Companies that Changed the World

Companies that Changed the World:
From the East India Company to Google Inc.
Jonathan Mantle
London, Quercus, 2008.

Table of Contents

Why's a wonderbra, a biro and a coke bottle a sexy combo?




Easy!


Each of them is made by a company that changed the world. And so did the companies that made your Swatch, your VW, your Nokia mobile, your IKEA furniture and your Walkman. And so did the other 42 companies that Jonathan Mantle introduces to us. From the oldest to the most recent. From the Honourable East India Company that was created in 1600 to Google which began in 1998.

This book was made for different reading styles. It works for a cover to cover approach. It also works for a need to know approach. For being used as an encyclopedia when you are curious about one of these 50 companies.

Best of all, it can handle various playful approaches, like what's the difference that makes a difference between the three motor-car manufacturers in the cast? Between Ford and Toyota and Volkswagenwerk?

How many of the companies are in the transportation business? For sure, there's Central Pacific and Union Pacific, Boeing, Virgin and the three motor-car manufacturers. But what about Thomas Cook and Western Union who move money about?

Two more of the same kind of question, but with a "the answer's not in the book" twist. First, why are so many of the companies that changed the world in the entertainment and information sector? Companies like Disney, EMI, Penguin, Sony, Nokia, CNN, Endemol, Al Jazeera and Google? Second, if Intel didn't exist, how many of the companies talked about in the book could not make what they are making today?

I enjoyed reading the book from cover to cover. I enjoyed these and other playful questions. Like what these companies teach us about being entrepreneurs and leaders, as well as about having or losing a value based culture. But what I enjoyed most were the chapters on three of my favourite companies: Disney, Sony and Swatch.

I like learning about - or being reminded about - Disney because I like learning about or being reminded about Walt. About his sleeping and day-dreaming his way through school. About his refusal to allow education to cripple his imagination. About him going bankrupt and being close to being bankrupt for more than two-thirds of his life.

There's also good news. More than a third of the world's population has seen at least one of the films he made. The legendary conductor, Leopold Stokowski, begged to be allowed to conduct the music for Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

And there are the quotable quotes.
- If you can dream it, you can do it.
- It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
- Animation is a way of story telling and visual entertainment which can bring pleasure and information to people of all ages everywhere in the world.

Sony's story is about the marriage of Masaru Ibuka's engineering mind and Akio Morita's marketing hunches. Their first product was an electric rice cooker. It failed to sell. Out of the failure came a decision to move from imitating to innovating. And so to the first tape recorder, the first transistor radio, the first Walkman - that nobody except Morita believed would sell - and the first PlayStation.

Masaru Ibuka's legacy reached into education. Into the Sony Fund for Education and into his book, Kindergarten is Too Late. In the book he argues for an idea that's as revolutionary as any of his inventions: the time between nine months and three years is the most significant stage in a child's development.

Finally, there's Swatch's story, which is actually Nicolas Hayek's story. It's a cheeky story. Instead of supervising the liquidation of two major Swiss watchmakers, he bought the two companies. Instead of competing with the Japanese on quality, he chose a head-on confrontation with their products. Instead of marketing a watch as something one kept for life and handed down the generations, he got buyers to believe they had bought a disposable item. A fashion accessory, with Swatch standing for "second watch".

The market - in particular, the yuppie market - caught the mood. People began buying more than one model. Some of them wore two models at a time, either with one on each wrist or with the second one as a pony tail band. Between 1983 and 1993, Hayek took the Swiss share of the global watch market from about 15 percent to more than 50 percent. The first models have become collector's items which change hands for vast prices. Not least of all, because partnerships with well-known popular artists helped to underline the cutting-edge lifestyle imagery of the brand.

For Disney, as well as for Ibuka and Morita, failure came in their first ventures. For Hayek it came when he moved into partnerships with Volkswagen and Daimler-Benz to create the first "Swatchmobiles", the Eco-Sprinter and the Eco-Speedster. Hayek pulled out in 2005, because research and development costs were so high. But the concept of a car that's 2.4 metres long and 1.4 metres wide hasn't gone away, with millions of customers in 25 countries, predominantly in Europe and North America.

Each of the other 47 companies are as interesting and instructive as these three. The statistics also are interesting: 25 of the companies are based in the United States of America (USA); 21 in the evolving United States of Europe (USE); two in Japan and two in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and Qatar). And for those who prefer images to numbers, there are delightful photographs of early advertisements for the products and services that launched these companies. And so, it's easy to recommend Mantle's book, both as fun to read and as a source of wisdom about leadership, as well as about creative thinking.

James Moulder (plato@sims.com.au) is a retired business school academic who lives in Melbourne, Australia. His hobbies are theology and poetry.