## Metadata * Author: [[John Micklethwait]] * ASIN: B004SOVAL2 * ISBN: 0679642498 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SOVAL2 ## Highlights “This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer,” warned President Rutherford B. Hayes: “It is a government of corporations, by corporations and for corporations.” — location: [131](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=131) ^ref-60254 --- The most important organization in the world is the company: the basis of the prosperity of the West and the best hope for the future of the rest of the world. Indeed, for most of us, the company’s only real rival for our time and energy is the one that is taken for granted—the family. — location: [140](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=140) ^ref-5201 --- East India Company, wound up ruling India with a private army of 260,000 native troops (twice the size of the British army). — location: [166](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=166) ^ref-43467 --- United States had 5½ million corporations in 2001, — location: [228](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=228) ^ref-52429 --- young Napoleon who yearns for the scent of global conquest would be better off joining a company than running for political office or joining the army. — location: [251](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=251) ^ref-1331 --- he argued that the main reason why a company exists (as opposed to individual buyers and sellers making ad hoc deals at every stage of production) is because it minimizes the transaction costs of coordinating a particular economic activity. Bring all the people in-house, and you reduce the costs of “negotiating and concluding a separate contract for each exchange transaction.” — location: [257](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=257) ^ref-53684 --- The word compagnia is a compound of two Latin words (cum and panis) meaning “breaking bread together.” — location: [357](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=357) ^ref-28797 --- Company of Distant Parts”). — location: [459](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=459) ^ref-27054 --- Dutch investors were the first to trade their shares at a regular stock exchange, founded in 1611, just around the corner from the VOC’s office. — location: [503](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=503) ^ref-59829 --- The Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures of New Jersey, chartered in 1791, was the first to be formed after the ratification of the American Constitution. — location: [830](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=830) ^ref-64424 --- even the most powerful politicians couldn’t rescue a bad idea: the Potomac Company, created in 1785 to make the Potomac River navigable, boasted George Washington as its president and Thomas Jefferson as a director. It still failed.) — location: [840](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=840) ^ref-42888 --- “a race to the bottom,” with local politicians offering greater freedom to companies to keep their business (just as they would much later dangle tax incentives in front of car companies to build factories in their states). — location: [863](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=863) ^ref-46238 --- And wouldn’t it attract the lowest sort of people into business? — location: [927](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=927) ^ref-56266 --- The Advantage of Poverty, — location: [1047](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=1047) ^ref-41839 --- Railroads accounted for 60 percent of publicly issued stock in America in 1898, — location: [1079](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=1079) ^ref-19489 --- Peter Drucker’s The Future of Industrial Man (1942), which argued that companies had a social dimension as well as an economic purpose. Sloan invited the Viennese exile, still at the time regarded as something of a misfit who didn’t know whether he was a political theorist or an economist, to analyze GM. The result was The Concept of the Corporation, published in 1946. — location: [1777](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=1777) ^ref-13413 --- In “the assembly-line mentality,” warned Drucker, workers were valued purely in terms of how closely they resembled machines.15 In fact, the most valuable thing about workers was not their hands, but their brains. — location: [1785](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=1785) ^ref-49599 --- “creative destruction.” An unusual amount of the Valley’s growth came from gazelle companies—firms whose sales had grown by at least 20 percent in each of the previous four years. It also tolerated failure and even treachery to an unusual degree. — location: [2197](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=2197) ^ref-22921 --- By 2000, McKinsey had four thousand consultants, ten times the number in 1975. — location: [2221](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=2221) ^ref-57358 --- “We are in the presence of a new organization of society,” he wrote. “Our life has broken away from the past.” — location: [2655](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B004SOVAL2&location=2655) ^ref-23595 ---