"From Richard Tedlow's insightful group portrait of seven American entrepreneurs...a rough formula for titanhood can be deduced." (Atlantic Monthly )^"Tedlow's 'passionate and fluid writing' makes Giants of Enterprise a pleasure to read." (Business Week )^"Tedlow's mastery as a historian.takes us to the heart of what is unique about the American economy." (Michael E. PorterBishop William Lawrence University ProfessorHarvard Business School )^One of the top ten business books of 2001 (Business Week )

This book offers a fascinating account of the forerunner of the modern multinational: the British East India Company (1600-1874). Nick Robins shows how the East India Company pioneered the model of the corporation that we see today. Its innovations included the shareholder model of ownership, and the administrative framework of the modern firm. Global in reach, it achieved market dominance in Asia, trailblazing the British Empire in the East. In the process, the company shocked its age with the scale of its executive malpractice, stock market excess and human rights abuse. Offering a popular history of one of the world's most famous companies, Nick Robins shows what it teaches us about corporations today. Ultimately, the East India Company succumbed to popular protest and outright rebellion, first in the Boston Tea Party and then in the Indian Mutiny. For Robins, the Company's legacy shows how essential it is to break-up today's over-mighty corporations, introduce new legal duties on corporate executives and establish effective mechanisms to hold companies to account wherever they operate.

In the 1760s a group of amateur experimenters met and made friends in the English Midlands. Most came from humble families, all lived far from the center of things, but they were young and their optimism was boundless: together they would change the world. Among them were the ambitious toymaker Matthew Boulton and his partner James Watt, of steam-engine fame; the potter Josiah Wedgwood; the larger-than-life Erasmus Darwin, physician, poet, inventor, and theorist of evolution (a forerunner of his grandson Charles). Later came Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen and fighting radical.
With a small band of allies they formed the Lunar Society of Birmingham (so called because it met at each full moon) and kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Blending science, art, and commerce, the Lunar Men built canals; launched balloons; named plants, gases, and minerals; changed the face of England and the china in its drawing rooms; and plotted to revolutionize its soul.
Uglow's vivid, exhilarating account uncovers the friendships, political passions, love affairs, and love of knowledge (and power) that drove these extraordinary men. It echoes to the thud of pistons and the wheeze and snort of engines and brings to life the tradesmen, artisans, and tycoons who shaped and fired the modern age.

Matthew Boulton was an eighteenth-century designer, inventor, and industrialist, a consummate businessman, and co-founder of the influential Lunar Society. Now, on the bicentenary of his death, this book surveys his life and extraordinarily varied achievements. The book explains how Boulton, a Birmingham 'toy'-maker producing buttons, buckles and silverware, went into business with James Watt and exported Boulton & Watt steam engines all over the world.Meanwhile his magnificent ormolu ornaments decorated aristocratic drawing rooms, and his determination to discourage counterfeiters led to a contract to manufacture British coinage and coins of other countries at his mint. Boulton was leader of the campaign to establish the Birmingham Assay Office (still the busiest in the country), and also at the heart of the Lunar Society, a group of prominent industrialists, natural philosophers, and intellectuals interested in scientific and social change. A friend of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood and many others, Boulton was a fascinating man, Britain's leading Enlightenment entrepreneur.

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Book Description
Joe Wilson was that rare business leader who, like Henry Ford before him or Bill Gates since, literally changed the world in which he lived. Wilson's company, Xerox Corporation, introduced the first one-piece, plain paper photocopier in 1959, dramatically altering the way in which business was done and becoming so culturally ingrained that the term for photocopying is "Xeroxing."
Yet Wilson was much more than just one of the twentieth century's most talented and accomplished business executives. Decades before a sense of social responsibility was considered vital to the success of a corporation, Joe Wilson was a driving force behind gender and racial equality, labor-management harmony, and the need for big business to understand and address the failures of our overall society.
Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox is the first book to tell the story of this deeply principled and talented leader. Written by Charles Ellis, the globally renowned business strategist and author of the investment classic Winning the Loser's Game, this inspirational and vastly entertaining book details:
* The determination and entrepreneurial drive of Joe Wilson as he transformed the brilliant invention of Chester Carlson from near-certain oblivion to ubiquitous xerography
* The early growth years of Xerox—then called Haloid—and the programs Joe Wilson put in place to hire the most promising employees and seamlessly "retire" those who didn't share his vision and work ethic
* The many years of uncertainty and near-defeat through which Wilson led the team he was recruiting to create the company and the great products that drove Xerox's profits consistently upward at a faster rate for a longer number of years than any other company
* The legendary 914 copier, and how Wilson and other company executives bet their futures and fortunes on the unproven product that would soon make Xerox a household name
Wilson's hands-on work with minority leaders to provide education and opportunity to young African- Americans during the racially explosive 1960s
The transition years, and how Joe Wilson carefully relinquished control of Xerox while remaining intimately involved in both its day-to-day and long-term growth
In a business world in which intense competition is the norm, with old-fashioned integrity often the first casualty, Joe Wilson's life and legacy have established a gold standard of leadership ethics and excellence. Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox tells Wilson's story, from struggling college graduate to esteemed business leader, and provides a success template that will be valuable for business leaders of every type, in every industry.
From Publishers Weekly
Transforming family-owned Haloid Corp., which struggled in the shadow of hometown behemoth Eastman Kodak, into the globally recognized Xerox is an amazing accomplishment. But as Ellis's biography of Joe Wilson attests, Wilson's achievements ranged more widely and went much deeper than many gave him credit for. Ellis, author of 11 books and former financial industry consultant offers a heartfelt, if not artful, telling of the CEO's life story. He contends that Wilson embodied all of the qualities that leadership management books celebrate: integrity, foresight and the ability to inspire people to perform. He credits these attributes to helping Wilson so spectacularly realize his vision for his company; its employees; his alma mater, the University of Rochester; and the city and people of Rochester, N.Y. Ellis's telling starts off slow and is initially quite repetitive. But once Xerox is finally born, after years of setbacks, the story picks up. The real purpose for the detailed buildup appears toward the end, when credit for the last 20-odd years of corporate strife and ultimate success is given to the wrong person, Wilson's best friend and the company's corporate counsel. At that point, it becomes clear why Ellis was compelled to write this book so long after the company's rise and its true founder's demise. (Sept.)
From Booklist
In Copies in Seconds (2005) David Owen told the story of Chester Carlson, the lone inventor of the Xerox machine. Here, Ellis creates a portrait of Joe Wilson (1909-71), the CEO of Xerox, who took the invention to fruition. An even-tempered man with impeccable values and enormous patience, Wilson took on an incredible risk backing a completely untested technology, which paid off only after decades of tireless work. When office workers embraced the technology, copying everything in sight, the Xerox copy machine became one of the most lucrative inventions of the twentieth century. But Wilson wasn't just about making money; he was one of the first business leaders to become personally involved in civil rights, hiring African American workers when most other companies effectively locked them out of jobs. Wilson remained humble even as others around him took credit for Xerox's success, and he passed on quietly just as the company began to lose its way. Ellis' account is a shining example of how honest and compassionate leadership can create profits and benefit the community at the same time.
David Siegfried
Book Dimension
length: (cm)23.4 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)16.1

The extraordinary story of the development of America's industrial muscle and the rise of big business during World War II For admirers of books by Erik Larson and Stephen Ambrose, here's a great, meaty, and untold story of World War II - how American big business set out to build the weapons and create the industrial muscle to arm the Allies and defeat the Axis, from the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Ghandi & Churchill. Bestselling author Arthur Herman reveals how two extraordinary American businessmen - the Danish immigrant William Knudsen and shipbuilding industrialist Henry Kaiser - helped corral, cajole, manipulate, and inspire big business around the country to help mobilize the war effort and what later critics would call the American "military-industrial complex," without which the history of America, as well as of the Second World War, would be very different. Together these men changed the face not only of American business and industry but of American society. At the same time their efforts transformed the culture of America's armed services, giving the army, navy, and air force both the tools and the new strategies for securing a postwar global order.

David A. Hounshell's widely acclaimed history explores the American "genius for mass production" and traces its origins in the nineteenth-century "American system" of manufacture. Previous writers on the American system have argued that the technical problems of mass production had been solved by armsmakers before the Civil War. Drawing upon the extensive business and manufacturing records of leading American firms, Hounshell demonstrates that the diffusion of arms production technology was neither as fast nor as smooth as had been assumed. Exploring the manufacture of sewing machines and furniture, bicycles and reapers, he shows that both the expresssion "mass production" and the technology that lay behind it were developments of the twentieth century, attributable in large part to the Ford Motor Company

This is a full-length history of the Western Electric Company, which was the manufacturing arm of the Bell System. As manufacturer in the communications revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western Electric made products that accelerated society's pace, such as telegraphs, telephones, an early computing machine, radios, radar and transistors. Western's history offers numerous examples of the difference between innovation and implementation. The aftermath of Western's 1882 acquisition by Bell Telephone, for instance, reveals vertical integration as a lengthy process rather than a single event. Ironically, although Western transformed business worldwide with innovations in areas such as quality control and industrial psychology, the company was slow to implement these innovations itself. Western's dual role as captive supplier for a regulated monopoly and as government contractor led to its most rapid change, in the area of civil rights.

《世界现代设计史》共分九章，对世界现代设计史的源流、发展及现状进行通论式的阐述，描述世界现代设计史上的各个时期重要流派、重要人物、重要作品，展现世界现代设计史的基本轮廓、构建基本框架。

"Stafford Beer is undoubtedly among the world's most provocative, creative, and profound thinkers on the subject of management, and he records his thinking with a flair that is unmatched. His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA. "If . anyone can make it [Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer . everyone in management . should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and . even elegant diagrams." The Economist This is the second edition of a book which has already become a management 'standard' both in universities and on the bookshelves of managers and their advisers. Brain of the Firm develops an account of the firm based upon insights derived from the study of the human nervous system, and is a basic text from the author's theory of viable systems. Despite the neurophysiology, the book is written for managers to understand. The companion volume to this book is The Heart of Enterprise, which is intended to support and complement this text. "Stafford Beer's works represent required reading for everyone who believes that a capacity for rigorous thinking is an essential attribute of today's successful managers and administrators. Brain of the Firm shows a first-rate intellect at work and provides concepts, models and inspiration for both practitioners and teachers." Sir Douglas Hague, CBE

This is a biography of a major American inventor, who obtained more than 350 patents during his lifetime. Elmer Sperry contributed greatly to the technological changes occurring between 1880 and 1930. He was best known for the Sperry gyrocompass and automatic pilot, and his inventions included arc-light systems, mining machinery, electric automobiles and streetcars, and electrochemical processes. Characteristic of his various inventions were feedback controls which have made automation a fact of life. The book won the Dexter Prize of the Society for the History of Technology.

"In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel.