"CLAW" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

probably would have all died of heartburn if Columbus had not discovered the
New World.

THE NEW WORLD

Every schoolchild is familiar with the story of how Columbus set off in
three tiny ships (the Pinto, the Cordoba, and the Coupe de Ville), and right
away his crew started getting very nauseous and asking why for God's sake he
had decided on three tiny ships instead of one medium ship. Nevertheless
Columbus pressed on, ignoring popular fears that he would sail off the edge of
the Earth, and finally he and his hardy band made it to the New World, except
for the Pinto, which mysteriously exploded, and the Cordoba, which due to a
navigational error actually did sail off the edge of the Earth.

The New World had an extremely good business climate. For one thing,
there was plenty of land, and nobody owned it, unless you counted the people
who had been living there for several thousand years. For another thing, it
had an abundance of the two crucial factors you need for economic development:
Water Power, in the form of rivers, and Raw Materials, in the form of ore. So
soon millions of Europeans flocked over to the New World to make their
fortunes. They stood around all day, sunup to sundown, throwing handfuls of
ore into the rivers and waiting for economic development to take place. They
would have starved to death if a friendly Indian named Squanto (which is
Indian for "Native American") hadn't come along and shown them how to plant
corn. "You put the seeds in the ground," explained Squanto. He couldn't
believe what kind of morons he was dealing with.

Soon the corn came up, and the Europeans decided to celebrate by inviting
all the Indians over for a big Thanksgiving dinner, then sending them off to
live on reservations in North Dakota.

THE RISE OF THE MODERN CORPORATION

At the beginning of the modern corporate era, many businesses actually
made things. Typically, they'd get hold of a Raw Material, which they'd smelt
and pour into a mold, where it would cool and form a product, which they'd
sell for a profit, which the owner would use to buy his family a nice house on
Long Island.

The problem was that when the owner died, the family members were darned
if they'd come in off Long Island and engage in anything as filthy as
smelting, so they'd hire a professional manager to run the business. Often,
however, the professional manager was a graduate of Harvard Business School,
and consequently he wasn't exactly dying to smelt either. So he'd dream up
other corporate activities for himself to engage in, such as Marketing,
Long-Range Planning, Management by Objectives, and Lunch, and he'd hire
additional managers, who of course would turn right around and hire managers
of their own, and so on.

This is how we arrived at the modern corporation, where at the very top