Word: profitability
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...place that was almost off it: Black Canyon, Nev. With the Depression raging in 1931, Bechtel's father helped organize a consortium called Six Companies to tackle the massive engineering job that became known as Hoover Dam. The consortium bid $49 million and made a profit...
Predictably, he became the first Hollywood mogul to embrace television. The show with him as host for over a decade became not just a profit center for his company but also a promotional engine for all its works. These included chuckleheaded live-action comedies, nature documentaries that relentlessly anthropomorphized their subjects, and, of course, Disneyland, which attracted his compulsive attention...
...distributor's markup. They even made their own nails. Levitt's methods kept costs so low that in the first years the houses, which typically sat on a seventh-of-an-acre lot, could sell for just $7,990, a price that still allowed the Levitts a profit of about $1,000. (They sell today for about...
Reuther kept pressing for new and better benefits, and over time, the union won the things that employees today take for granted. Year by year, workers gained, among others, comprehensive health-care programs, tuition-refund programs, life insurance, profit sharing, severance pay, prepaid legal-service plans, bereavement pay, jury-duty pay--plus improvements in vacations, holidays and rest time. The negotiation of decent working, health and safety conditions, coupled with a sound grievance procedure, added immeasurably to the personal sense of dignity and self-respect of the worker...
Once committed to discounting, Walton began a crusade that lasted the rest of his life: to drive costs out of the merchandising system wherever they lay--in the stores, in the manufacturers' profit margins and with the middleman--all in the service of driving prices down, down, down...