Description
In 1949, FULLY ONE-HALF OF ALL GOODS made, mined, or grown on planet earth were of U.S. origin. The average American had an income fifteen times greater than the average foreigner's, and ate three and a half times as much. It was a moment of unilateral economic dominance the likes of which the world had seldom seen-and for the men who were fortunate enough to graduate from Harvard Business School that year, it was a time of rampant optimism and ravishing opportunity.
As of 1949 the MBA degree was still exotic, arcane, and swaggeringly potent, and the men of Harvard '49 would ride it to a level of success that has become the stuff of business legend. They would be "the class the dollars fell on." By 1974, nearly one '49er in five was a millionaire. Forty-five percent were chair- men, presidents, or chief operating officers of the companies that employed them-companies that included Xerox, Johnson & Johnson, Bloomingdale's, and Capital Cities Communications, which would go on to acquire ABC.
The men of HBS '49, however, haven't just achieved success; they've defined success. To an extent wildly disproportionate to their numbers, they've set the tone of American business over the course of the past three and a half decades. Their story, therefore, stands as much more than a catalogue of vivid business tales; it is a map of American ambitions and American assumptions, of national triumphs and epic-scale misjudgments that have only recently been finding their comeuppance.
Told with a novelist's eye for character and detail, and a historian's attention to the larger sweep, The Big Time is a cogent, controversial, and wryly original account of the spectacular rise and relative decline of the America we know.
ISBN:0060152788
