Changing Fortunes

CHANGING FORTUNESIn 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