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Overview
Every day our economy grows more and more unlike the one we used to know. Twenty years ago, best-selling economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted that America's giant corporations would dominate world markets through integration and long-term planning. But the Fortune 500 took a beating and became the prime targets for the headlines of the 1980s: bailout, divestiture, takeover, and collapse. John Case, author of Understanding Inflation, looks beyond the headlines and the economic theories and shows there is an important and encouraging transformation taking place. The Fortune 500 employed 3.5 million fewer workers in 1990 than in 1980, but new companies--smaller, more maneuverable, and definitely entrepreneurial--have emerged and are growing. The center of gravity in the American economy is shifting. In the least and most likely places, John Case discovers the real people and real businesses that are setting a bold course for our economic future: innovators exploring the niches the bigger companies couldn't risk going into, and suppliers filling the gaps the bigger companies had given up on. The signs of entrepreneurial regrowth are widespread: from Kennedy Die Castings, a small family-run business outside Worcester, Massachusetts, where new technologies have broadened the company's capabilities, to Thrislington Cubicles, a West Coast bathroom partition manufacturer founded by a former Hollywood actor, where determination and cleverness turned a shoestring operation into a budding nationwide supplier. If Silicon Valley was once a landmark of American technological leadership, the 1980s certainly changed that. The microchip giants not only stumbled but fell. The Japanese were gaining the upper hand. Yet Case digs deeper and finds the chip industry itself still flourishing--just differently. A crop of new companies, agile and clever, are focusing on small niches in the rapidly changing high-tech field, and are learning new ways to thrive by developing intimateEditorials
Library Journal
As presidential candidates stump the nation with plans for ``Putting Americans Back To Work,'' Case reports on some of the entrepreneurs who have barged ahead and done just that. Case, an editor of Inc. magazine, has written a lively examination of the surge of new business creation since 1970. In counterpoint to J.K. Galbraith's 1950s' theory of the New Industrial State that saw the U.S. economy as dominated by large corporations, Case sees the decline of the Fortune 500 as the fount of innovation and employment growth for the United States. In his visits to going concerns of both the metal-bending and postindustrial persuasions, Case finds that one owner of a die-casting outfit in Worcester, Massachusetts, has transformed his firm into a sophisticated job shop. High-tech firms and attendant fern bars have sprouted in Akron, Ohio, where giant tiremakers formerly plied their trade. Case cruises a Silicon Valley where the progeny of big computer firms act as suppliers to and collaborators with their forebears. He ends with a call for public/private cooperation rather than laissez-faire to foster the creation of new businesses. Highly recommended for all business collections.-- Michael Stevenson, Harvard Business Sch. Lib.Book Details
Published
February 15, 1992
Publisher
New York : Simon & Schuster, c1992.
Pages
256
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780671683085