Word: developed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After the Model T's enormous success, the two visionaries from rural Michigan became friends and business partners. Ford asked Edison to develop an electric storage battery for the car and funded the effort with $1.5 million. Ironically, despite all his other great inventions, Edison never perfected the storage battery. Yet Ford immortalized his mentor's inventive genius by building the Edison Institute in Dearborn...
...with America recovering from its greatest depression and war rumbling in the distance, Sarnoff gave the world a look into a new life. Not only was he instrumental in creating both radio and television as we know them, he was also nearly clairvoyant in seeing how each medium would develop. He regarded black-and-white TV as only a transitional phase to color and even predicted the invention of the VCR. His stubborn pursuit of technology turned his employer, Radio Corp. of America, into a powerhouse in less than a decade...
With IBM clearly on top in the early '60s, Watson took one of the biggest gambles in corporate history. He proposed spending more than $5 billion--about three times IBM's revenues at the time--to develop a new line of computers that would make the company's existing machines obsolete. The goal was to replace specialized units with a family of compatible computers that could fill every data-processing need. Customers could start with small computers and move up as their demands increased, taking their old software along with them. This flexibility inspired the name System/360, after...
...main reason living standards have improved so much in the 20th century is that businesses have become so much more productive. And it is managers who have helped drive that evolution. The great ones do more than just run things efficiently; they develop and put into practice ideas that transcend their company, their industry, even their national borders. Their ideas survive to become vocabulary in the halls of management and often in society at large...
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...