Introduction -- Pioneers. Ray Kroc -- Thomas Edison -- John Jacob Astor -- Frederick Winslow Taylor -- Frank Woolworth -- Innovation -- John MacArthur -- Charles Babbage -- Josiah Wedgwood -- Industrialists. Richard Arkwright -- William Cockerill -- The production line -- Alfred Krupp -- Henry Ford -- Andrew Carnegie -- Cornelius Vanderbilt -- Samuel Cunard -- The incorporated company -- Entrepreneurs. Sam Walton -- Richard Branson -- Phineas Taylor Barnum -- Walt Disney -- Risk -- Anita Roddick -- Coco Chanel -- Mary Kay Ash -- Branding -- Financial geniuses. J. P. Morgan -- John D. Rockefeller -- Jay Gould -- Company stock -- The Rothschild dynasty -- Warren Buffett -- Rupert Murdoch -- Mergers and acquisitions -- Mavericks. Kun Hee Lee -- Akio Morita -- Jack Welch -- Bill Gates -- Jeff Bezos -- Larry Page and Sergei Brin -- Monopolies -- Strategists. Michael Porter -- Gary Hamel -- Ronald Coase -- Russell Ackoff -- Robert Kaplan -- Kenichi Ohmae -- Multinationals -- Taiichi Ohno -- Herbert Simon -- Theorists. Kaoru Ishikawa -- Peter Drucker -- Alfred Chandler -- Profitability -- Sumantra Ghoshal -- Michael Hammer -- Charles Handy -- Tom Peters -- James G. March.
Summary
Presents brief profiles of fifty influential people in business and industry from the eighteenth to the twentieth century and discusses ten important business trends.