Word: 1950s
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...fortunes were made in soft drinks (Coca-Cola), processed foods (Heinz), insurance (Travelers, AIG) and retail (Sears, Wal-Mart). The information age began in the 1920s, when Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer and the rest of Hollywood began to build businesses of scale. But it wasn't until the 1950s, with the emergence of television as a mass medium, and the two most recent decades, with the computer's coming of age, that information has replaced manufacturing as the primary source of growth. In fact, it is really too soon to pass judgment on most of the information...
...punched rail lines and highways through the California wilderness. To the end of his long life--he died in 1989, six months short of his 89th birthday--Steve Bechtel enjoyed prowling around job sites, but he neither looked nor sounded like a construction boss. In his prime, in the 1950s, he was trim, well tailored and relatively soft voiced, with the ingratiating manner of a salesman...
...career that spanned nearly six decades, his aptitude for inventing evocative, easily recognizable corporate identities spawned the Jolly Green Giant, the Marlboro Man, the Pillsbury Doughboy and Tony the Tiger, among other familiar icons of commerce. By the late 1950s Burnett had emerged as a prime mover in advertising's creative revolution, which grew in the glow of television's rise as America's consummate commercial medium. By 1960 Burnett's roster of clients had grown exponentially; at the time of his death the agency's billings exceeded $400 million annually. By last year that figure approached $6 billion...
...dominated the industry that even rivals like Univac--which built the first large commercial computer--were dismissed as merely part of "the Bunch." And while newcomers such as Compaq and Microsoft brought the company to its knees in the 1980s, the colossus that Watson inherited and reinvented in the 1950s and '60s stands strong again today, the sixth largest U.S. company...
...postwar America of the 1950s and '60s democratized middle-classness, Gates has democratized filthy-richness--or has at least started to. Get the right job offer from Microsoft, work hard, get rich; no miracle required. Key Microsoft employees pushed Gates in this direction, but he was willing to go, and the industry followed. The Gates Road to Wealth is still a one-laner, and traffic is limited. But the idea that a successful corporation should enrich not merely its executives and big stockholders but also a fair number of ordinary line employees is (although not unique to Microsoft) potentially revolutionary...