Word: railroad
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...expected to exceed $100 billion, and with market capitalization of $302 billion, the company is in a close race with Microsoft for the title of Most Valuable. GE chairman Jack Welch isn't the innovator that GE's founder Thomas A. Edison was, but this son of a railroad conductor and lifelong GE employee would certainly get my vote for CEO of the century...
...first breakthrough came when he landed a job as secretary and telegrapher to Tom Scott, a powerful overlord of the Pennsylvania Railroad. At 23 Carnegie headed Pennsy's Pittsburgh division and began to rake in a small fortune from outside investments ranging from oil to iron bridges. When he was 33, the rich young man privately lectured himself that his continued pursuit of wealth "must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery." Yet he couldn't abandon the money chase. "Put all your eggs into one basket," Carnegie once advised, "and then watch that basket." For him that basket brimmed...
Like Rockefeller, Morgan scorned competition as wasteful and ran afoul of federal trustbusters who broke up his railroad holding company, Northern Securities, in the early 1900s. The apex of Morgan's power came in 1901 with the creation of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided over so many large-scale industrial consolidations that he recast the banker's role from that of handmaiden to master of industry...
When Ford stumbled, it was because he wanted to do everything his way. By the late 1920s the company had become so vertically integrated that it was completely self-sufficient. Ford controlled rubber plantations in Brazil, a fleet of ships, a railroad, 16 coal mines, and thousands of acres of timberland and iron-ore mines in Michigan and Minnesota. All this was combined at the gigantic River Rouge plant, a sprawling city of a place where more than 100,000 men worked...
...Internet and email have revolutionized communication in the 1990s. Underground BBSes (bulletin board systems), which were most times run by people out of their homes, contained illegal software to download. The precious phone numbers of these BBSes were passed around among friends in a sort of Underground Railroad of computer users. His high school computer lab was a close-knit community where more experienced users shared their knowledge with younger users eager to soak up their expertise. Information was not withheld for selfish reasons, but disseminated among everybody in order to spread computer intelligence. His prose makes a family concept...