to life under the prodding of a genius in shirtsleeves from the fields of Indiana, Barney Kilgore. He preached three dictums: Keep it simple, broaden the subject matter beyond finance to everything affecting earning a living, and make the Journal America's first national daily newspaper. "Don't write banking stories for bankers," he ordered. "Write for the banks' customers. There are a hell of a lot more depositors than bankers." Helped by the public's warm interest in business and industry during World War II and then by the postwar boom, Kilgore...