Concrete records of what worked and what did not.
9 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor · 1911
Argues a single best method for any manual task can be discovered by systematic time-and-motion study, and that management's job is to find it and…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It
Louis Brandeis · 1914
Argues concentrated control of credit by a small circle of investment bankers, not any single trust, was the era's real monopoly problem, because it…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Eclipse of the Public Corporation
Michael Jensen · 1989
Argues the leveraged buyout wave of the 1980s was a rational response to public companies' inability to return excess cash to shareholders,…
+2 more at this level
9 works
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Argues a single best method for any manual task can be discovered by systematic time-and-motion study, and that management's job is to find it and enforce it rather than leave method to the worker's judgement.
about 2.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Andrew Carnegie
Recounts building Carnegie Steel from a telegraph messenger's wage through vertical integration and ruthless cost control, framed by Carnegie's own claim that accumulated wealth is a trust to be given away, not kept.
about 70 minutes to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Henry Ford & Samuel Crowther
Presents the moving assembly line and the five-dollar day as one connected idea, that paying workers enough to buy what they make and paring the job down to something anyone can learn in a day are the same strategy.
about 6 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Louis Brandeis
Argues concentrated control of credit by a small circle of investment bankers, not any single trust, was the era's real monopoly problem, because it let a few men sit on the boards of their own competitors and customers at once.
about 5.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Paul Healy & Krishna Palepu
Traces Enron's collapse to accounting choices, special purpose entities and mark-to-market gains booked years before cash arrived, that were legal on paper but designed to keep debt and losses off the balance sheet.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Marianne Bertrand & Antoinette Schoar
Surveys evidence that family control shapes firm behaviour well beyond the founding generation, arguing the trade-off between family control and professional management explains much of the variation in how family firms perform.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Michael Jensen
Argues the leveraged buyout wave of the 1980s was a rational response to public companies' inability to return excess cash to shareholders, functioning as a substitute for the takeover market as a disciplining force on management.
Larry Lang & René Stulz
Finds diversified firms trade at a lower valuation than a portfolio of comparable single-segment firms, arguing the conglomerate structure itself destroys value rather than merely correlating with already-weak firms diversifying.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Richard Langlois
Argues Chandler's vertically integrated managerial corporation was a historically specific response to thin markets, and that as markets for components and capabilities thickened, industries re-organised around modular, arm's-length coordination instead.
link checked 17 Sept 2026