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In 1973, Westinghouse and its longtime rival,
General Electric, ranked among the strongest companies in
the American economy. By the late 1990s, Westinghouse had
disappeared from the economic landscape, whereas GE posted
sales of $100 billion and employed nearly 300,000 people.
Both companies faced common external challenges: energy
crises, recessions, shareholder activism, the globalization
of competition, the revolution in information technology,
and the graying of the industrial economy. Their drastically
different fates, however, were the results of the choices
made in the face of these changes.
Based on a statistical profile of the one
hundred largest industrial companies -- the Fortune 100
-- and complemented by detailed historical case studies
of individual corporations, Changing Fortunes examines
the struggles of the giant industrial enterprises that once
dominated the economy to adapt to a new reality.
One of the first books to address the shifting
roles of big industrials in the postindustrial economy,
Changing Fortunes vividly portrays the waning of
America's leading industrial corporations and their internal
transformations. Here, a leading Harvard Business School
scholar and two business historians profile the Fortune
100 industrial corporations during the past quarter century
-- since the first oil crisis in 1973-1974 -- and trace
their migration from center stage as they struggled to adjust
to internal and external changes. Organized thematically,
chapters in this groundbreaking study investigate:
- The forces reshaping the economy since
the mid-1970s, as well as the magnitude of changes big
companies had to make to survive and prosper
- The broad economic, technological, and
social forces that affected all big companies and common
responses by the Fortune 100 industrial corporations
- The changes large industrial corporations
made in strategy, structures, systems, and governance
- The implications of the receding significance
of large industrial corporations for owners and investors,
employees, customers, and communities
- Entry and exit from the Fortune 100 population
and the changing basis of the United States economy
- Strategies and actions that seem most
likely to ensure the survival of individual industrial
companies in an environment of contraction and a future
of constrained options
Changing Fortunes is essential reading
not only for all leaders of industrial companies who need
perspective on their immediate circumstances but also for
leaders in nascent industries and service businesses who
can expect, eventually, to encounter tough choices when
confronted with the necessity to change.
Nitin Nohria is Richard P. Chapman Professor
of Business Administration and Chair of the Organizational
Behavior Department at Harvard Business School. He is the
author of The Differentiated Network, winner of the
Academy of Management's Best Book Award.
Davis Dyer is a founding director of
The Winthrop Group, Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based
firm specializing in business and technology history, and
a faculty member at Monitor University, part of the Monitor
Group. His most recent book is (with Daniel Gross) The
Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of a Global Corporation
(2001).
Frederick Dalzell is a senior consultant
with The Winthrop Group. He holds a PhD in American Civilization
from Harvard University and is coauthor of a forthcoming
study of Procter & Gamble.
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