3M1
Year founded: 1902
Founder(s): Five Minnesota investors—two railroad operators, a physician, a meat-market operator, and an attorney
Location: Crystal Bay, MN
Founding Concept: To open and operate a mine to extract corundum as an abrasive to export to grinding-wheel manufacturers.
Initial Results: Mining business failed after selling only one ton of material; no further purchasers could be found. Company stumbled along via personal accounts of the investors and saved by a new investor (Louis Ordway), who helped the company shift to sandpaper production in 1905. 3M could not afford to pay its president (Edgar Ober) a salary during his first eleven years.
Norton2
Year founded: 1885
Founder(s): Seven investor-managers of diverse business backgrounds
Location: Worcester, MA
Founding Concept: Purchased small grinding-wheel company from Frank Norton to capitalize on the growing market for grinding wheels for the expanding machine tools industry.
Initial Results: Early growth and success; paid steady annual dividends in all but one of its first fifteen years of operations and multiplied its capital fifteen times over during the same time. By 1990, Norton had become the number one company in its industry.
American Express3
Year founded: 1850
Founder(s): Henry Wells (age unknown), William Fargo (age unknown), John Butterfield (age unknown)
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: To eliminate “wasteful competition” between three rival companies (Wells & Company; Livingston, Fargo & Company; and Butterfield, Wasson & Company) in the freight express business, the three companies agreed to join forces into one, somewhat monopolistic, company.
Initial Results: Immediately profitable and rapidly growing (not surprising with a near monopoly).
Wells Fargo4
Year founded: 1852
Founder(s): Henry Wells (age unknown), William Fargo (age unknown)
Location: San Francisco, CA
Founding Concept: To provide express (package delivery) and banking services in the expanding California market (expansion due to the gold rush).
Initial Results: One of the only companies to survive the California banking shakeout of 1855, and emerged in strong position with few competitors after the panic. Expanded rapidly from 1855 to 1866.
Boeing5
Year founded: 1915
Founder(s): William E. Boeing (age 35)
Location: Seattle, WA
Founding Concept: From the articles of incorporation: “To be a general manufacturing business ... to manufacture goods, wares, and general merchandise of every kind, especially airplanes and vehicles of aviation ... to operate a flying school and act as a common carrier of passengers and freight by aerial navigation.” Bill Boeing entered the business as an ex-lumber merchant.
Initial Results: Bill Boeing’s first airplane (the B&W) failed its Navy tests. Boeing then sold fifty of its second plane (the Model C) to the Navy, but could not extend the contract and the company spiraled downward through 1919–1920. Boeing lost $300,000 in 1920 and kept itself alive through loans from Bill Boeing and making furniture and speedboats.
Douglas Aircraft6
Year founded: 1920
Founder(s): Donald W. Douglas (age 28)
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Founding Concept: To design and build an aircraft for the first nonstop flight across the United States (the Cloudster). Company reorganized in 1921 into a new corporation to transfer technology from Cloudster to fulfill contract for experimental torpedo bombers for the Navy.
Initial Results: Successfully gained quantity contract from the Navy for eighteen torpedo bombers and soon thereafter obtained further contracts from the U.S. and Norwegian governments. The company attained early success and grew at an average annual rate of 284 percent per year during its first four years of operations.
Citicorp7
Year founded: 1812
Founder(s): Samuel Osgood (age unknown)
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: Essentially a private credit union for its merchant-owners, who used it to finance their own ventures.
Initial Results: No coherent strategy and continued to operate like a private bank for nearly seventy years. Didn’t begin process of becoming a national bank until the 1890s under the guidance of James Stillman.
Chase Manhattan8
Year founded: 1799 for Bank of Manhattan and 1877 for Chase Bank.
Founder(s): Aaron Burr (age unknown) for Bank of Manhattan and John Thompson (age unknown) for Chase Bank
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: To be a bank.
Initial Results: Bank of Manhattan flourished from 1808 on. The Chase Bank didn’t become prominent until 1911.
Other Comments: Chase and Manhattan merged in 1955.
Ford9
Year founded: 1903
Founder(s): Henry Ford (age 40) and Alex Malcomson (age unknown)
Location: Detroit, MI
Founding Concept: To make automobiles based on Henry Ford’s mechanical expertise and, in particular, to capitalize on vertical piston technology. One of 502 firms founded in the United States between 1900 and 1908 to make automobiles.
Initial Results: First car, the Model A, proved successful; reached sales of over six hundred units per month by the end of the first year of operations. Introduced five models (A, B, C, F, and K) before introducing the Model T in 1908, which revolutionized the industry and made Ford the number one car maker.
Other Comments: Although Ford did not found the company specifically to build the Model T, it appears that he had considered the idea of the mass-production line manufacturing process as early as 1903.
General Motors10
Year founded: 1908
Founder(s): William Durant (age unknown)
Location: Detroit, MI
Founding Concept: To acquire and organize a range of smaller automakers into one company with the strategy of providing a variety of cars for a variety of tastes and incomes and capitalizing on shared financial and other resources.
Initial Results: Between 1908 and 1910, Durant acquired seventeen companies—including Oldsmobile, Cadillac, and Pontiac—to complement Buick Motors. Added Chevrolet in 1918. Bumpy road with strong growth but financial crises; Durant ousted in 1920.
Other Comments: From 1921 to 1927, GM under the guidance of Alfred Sloan, caught and passed Ford to became the number one automaker.
General Electric11
Year founded: 1892
Founder(s): Thomas Edison (age 45), Elihu Thomson (age 39), Charles Coffin (age 48)
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: Consolidation of Edison General Electric Company (founded in 1878 to develop and commercialize Edison’s electricity and lighting research) and Thomson-Houston Electric Company (founded in 1883 as a conglomerate of electricity-related businesses).
Initial Results: Successful first year ($3 million earnings in seven months); financial difficulties and cash shortage in 1893 due to national depression; recovered and grew steadily through the next two decades aided, in part, by evolving to the AC system.
Westinghouse12
Year founded: 1886
Founder(s): George Westinghouse (age 39)
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Founding Concept: To develop and commercialize alternating current (AC) electricity technology and the concept of central power systems—a technology that eventually proved superior to Edison’s DC system—and thereby make the AC system the primary system throughout the world.
Initial Results: Superior technology concept led to substantial early success, turning the company into the number two company in the industry, and George Westinghouse was able to finance initial growth for two decades without losing control of the company.
Other Comments: Financial trouble during the national panic of 1907 led bankers to oust Westinghouse from his own company in 1910.
Hewlett-Packard13
Year founded: 1937
Founder(s): William Hewlett (age 26) and David Packard (age 26)
Location: Palo Alto, CA
Founding Concept: Initial approach was “strictly opportunistic” within the broadly defined “radio, electronic, and electrical engineering field.” Initial products considered in early years included welding equipment, shock machines for weight reduction, automatic urinal flushers, bowling alley sensors, radio transmitters, public address systems, air-conditioning equipment, clock drives for telescopes, medical equipment, and oscilloscopes.
Initial Results: Kept itself alive in the first year via contract engineering jobs and lean operations (in a garage). In 1939, sold a few audio oscilloscopes. First-year sales: just above $5,100 with a profit of $1,300. Moved out of garage in 1940. Seventeen people employed in 1941. World War II boosted employment to 144 people; shrank twenty percent after the war. Sales in 1948: $2.1 million.
Texas Instruments14
Year founded: 1930
Founder(s): Dr. J. Clarence Karcher (age unknown) and Eugene McDermott (age 31)
Location: Newark, NJ
Founding Concept: Began life as Geophysical Service, Inc., “the first independent company to make reflection seismograph surveys of potential oil fields, and its Texas labs developed and produced instruments for such work.” The company moved to Dallas, Texas, in 1934 to solidify its position in the oil exploration business. Changed its name to Texas Instruments in 1951.
Initial Results: Quickly became the market leader in geophysical exploration business. Grew and prospered in the early and mid-1930s. Stumbled in the early 1940s when it tried to move into the oil exploration business directly. Saved itself by applying seismic technology to signal search for the military. Recovered well during World War II.
IBM15
Year founded: 1911 (1890 for root companies)
Founder(s): Charles Flint (age unknown)
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: Merger of two small companies into a mini-conglomerate of measuring scales, time clocks, and tabulating machines for clerks and accountants (named the “Computing, Tabulating, Recording Company,” or CTR.)
Initial Results: Floundered for three years and the board seriously discussed liquidation. In 1914, hired Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who gradually improved the health of the company and turned it into the market leader in tabulating machines by 1930.
Other Comments: Changed name to the International Business Machines Corporation in 1925.
Burroughs16
Year founded: 1892
Founder(s): William Burroughs (age unknown), Joseph Boyer (age unknown)
Location: St. Louis, MO
Founding Concept: William Burroughs invented the first-ever recording and adding machine and formed a company (named the American Arithmometer Company) to market it.
Initial Results: Once on the market, the product proved a success and the company grew. Burroughs consolidated its position in the industry through new products and acquisitions. In 1914, the company had ninety products. In 1920, it was viewed as a “mainstay of the office-machine industry.”
Other Comments: William Burroughs received the Franklin Institute’s John Scott Medal for his invention; he died in 1898 from tuberculosis; company renamed “Burroughs Adding Machine Company” in his memory in 1905.
Johnson & Johnson17
Year founded: 1886
Founder(s): Robert W. Johnson (age 41), James Johnson, E. Mead Johnson (younger brothers of Robert W.; ages unknown)
Location: New Brunswick, NJ
Founding Concept: Manufacture of medical products, with particular emphasis on antiseptic surgical dressings and medical plasters; first catalog had thirty-two pages “crammed with an array of products.”
Initial Results: The company began with fourteen employees in 1886; in 1888, the company employed 125 workers; in 1894, the company employed 400. Early success based on a wide range of innovative products, emergence of hospitals, and cultivation of a strong brand image.
Bristol-Myers18
Year founded: 1887
Founder(s): William McLaren Bristol (age early 20s), John Ripley Myers (early 20s)
Location: Clinton, NY
Founding Concept: Acquired for $5,000 “a failing drug manufacturing firm called the Clinton Manufacturing Company.” Neither Bristol nor Myers had any background in pharmaceuticals.
Initial Results: Struggled early on; in 1889, the company employed only nine employees; did not earn a profit during its first twelve years of operations. The company did not begin to grow rapidly until 1903, when it introduced new hit products: Sal Hepatica (a laxative salt) and Ipana (the first-ever disinfectant toothpaste).
Marriott19
Year founded: 1927
Founder(s): J. Willard Marriott (age 26), Allie Marriott (age 22)
Location: Washington, DC
Founding Concept: To be in business for themselves. Began with a nine-seat A&W root beer stand. To attract additional business, they added hot food (mostly Mexican) and named the restaurant the Hot Shoppe.
Initial Results: Built on sixteen-hour days, the store proved profitable during the first year, with $16,000 gross receipts. By 1929, had expanded to three outlets running twenty-four hours per day. Expanded to Baltimore in 1931. Had eighteen Hot Shoppes by 1940.
Howard Johnson20
Year founded: 1925
Founder(s): Howard Johnson (age 27)
Location: Wollaston, MA
Founding Concept: Acquired a soda fountain and adopted his mother’s ice-cream formula, which proved a hit with New Englanders.
Initial Results: Within six months, demand exceeded his production capacity. By 1928, ice-cream sales reached $240,000. In 1933, he expanded to the famous roadside orange-tiled restaurants. Built to 125 units by 1940.
Other Comments: Once Howard Johnson had the basic concept of his road restaurants down, he expanded and fully capitalized on that idea to the fullest.
Merck21
Year founded: 1891
Founder(s): George Merck (age 23)
Location: New York City, NY
Founding Concept: Sales branch for German chemical company, E. Merck. Traces roots back to Merck family apothecary in Darmstadt, Germany, 1668.
Initial Results: Solid sales success ($1 million by 1897) of imported chemicals from parent company; didn’t manufacture its own chemicals until its second decade of life. Began manufacturing iodides and other staple pharmaceuticals at new facility in Rahway, New Jersey, in about 1903. Revenue in 1910 $3 million.
Pfizer22
Year founded: 1849
Founder(s): Charles Pfizer (age 25) and Charles Erhart (age 28)
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Founding Concept: Manufacture of high-quality chemicals not then produced in the United States, thus leveraging off a tariff advantage over imports; first product was Santonin, a compound to combat parasitic worms.
Initial Results: Santonin appears to have sold well, giving the company a basis for expansion; in 1855, the company began manufacturing iodine-based products, and by 1860 the company manufactured at least five product lines. In 1857 the company opened an office in downtown Manhattan and between 1857 and 1888 Pfizer purchased seventy-two lots of land for expansion.
Motorola23
Year founded: 1928
Founder(s): Paul V. Galvin (age 33)
Location: Chicago, IL
Founding Concept: Battery eliminators for radios, including a repair business for Sears, Roebuck radio battery eliminators that came back to Sears for service under warranty. Galvin “knew that the eliminator was not going to provide a market for very long,” so he began looking early for other markets.
Initial Results: The company kept itself barely alive in the first year on the eliminator manufacture and repair business. Almost bankrupt at the end of 1929. Conceived of car radio concept in 1930. Lost money in 1930, then became profitable in 1931 and grew steadily from then on.
Zenith24
Year founded: 1923
Founder(s): Eugene F. MacDonald (age 37)
Location: Chicago, IL
Founding Concept: Sales and marketing of radios to capitalize on the emerging radio industry (commercial radio broadcasts began in 1920, and radios were in short supply); in 1923, took out an exclusive license to sell radios made by the Chicago Radio Lab; in 1924, introduced the world’s first portable radio.
Initial Results: Early innovations fueled sales growth (1924: first portable radio; 1926: first home radio to operate from an AC outlet; 1927: first push-button tuning). Lax asset management, however, led to liquidity and credit problems in the mid-1920s.
Nordstrom25
Year founded: 1901
Founder(s): John Nordstrom (age 30), Carl Wallin (age unknown)
Location: Seattle, WA
Founding Concept: In the words of John Nordstrom: “I was still not certain what I wanted to do.... I started looking around for some small business to get into. Mr. Wallin was a shoemaker by trade and ... had set up a shoe repair shop.... I often visited Mister Wallin in his shop and one day he suggested that we join a partnership and open a shoe store.”
Initial Results: Became profitable early. Changed location three times in the first fifteen years, but remained a single-unit business until 1923, when the partners added a second store.
Other Comments: John Nordstrom sold out his share of the company to two of his sons (Everett and Elmer) in 1928.
Melville26
Year founded: 1892
Founder(s): Frank Melville (age unknown)
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: Frank Melville, a traveling shoe wholesaler, acquired three shoe stores “when the owner skipped town without paying Melville for a shipment of shoes.”
Initial Results: Appears to have been profitable from early on. Began expanding into a chain concept in 1895. By 1923 it had 31 retail outlets; by 1935 it had 571 retail outlets. Largest retailer of shoes in the United States by the early 1930s.
Procter & Gamble27
Year founded: 1837
Founder(s): William Procter (age 36) and James Gamble (age 34)
Location: Cincinnati, OH
Founding Concept: Procter, a candle-maker, and Gamble, a soapmaker, relied on the same animal fat raw materials to make their products; as brothers-in-law, they decided to pool their efforts and formed a partnership to sell soap and candles.
Initial Results: The company grew slowly, requiring fifteen years before outgrowing their modest office, production facility, and store on “Main Street, 2nd door off Sixth Street.” Although not spectacular in growth, the company appears to have been profitable; in 1847, the company earned $20,000. Two decades after founding, the company employed eighty factory workers.
Other Comments: At its founding, P&G was one of eighteen companies that sold soap and/or candles in Cincinnati.
Colgate28
Year founded: 1806
Founder(s): William Colgate (age 23)
Location: New York, NY
Founding Concept: According to Colgate’s chairman in 1956, “At that period in American history [1806], at least 75 percent of the soap used was home made.... Soap made at home was crude, coarse, rough to the skin, and hardly pleasant in aroma. William Colgate undertook to make a soap that would be pleasant to the senses and yet available to the average person.”
Initial Results: Little information available; no indication that the company was significantly more or less successful than P&G during its first two decades of life.
Other Comments: One of the first companies in the United States to manufacture soap for sale.
Philip Morris29
Year founded: 1847
Founder(s): Philip Morris (age unknown)
Location: London, England
Founding Concept: Tobacco shop on Bond Street in London.
Initial Results: Remained a simple retail shop until 1854, when Philip Morris began making cigarettes. Little indication of substantial early growth. Introduced its cigarettes in the United States in 1902. American investors purchased rights to the Philip Morris name in 1919.
Other Comments: Marlboro brand introduced as a women’s cigarette in 1924.
R.J. Reynolds30
Year founded: 1875
Founder(s): Richard J. Reynolds (age 25)
Location: Winston, NC
Founding Concept: To develop and sell chewing tobacco based on a newly developed “flue-cured leaf that made the best chewing tobacco.”
Initial Results: In the first year of operations, his company turned out 150,000 pounds of product. “From then on, about every other year, a new addition had to be made to the factory to keep up with a nation of chewers.” By the mid-1880s, R.J. Reynolds had amassed a personal fortune in excess of $100,000.
Other Comments: Introduced Camel brand cigarettes in 1913; became No. 1 U.S. brand by 1917.
Sony31
Year founded: 1945
Founder(s): Masaru Ibuka (age 37)
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Founding Concept: No clear idea other than the vague concept to apply technology to the creation of consumer products.
Initial Results: Struggled with a failed rice cooker, failed tape recorder system; stayed alive via crude heating pads and then a hodgepodge of products on contract for Japan Broadcasting, such as voltmeters and control consoles for studios. Developed first hit consumer product (pocket radio) in 1955. Took a dozen years to reach five hundred employees.
Kenwood32
Year founded: 1946
Founder(s): Not listed in history
Location: Komagane City, Japan
Founding Concept: To be a specialist pioneer in audio technology.
Initial Results: Quickly established itself as a leader in audio technology. Its first products, specialized radio components, were successful and immediately established the company. Its high-frequency transformer is the first product made in Japan to pass the approval standards of the Japan Broadcasting Corporation (1949).
Wal-Mart33
Year founded: 1945
Founder(s): Sam Walton (age 27)
Location: Newport, AR
Founding Concept: Acquired a franchise license for a single-unit Ben Franklin five-and-dime store in a small town; no evidence of plans to be anything than a single-unit outlet.
Initial Results: First year sales: $80,000; third year sales $225,000. Lost his lease in 1950, and thereby lost his store. Moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, and opened a small five-and-dime store he called “Walton’s.” Expanded to two units in 1952.
Other Comments: Opened first large-scale rural discount store in 1962.
Ames34
Year founded: 1958
Founder(s): Milton Gilman (age 33) and Irving Gilman (age unknown)
Location: Southbridge, MA
Founding Concept: Mortgaged family farm specifically to launch discount retailing chain in small towns.
Initial Results: First-year sales $1 million; within two years, Ames expanded to multi-unit chain in New York and Vermont.
Other Comments: Opened first large-scale rural discount store in 1958.
Walt Disney35
Year founded: 1923
Founder(s): Walter E. Disney (age 21), Roy O. Disney (age 27)
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Founding Concept: Walt moved from Kansas City to Los Angeles to get into the movie business, but could not land a job, so he rented a camera, made an animation stand, set up a studio in his uncle’s garage, and decided to go into the animation business for himself. According to Disney biographer Schickel, “He was at least halfway convinced that he was too late, by perhaps six years, to break into animation, but [it] was the only area in which he had any prior experience.”
Initial Results: First film series (Alice) provided barely enough cash flow (due to frugal expenses) to keep going. Second product (Oswald the Rabbit, 1927) did better, but lost control of product in bad business arrangement. In 1928, he introduced Micky Mouse.
Columbia Pictures36
Year founded: 1920
Founder(s): Harry Cohn (age 29) and Jack Cohn (age unknown)
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Founding Concept: Harry and Jack Cohn founded the company in 1920 initially to make cartoons and short films to show the off-screen activities of movie stars and publicize the current pictures of the stars. Then moved into full-length feature films.
Initial Results: Only moderate success with the initial shorts concept. First feature-length films more successful: $130,000 income for cost of $20,000 on first full-length feature; between August 1922 and December 1923, the company produced ten profitable full-length feature movies.
APPENDIX 2 NOTES
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
1. Our Story So Far (St. Paul, MN: 3M Company, 1977), 51–56.
2. Charles W. Cheape, Norton Company: a New England Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 12
3. Alden Hatch, American Express 1850–1950 (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1950); “About American Express,” corporate publication; Peter G. Grossman, American Express: The Unofficial History of the People Who Built the Great Empire (New York: Crown, 1987).
4. International Directory of Corporate Histories (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 380.
5. E. E. Tauber, Boeing in Peace and War (Enumaclaw, WA: TABA, 1991), 19; Robert J. Serling, Legend and Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 2–6.
6. René Francillon, McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Since 1920 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988), 1–12.
7. Harold van B. Cleveland and Thomas F. Huertas, Citibank 1812–1970 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); International Directory of Corporate Histories (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 253.
8. International Directory of Corporate Histories (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 247.
9. Alfred Chandler, Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964); Arthur Kuhn, GM Passes Ford, 1918–38 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986); Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986)
10. Alfred Sloan, My Years with General Motors (New York: Anchor Books, 1972); Alfred Chandler, Giant Enterprise: Ford, General Motors, and the Automobile Industry (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964); Maryann Keller, Rude Awakening (New York: Morrow, 1986); Arthur Kuhn, GM Passes Ford, 1918–38 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986); Arthur Pund, The Turning Wheel: The Story of General Motors Through 25 Years, 1908–1933 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doarn, 1934).
11. The General Electric Story (Schenectady, NY: Hall of History Foundation, 1981), volumes 1–2.
12. Henry G. Prout, A Life of George Westinghouse (New York: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1921), 1–150.
13. Materials courtesy Hewlett-Packard Company Archives.
14. “Research Packed with Ph.D.’s,” Business Week, 22 December 1956, 58; Hoover’s Handbook, 1991, (Emeryville, CA: The Reference Press, 1990), 528; John McDonald, “The Men Who Made T.I.,” Fortune, November 1961, 118–119.
15. Thomas J. Watson, Jr., Father, Son & Company (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 13–17; International Directory of Corporate Histories (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 147.
16. International Directory of Corporate Histories (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 165.
17. Lawrence G. Foster, A Company that Cares (New Brunswick, NJ: Johnson & Johnson, 1986), 9–27.
18. Bristol-Myers Company—Special Report: The Next Century, company publication (1987) 3–5.
19. Robert O’Brian, Marriott: The J. Willard Marriott Story (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1987), 123–137.
20. “Glorified Road Stands Pay,” Business Week, 17 February 1940; “The Howard Johnson Restaurants,” Fortune, September 1940.
21. Values and Visions: A Merck Century (Rahway, NJ: Merck, 1993), 13–15.
22. Samuel Mines, Pfizer: An Informal History (New York: Pfizer, 1978), 1–6.
23. Harry Mark Petrakis, The Founder’s Touch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 62–111.
24. International Directory of Corporate Histories (Chicago: St. James Press, 1988), 123.
25. John W. Nordstrom, The Immigrant in 1887 (Seattle: Dogwood Press, 1950), 44–50; “Nordstrom History,” company publication, 26 November 1990.
26. Francis C. Rooner, Jr., Creative Merchandising in an Era of Change (New York: Newcomen Society, 1970), 8–12; “Largest American Shoe Retailer,” Barron’s, 8 April 1935; Hoover’s Handbook 1991 (Emeryville, CA: The Reference Press, 1990), 372.
27. “Procter & Gamble Chronology,” company publication; Oscar Schisgall, Eyes on Tomorrow: The Evolution of Procter & Gamble (New York: Doubleday, 1981), 1–14; Alfred Lief, It Floats: The Story of Procter & Gamble (New York: Rinehart, 1958), 14–32; plus over forty outside articles on the company dating back to the 1920s.
28. “Colgate Palmolive Company: Memorable Dates,” company publication; “Colgate-Palmolive-Peet,” Fortune, April 1936; William Lee Sims II, 150 Years ... and the Future! Colgate-Palmolive (1806–1956) (New York: Newcomen Society, 1956), 9–10.
29. The Philip Morris History, company publication (1988).
30. RJ Reynolds: Our 100th Anniversary, company publication (1975).
31. Nick Lyons, The Sony Vision (New York: Crown, 1976), 1–35.
32. Japan Electronics Almanac ’88, (Tokyo, Japan: DEMPA Publications, 1988), p. 282; Kenwood annual reports.
33. Vance Trimble, Sam Walton (New York: Dutton, 1990), 45–72.
34. “Cornering the Market,” Forbes, 23 May 1983, 46. Also Hoover’s Handbook 1991 (Emeryville, CA: The Reference Press, 1990), 84.
35. Richard Schickel, The Disney Version (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 91–117.
36. Clive Hirschhorn, The Columbia Story (New York: Crown, 1989), 7–16.