Just as one can destroy one's health, marriage, career, etc., CEOs and bankers can engage in behaviors and decisions that destroy the corporation they lead. For almost 25 years corporate America has resembled the Wild West. CEOs and their executives, Wall Street bankers, and others have been quietly engaged in terminating millions of jobs, stealing pensions, breaking up companies, committing fraud, outsourcing, and engaging in incomprehensible risk taking, all for the purpose of personal gain. It was blatant greed. And like most feeding frenzies it got out of control. Now, thanks to the greed demonstrated by executives at AIG, Merrill Lynch, Lehman and hundreds of other companies, Main Street America is finally outraged. It's as if Congress, journalists, pundits and even scholars have discovered that executives and bankers were cheating the system, and even in the midst of the present furor over pay, performance and bailouts, they cannot stop the greed, causing further outrage. We suggest that CEO greed has not only destroyed the American corporation, but it is responsible for the financial crises and a climate of mistrust that will take years if not decades to restore. We begin by explaining the scope of the CEO pay problem and what business schools did for the past 20 years to create the type of thinking that facilitates a culture of greed. In addition, we explore how CEOs engaged in an array of decisions that destroyed the employee-employer compact, destroyed customer service, outsourced and made themselves and stockholders wealthy. We then explain the psychological motivation to engage in unthinkable greed and how the tremendous effort an executive makes climbing the corporate ladder and then staying there leads to a psychological state of entitlement, guilt, and depersonalization in which the CEO looses empathy, and greed takes over as a defense. We then examine the nature of these problematic executive constellation cultures that become breeding grounds for greed, hubris and destruction. We discuss the psychology of the destruction of Lehman Brothers and then conduct an in-depth analysis of one of the most celebrated CEO's accused of greed and destructiveness, Bob Nardelli. the former CEO of Home Depot. This follows with a discussion of the new generation of employees, the Gen Ys, who will contribute to the demise of the American Corporation as we know it. The book ends with a discussion of what needs to be done to end unemployment and the growing gap between the rich and the poor. An extensive appendix presents the actual misdeeds and greedy acts of hundreds of CEOs.

While the Big Three automobile companies came to dominate the industry, its early history was characterized by an array of competing companies. Studebaker's story is the chronicle of the life and death of an American automobile company where managements concept of "tradition" played a fundamental role in modeling corporate culture, rhetoric, and strategy. Donald T. Critchlow focuses on how organizational philosophies, developed by successive managerial regimes, reflected and influenced corporate strategies concerning product development, investment policies, employee relations, and the allocation of resources. The upper management of Studebaker thus shaped corporate strategy within an institutional environment that embodied company tradition and responded to market forces.

"Patrick Foster's American Motors Corporation: The Rise and Fall of America's Last Independent Automaker is the definitive history of the AMC corporation. Featured vehicles include the Rambler, Javelin, and more, as Foster walks the reader through not only the history of an American classic, but a history of the automotive industry itself as it evolved through emissions restrictions and the gas guzzlers of the 80s and 90s"-Provided by publisher.

Big business has been the lever of big change over time in American life, change in economy, society, politics, and the envelope of existence--in work, mores, language, consciousness, and the pace and bite of time. Such is the pattern revealed by this historical mosaic. --From the Preface Weaving historical source material with his own incisive analysis, Jack Beatty traces the rise of the American corporation, from its beginnings in the 17th century through today, illustrating how it has come to loom colossus-like over the economy, society, culture, and politics. Through an imaginative selection of readings made up of historical and contemporary documents, opinion pieces, reportage, biographies, company histories, and scenes from literature, all introduced and explicated by Beatty, Colossus makes a convincing case that it is the American corporation that has been, for good and ill, the primary maker and manager of change in modern America. In this anthology, readers are shown how a developing "business civilization" has affected domestic life in America, how labor disputes have embodied a struggle between freedom and fraternity, how corporate leaders have faced the recurring dilemma of balancing fiduciary with social responsibility, and how Silicon Valley and Wall Street have come to dwarf Capitol Hill in pervasiveness of influence. From the slave trade and the transcontinental railroad to the software giants and the multimedia conglomerates, Colossus reveals how the corporation emerged as the foundation of representative government in the United States, as the builder of the young nation's public works, as the conqueror of American space, and as the inexhaustible engine of economic growth from the Civil War to today. At the same time, Colossus gives perspective to the century-old debate over the corporation's place in the good society. A saga of freedom and domination, success and failure, creativity and conformity, entrepreneurship and monopoly, high purpose and low practice, Colossus is a major historical achievement.

Over time, corporations have engaged in an aggressive campaign to dramatically enlarge their political and commercial speech and religious rights through strategic litigation and extensive lobbying. At the same time, many large firms have sought to limit their social responsibilities. For the most part, courts have willingly followed corporations down this path. But interestingly, corporations are meeting resistance from many quarters including from customers, investors, and lawmakers. Corporate Citizen? explores this resistance and offers reforms to support these new understandings of the corporation in contemporary society.

National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist A New York Times Notable Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year A PBS “Now Read This” Book Club Selection Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the Boston Globe A landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet least known, civil rights movements in American history (Washington Post). In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (New York Times Book Review, front page), Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business. Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (Economist), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (Wall Street Journal). We the Corporations is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.

Why did the financial scandals really happen? Why are they continuing to happen? In The Death of Corporate Reputation, Yale's Jonathan Macey reveals the real, non-intuitive reason, and offers a new path forward. For over a century law firms, investment banks, accounting firms, credit rating agencies and companies seeking regular access to U.S. capital markets made large investments in their reputations. They treated customers well and sometimes endured losses in transactions or business deals in order to sustain and nurture their reputations as faithful brokers and “gate-keepers.” This has changed completely . The existing business model among leading participants in today’s capital markets no longer treats customers as valued clients whose trust must be earned and nurtured, but as one-off “counter-parties” to whom no duties are owed and no loyalty is required . The rough and tumble norms of the market-place have replaced the long-standing reputational model in U.S. finance. This book describes the transformation in American finance from the old reputational model to the existing laissez faire model and argues that the change came as a result of three factors: (1) the growth of reliance on regulation rather than reputation as the primary mechanism for protecting customers and (2) the increasing complexity of regulation, which made technical expertise rather than reputation the primary criterion on which customers choose who to do business with in today’s markets; and (3) the rise of the “cult of personality” on Wall Street, which has led to a secular demise in the relevance of companies’ reputations and the concomitant rise of individual “rain-makers” reputation as the basis for premium pricing of financial services. This compelling book will drive the debate about the financial crisis and financial regulation for years to come -- both inside and outside the industry.