However, publishers or compilers cannot accept any responsibility for the accuracy of the information presented. Where opinion is expressed, it is the author's and does not necessarily coincide with the editorial views.
Oldest family firms
The business pre $$
BIG firms, BIG facts
Adobe Named after the stream that ran past the homes of the American software firm's founders, John Warnock and Chuck Geschke. Amazon.com Jeff Bezos, the founder of the American online retailer, originally wanted to name his firm Cadabra.com.
Behind the corporate nameBehind the corporate name
Apple Steve Jobs, one of the company's co-founders, sought enlightenment in the orchards of a Hare Krishna commune, tried an experimental all-fruit diet, or wanted to pay tribute to the Beatles and their business arm, Apple Corp. Apple paid the Beatles a substantial out-of-court settlement to use the name and the legal disputes continue.
Aston Martin The Aston Hill races near Birmingham, where the British car company was founded, provided the inspiration for the first half of the name. It gets its name from the nickname of Daniel, the son of the founder, Isaac Carasso.
Haribo German confectionery got its name from the name of the company's founder and hometown, Hans Riegel from Bonn. It is a combination of the words mitsu, meaning three, and hishi, meaning water chestnut, a Japanese word for the shape of a diamond.
From a Danish phrase which means
Improbably, a hotel chain of the same name beat them to it, so they went for a fusion of integrated electronics. Mercedes was both his daughter's name and the pseudonym he used when racing the cars.
Sony The name of the Japanese electronics firm is derived from both a Latin word, sonus, which is the root of the word sonic, and the expression "sonny boy", popular in post-war Japan when the firm was founded. Fulk's Hall', the home of a medieval knight, Fulk le Breant, on the south bank of the Thames in London in 1894.
It was originally a name for a ball bearing developed by the parent company of the Swedish car manufacturer, founded in 1927.
America’s BIGGEST bankruptcies
The merger of America Online and Time Warner in 2000 was hailed as a masterstroke for its brilliant marriage of old and new technology. America Online used its highly-priced stock to create AOL Time Warner for $180 billion, but the hoped-for cross-media synergies failed to materialize, and the collapse of the dotcom bubble wiped much of AOL's value.
Business blu n ders
Time Warner had an extensive catalog of movies and music, which AOL would be able to exploit through its online distribution. At the height of "cool Britain" in 1997, BA decided it would chime with the nation's mood and announced it would remove the union flag adorning the bottoms of its aircraft.
Sir Clive is undeterred and has suggested the C6 is on its way. Despite an advanced purification process, the water contained high levels of bromate, a chemical linked to cancer.
Further launches in France and Germany were stymied after press reports suggested the "pure" water came out of a pipe in Sidcup, an unfashionable suburb on the outskirts of south-east London. Ford made a profit and paid a dividend for the entire time the Edsel was produced.
Every Day
The introduction of the Ford Edsel in September 1957 was preceded by a large and expensive marketing campaign. Motorists have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Ford's mystery new car after months of teasing ads.
Something Else Leaks
The same year, a trader at Bear Stearns, an American investment bank, entered a sell order for $4 billion instead of one for $4 million. In 2001, a trader at UBS Warburg, the Swiss investment bank, lost £71 million in seconds while trying to sell sixteen Dentsu shares for 600,000 yen each.
In 2002, a trader at Eurex in London wanted to sell a futures contract when the DAX, Germany's main stock index, hit 5,180. In 2001, Lehman Brothers was fined £20,000 after a trader, who wanted to sell only £3m worth of shares in various blue-chip companies, shorted on multiple values.
In the early 1980s, Coca-Cola executives decided that the way to combat the growing popularity of the Pepsi brand was a new formula for their soft drinks. However, Dutch and Danish authorities also found traces of the chemical in Perrier, leading to a worldwide recall.
Ratner resigned in 1992 and the company was renamed Signet in 1993, and has since regained its position as one of the world's largest jewelery companies. Over the next 100 years, mines sunk on or near his claim produced more than 1,000 tons of gold per year, 70% of the West's supply of the precious metal.
A war of words ensued in the press and through advertising, but eventually Unilever was forced to withdraw Persil Power. In 1886, Sors Hariezon, a gold miner from the Witwatersrand in the Transvaal, sold his South African gold claim for $20.
In 1977, the office equipment firm showed its top executives an electronic typewriter that could display written correspondence on a screen, save it with the click of a button, send it around the office and print out copies.
BIG buck$$$$$
Profits and losses
Market capitalisation
The world’s mo$t valuable brand$
The world’s most adm ire companies
Britain’s most admired companies
What companies say about themselves
Google Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usable. Heinz Our vision is simply to be "the world's leading food company, providing nutritious, superior foods to people everywhere".
Pfizer Our mission: We will become the world's most valued company for patients, customers, colleagues, investors, business partners and the communities where we work and live. Procter & Gamble We will deliver branded products and services of superior quality and value that improve the lives of the world's consumers.
Games directors play
Half-truths occur when a director, even if he does not lie intentionally, only tells one side of the matter during board deliberations. Propaganda is the dissemination of information to support a good cause and is seen more in shareholder relations, stock markets and financial institutions than in board-level deliberations.
Hidden agendas involve executives pursuing secret goals to benefit their own empire or advance their own careers against the interest of the organization as a whole. Scarecrow highlights downside risks in a board decision and casts doubt on a situation so that a proposal is rejected.
Some executive directors suffer from
Business
How competitive?
Easy money?
Business cycles
Corruption: business perceptions
Business : ratios
A low stock turnover can be a sign of stocks that are difficult to move and usually indicates unfavorable conditions. Return on equity=(profit/net assets) ×100 =profits as a percentage of net assets (“net worth” or “capital employed”).
Entrepreneurial activity
Busine$$ costs
The changing workforce
Days lost in strikes and lockouts
Labour union strength
Changes in working hours
International pay comparisons comparisons
What CEOs get paid
US chief executive pay
Leading Wall $treet traders’ $alaries
City of London total bonuses, £bn
Inve$tment banker$’ pay
Best paid hedge-fund managers in the US
A world of lawyers
The number of acc%untants
Women in business
Linda Cook Shell Gas & Power Netherlands CEO Tomoyo Nonaka Sanyo Electric Japan CEO Marina Berlusconi Fininvest Italy Vice Chairman Nancy McKinstry Wolters Kluwer Netherlands CEO Ana Patricia Botín Banco Banesto Spain Chairman. Judy McGrath Chairman and CEO of MTV Networks Stacey Snider Universal Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal Sony Pictures Entertainment Vice Chairman Nancy Tellem CBS Paramount Network President.
TALL
Some famous advertising slogans
Carnegie, Andrew (1835–1919)
Some business giants of the past
Carnegie believed that great wealth was of no
Disney, Walt Elias (1901–66)
Walt was among the first to recognise the
Henry Ford is best known for the invention of the Model T Ford and the moving assembly line and less well known as the American publisher of the infamous anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion (in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent). In 1891 he joined the Edison Illuminating Company, but found enough free time to invent, build and drive his four-wheeled motorcycle which led to the creation of the Henry Ford Company.
Gibbs, William (1790–1875)
He returned to work on the family farm in 1882, but soon after, thanks to his skills with steam engines, was employed as a maintenance engineer in a local company. However, this was taken over by the investors who turned it into Cadillac, so Henry Ford created the Ford Motor Company in 1903 and released the Model T six years later.
Guano is seabird droppings, rich in nitrates and phosphates, and was busily harvested off the coast of South America in the mid-19th century as fertilizer. However, there was no doubt about his core principle - in his own words: "The definition of salesmanship is the gentle art of letting the customer do it your way." He was chairman of the McDonald's Corporation from its creation in 1955 until his death, and he never stopped developing new ideas, from German taverns to theme parks.
At the age of 15, Ray Kroc, who lied about his age, was bound for Europe as a Red. He was saved by the fact that the war ended before he could leave, and instead took up various trades as a salesman.
Krupp, Alfred (1812–87)
William Hesketh Lever (1851–1925)
After his purchase of the Scottish islands of Harris and Lewis in 1918, he established similar projects there as well, spending large sums of money to create a community of gainful employment free from poverty. Lever is known for his art collections, which served a dual purpose as he not only had a passion for art and artifacts, but he also saw that certain types of painting could be used to boost soap sales.
Morgan, John Pierpoint (1837–1913)
He came of age as Lord Leverhulme of Bolton-le-Moors in 1917 and became Viscount Leverhulme of the Isles five years later.
The resulting US Steel Corporation was the first company in the world whose capital amounted to more than a billion dollars. Despite the cathedrals and churches he built, and his intervention to save Wall Street in 1907 (which eventually led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System), J.P.
Morita, Akio (1921–99)
There followed the purchase and consolidation of American steelmaking - he bought the Carnegie Steel Company from Andrew Carnegie for. Meanwhile, he also started the International Harvester Company, which trades in agricultural equipment, and the International.
Masaru was the source of many of the company's electrical engineering successes, but Morita provided the business sense that underpinned its greatest achievements. In 1958 he renamed the company Sony (a combination of sonus (Latin: sound) and Sonny Boy), and in 1961 Sony was the first foreign company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Rockefeller, John Davison (1839–1937) The wealth of the Rockefellers was created by John
He wanted to destroy the image of Japan as a source of cheap and bad goods and started selling the company's products abroad.
Woolworth, Frank (1852–1919)
Some management styles
Philanthr py
The richest people
Central bankers since 1900
In their own words”
But unlike the Lord, the market does not forgive those who do not know what they are doing. Only a handful see it for what it really is - the strong horse that pulls the whole car.
When you innovate, you have to be prepared for everyone to tell you that you're crazy. In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself.
Bad boys – and something fishy
In December 2005, Richard Causey, the company's former chief accountant, pleaded guilty to securities fraud. In a separate trial before a judge, Mr Lay was also found guilty of bank fraud.
Enron management created a virtual company
Sir. Lay was found guilty of six counts of conspiracy and fraud, and Mr Skilling was found guilty of 18 counts, but was acquitted of all but one charge of insider trading. In 2002, Frankel pleaded guilty to 24 federal corruption charges for defrauding insurance companies in the southern United States of more than $200 million.
2m birthday party for MrKozlowski’s wife
But his business began to fail after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and he was hit by a liquidity crisis. His job, trading futures contracts on the Singapore money exchange, led to heavy losses when bets on the future direction of the Japanese stock market went horribly wrong after the 1995 Kobe earthquake.
After a second trial in June 2005, both men were found guilty and sentenced to up to 25 years in prison. He was apprehended in Germany and sent back to Singapore, where he was sentenced to six and a half years in prison.
1.4bn Mr Leeson went on the run
Nick Leeson worked for Barings, a respectable and well-established bank based in the City of London. Michael Milken, the "junk bond king" of Wall Street, financed a series of corporate takeovers in the 1980s through the pioneering use of high-yield, high-risk bonds, making huge sums for himself and his employer, Drexel Burnham Lambert, in dealings.
By 1920 he had received millions of dollars paying off former investors with subsequent deposits, thus requiring an ever-increasing number of frauds. Despite a dispute over jurisdiction, Ponzi received five years in federal prison for mail fraud and was later sentenced to seven to nine years in Massachusetts.
He was later accused of looting the company of $224 million and fled to Costa Rica after making large illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's re-election campaign. In 1996 Mr Vesco was sentenced to 13 years in prison in Cuba on charges of manufacturing and marketing a miracle cure for cancer to overseas investors without the communist government's knowledge.
Just before the contracts were to be signed, Bre-X's on-site geologist fell from a helicopter under mysterious circumstances. Shortly afterwards, an independent investigation revealed that the site contained only insignificant amounts of gold.
Bre-X’s geologist at thesite fell from a helicopter
The case, known as "Enron of Kansas," came to court in late 2003 but ended in a mistrial. In 1995, a geologist whose keen interest in higher life should have raised the alarm said the site could produce about 30 million ounces of gold.
Bre-X Minerals, a small Canadian company, bought mining rights on the Busang River in the jungles of Borneo in 1993, not knowing that it would contain the world's largest deposits of gold ore. The company's share price fell from a peak of about C$6 billion to about C$600 million, leaving disgruntled investors in its wake (bankruptcy followed in 2002).
Leading management thinkers
Warren Bennis
Marvin Bower
Jim Collins
Edwards Deming
Deming was a statistician who applied the ideas about variance of a little-known American mathematician, Walter Shewhart, to business processes – with dramatic consequences in terms of quality and productivity. His secret was to demonstrate that all business processes are vulnerable to loss of quality due to variation.
Peter Drucker
When Jim Collins (see above) was asked what was the best advice he ever received, he said it came from Drucker at a time when Collins was thinking of starting a consulting business rather than pursuing new business ideas.
Henri Fayol
Sumantra Ghoshal
Gary Hamel
Michael Hammer
Charles Handy
His vivid use of metaphors and accessible writing style have made his books extremely popular – with titles such as The Empty Raincoat and The Gods of Management (in which he identified four different management cultures, which he compared to four Greek gods: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus and Zeus) . Handy's academic career began when he attended MIT's Sloan School of Management, where he met, among others, Warren Bennis (see above), who he credits with being his mentor.
Robert Kaplan
Handy began his career as an employee of the Shell oil company, and was sent to work with a drilling operation in the jungles of Borneo. He later described clearly how little his life at work had to do with the objective he was given at head office: to maximize the company's return on equity.
If you only measure financial performance, then financial performance is the measure people aim for. In the balanced scorecard, things are measured from a number of different perspectives, not just the financial one, but also, for example, from the customer's perspective, from the company's own internal perspective and from the perspective of innovation and improvement.
Nicolo Machiavelli
ABC was popular for a while and fell into disrepute when it became clear that it was much simpler in theory than it was in practice. The idea appealed to managers who felt that traditional measures of performance were unnecessarily focused on shareholders' interests.
Machiavelli’s tripartite division of the tactics of leaders – “Some princes, in order to keep their states safe, disarmed their subjects; some kept their vassal cities divided; and some harbored hatred of themselves” – first expounded in Florence in the 1520s, has evolved into the modern theory of corporate structure.
Abraham Maslow
He is nothing but a fact. not just the Italian fact, he is the European fact.” Now we can say with confidence: he is the global fact. described by Maslow as: “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he ultimately wants to be happy.
Douglas McGregor
Needs in earlier categories must be satisfied before needs in higher categories can act as motivators. We drink in a bar because we are thirsty and also because we want to meet friends.
Henry Mintzberg
Kenichi Ohmae
Tom Peters
Michael Porter
Competitive advantage, he wrote, is "a function of either providing comparable buyer value more efficiently than competitors (low cost) or performing activities at comparable cost but in unique ways that create more buyer value than competitors and thus a premium price required.(differentiation)". In his book Competitive Advantage (1985) Porter introduced the idea of the value chain, which was.
He started by simplifying the concept of competitive advantage and then created a new framework for companies to think about how to achieve it. Like Tom Peters, he is a skilled presenter who commands high fees on the lecture circuit.
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Lenin exhorted workers to ‘tryout every scientific and
Sun Tzu
The oldest stock exchanges
Leading stockmarkets
Some stockmarket indices explained
Index
Index
The MSCI Emerging Markets Index measures the stock market performance of the most popular emerging markets. The NASDAQ 100 tracks the performance of the top 100 companies traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange system.
Stockmarket performance
Clocking the stockmarkets
Investment [formulas]/ 2
E(Rs) =the expected return on security s RF =the risk free rate of return βs=the beta of security s. An important formula for valuing a warrant, which measures the minimum annual percentage increase required from the value of the underlying common stock for investors to hold warrants in a company's stock over the stock itself.
Private equity
Event-driven: funds that invest in opportunities created by corporate events, such as spin-offs, mergers,. Macro: funds that make leveraged bets on expected price movements of stock markets, interest rates, currencies and commodities.
Hedge-fund assets under management by strategy
Strategies vary and these funds may specialize in fixed income arbitrage, convertible bonds, high yield bonds or mortgage bonds.
Bonds
Bubbles that burst
Confidence in the market had weakened, and in an attempt encouraged by the leaders of the South Sea Company to restore it, the "Bubble Act" was passed in 1720, requiring all joint-stock companies to have a royal charter. The British "railway mania" of the 1840s and the American railroad boom up to 1873 shared many similarities.
Oil reserves and prices
Gold reserves and prices
Gold facts
Ag Au Carat
Rich producers
Diamond and platinum facts
Behind the currency name
Drachma The Greek currency (now replaced by the euro) took its name currency from the verb "to grasp". The peseta Spain's former currency takes its name from the Catalan word peceta, meaning "small piece".
Some money superlatives
The largest banknotes ever in general circulation are probably Chinese banknotes from the Ming dynasty: 1,000 banknotes made during the reign of Hungwu (1368–1398) measured 10 inches by 16 inches (26 cm × 40 cm) . In more recent times, an emergency coin issue in the German state of Westphalia in 1923 included a coin with a value of 1 billion marks, and in 1946 Romania issued a silver coin with a face value of Lei 100,000.
These coins are not for daily circulation and are often made in small quantities for collectors. In the modern world, the effects of hyperinflation have produced some extremely high denomination banknotes.
The inscription on the reverse says, disingenuously, "He restored to the people of Rome their laws and their rights." Another unique coin of Augustus from 12 BC shows the emperor raising a personification of the Roman Republic from its knees - the emperor as savior of the state. The usurper Roman emperor Silbannacus (mid-3rd century AD) is known to history only because of the two surviving coins bearing his name.
But that doesn't compare to the more than $4 million paid in 2005 for one of the five known 1913 US Liberty Head nickels. Paper money, because of the material it is made of, has less chance of surviving hundreds, let alone thousands, of years.
Offshore attractions
Notes and coins in circulation
Euros printed
The life of $ and £ notes
Exchange rates
Exchange-rate pegs
The changing world economy
Leading exporters
Note: Foreign direct investments (FDI) are long-term investments in companies abroad, which implies a degree of control over those companies.
Sending money home
Interest rates
Corporate tax rates
What companies pay in tax
What individuals pay in tax
How taxing for top earners?
Wealth and debt
Great business books
Functus officio that fired the bolt; spent Habeas corpus let him have his body back Ignorance legis ignorance of the law is not one. Uberrimae fidei in the utmost good faith Ultra vires outside the permitted powers Literally literally; an accurate description.
What’s in a
Blue chip An American term referring to the color of the poker chip with the highest value. Paying through the nose The Danes of the 9th century imposed a 'nose tax' on the Irish, supposedly because those who refused to pay had to slit their nostrils.