Just after the nation’s founding, Alexander Hamilton took on a banking crisis with eerie parallels to today’s,

How capitalism killed the soul of Motorola.

In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human. It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.

So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.

It is not yet time for the obituary (and that time may never come), but the sun is certainly setting on the Golden Age of corporations. It is time to review the memoirs of the corporation as an idea, and contemplate a post-corporate future framed by its gradual withdrawal from the center stage of the world’s economic affairs.

The lessons of history suggest that if we want to reduce poverty in emerging markets, regulation reform and business success are prerequisites, not outcomes.

The economic crisis has prompted many to call for a greater emphasis on studying the history of business and management. Morgen Witzel looks at the lessons that could be learned and why they are so important.

The legendary advertising innovator David Ogilvy created an enduring organization using culture, integrity, and charm.

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over. Michael Lewis, who chronicled its excess in Liar’s Poker, returns to his old haunt to figure out what went wrong.

Last year, on the 100th anniversary of their book's subject, Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr published The Panic of 1907: Lessons Learned from the Market's Perfect Storm (John Wiley & Sons). A year later, as we weather a far greater financial storm, the book's lessons are more relevant than ever. From their analysis of one of the worst banking panics in U.S. history, when dozens of banks and trust companies failed, Bruner and Carr conclude that financial crises typically result from the convergence of certain elements into a "perfect storm." The book is an engrossing read, featuring characters such as Augustus Heinze, the brash entrepreneur; Charles Barney, the tragic trust president; and, above all, J.P. Morgan, Wall Street's indispensable man. Bruner, who is Dean and Distinguished Professor at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Admi

This paper presents a new database on the timing of systemic banking crises and policy responses to resolve them. The database covers the universe of systemic banking crises for the period 1970-2007, with detailed data on crisis containment and resolution policies for 42 crisis episodes, and also includes data on the timing of currency crises and sovereign debt crises. The database extends and builds on the Caprio, Klingebiel, Laeven, and Noguera (2005) banking crisis database, and is the most complete and detailed database on banking crises to date.

Ida Tarbell's reporting into Standard Oil led not only to the break-up of a large oil monopoly. It also precipitated a shift in US attitudes to competition and big business.

At some point in the past few years, that overworked phrase "the post-Cold War world" fell out of fashion, even though it has not really been replaced. It was neither a satisfactory nor a popular way of describing the strange and somewhat anomalous time after the Gorbachev reforms and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union changed the geopolitical furniture. Some preferred to describe the 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall as America's unipolar moment, the period when it was the sole and unquestioned hyperpower, uniquely and unprecedentedly dominant in military, economic, technological and even cultural power.

In the wake of World War II, Georges Doriot helped found the world's first public venture capital firm, American Research and Development. Doriot (1899–1987) was also a professor at Harvard Business School for 40 years. This book excerpt from Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital (HBS Press) describes how ARD first came to "marry" investors and innovators.

An important American thinker in the early part of the twentieth century, James Burnham saw owners and managers in a perpetual struggle for power. In important respects, his ideas still resonate.

In the U.S. in 1906, the prominent private bank Kuhn Loeb - prompted by the scandal of the Armstrong Investigation - withdrew from the boards of all non-bank corporations. This historical announcement changed the course of corporate governance, and ultimately prevented private banks from being activist shareholders in the United States. In the paper "The Value of Private Banks in Corporate Governance: Evidence From the Armstrong Investigation," IESE finance professor Miguel Cantillo looks at Kuhn Loeb's lessons and shows why it made sense to phase out financial capitalism, even though it had undeniable benefits to some shareholders.

A study of history yields important clues about what helps economies enjoy sustained economic growth.

A new book argues that the origins of American financial dominance can be traced to a bold decision to close the New York Stock Exchange for more than four months.

"Any study of the history of Silicon Valley should start with a magazine article by perhaps the greatest literary journalist of our time, Tom Wolfe. In this 1983 Esquire piece, Wolfe offers a highly engaging profile of the charismatic founder of Intel and tells the story of the founding of the computer chip business. It's a terrific tale: A group of young geniuses, many still in their 20s, follow the great Bell Labs engineer and transistor inventor William Shockley to start Shockley Transistor. Soon frustrated with the controlling and self-centered leader, a group of them, led by Noyce, persuade a sleepy East Coast camera company to underwrite them, and dump Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor, which later gave birth to Intel, AMD, LSI Logic, and most of the rest of the chip business. In the style of The Right Stuff, Wolfe captures the spirit and culture of Noyce and his crowd in a way that's never been equaled, and is as good a read today as it was 25 years ago." -- Jonathan Weber, strategy+business

Celebrated by Peter Drucker as a key influence, Walther Rathenau deserves to be remembered as a major figure in pre-War Germany.

n 2004, The American Finance Association Board approved a project to record aspects of the History of Finance. Stephen Buser was appointed Historian with the mission to produce video interviews with important contributors to financial economic knowledge. Links to streaming videos of edited versions of interviews with Harry Markowitz, William Sharpe, Paul Samuelson and Robert Merton are posted below. Transcripts of the full texts of these interviews will be available in due course. Additional interviews with other seminal scholars in the field are planned. [Hat Tip to FinanceProfessor.com]

This article attempts to trace the development and summarise the current state of strategic thinking and "strategy theory" in business.

Editor's Note: dont' let the introductory text and use of word "survey" fool you - this article is a great short history of the development of the various major approaches to strategy analysis.

This article provides an overview on the rise and fall of cartels since the late 19th century when the modern cartel movement properly arrived with the rise of big business based on scale and scope. The general narrative about cartels may not be a story of rise and fall, but rise, boom, collapse, revitalization, gradual decline, and then criminalization. Yet, until the 1980s, the global story of big business must be told in conjunction with cartels rather than without them. They affected technological development, corporate strategy, and organizational change. Viewing cartels only as a "conspiracy against the public" short-circuits many important questions and obscures the great variations in objectives, type, and services provided by cartels.

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An original thinker and a pioneer of the theory of harmonisation, Polish born Karol Adamiecki deserves to regain his place as one of Europe's foremost management gurus.

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He turned a family-run gunpowder factory into a giant corporation, and rebuilt a faltering General Motors. Pierre du Pont proves that even the most moribund company can be rescued with the right management skills.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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For the past five centuries, the political genius of Niccoló Machiavelli has been overshadowed by his reputation as a cold supporter of corrupt ruling. Only recently have his true beliefs come to light.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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The world's most famous management writer may have spent most of his working life in the US, but he owes many of his ideas to his European origins.