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Rating: 
Summary: Whiz Kids and the Holding Companies
Review: This is a great read for today's corporate watchers (think Enron, Qwest, Tyco, WorldCom). After WWII, the early speadsheet types, geeks, nerds and whiz kids went on a roll in the 1950s and 1960s. They created holding companies (we call it today "synergy") like the electrical and railroad guys did a generation (30 years) earlier. The names were great: Teledyne, Litton, LTV, etc. The holding company or parent owned lots of divisions or profit centers. Think of it as a mutual fund, like the Sage of Omaha has today. Government contracts, the cold war, all helped them grow. They flew Braniff 707s and AA Convair 990s between LA and Dallas and NYC, drank martinis, dressed like the movie "Down with Love." They used computers to figure out market share and P&L, big IBM and Sperry Univacs. Like all parties it ended with Vietnam going south, Nixon taking away the punch bowl and the NYSE dropping. Like the 1920s, the 50-60s needed this book and many will be done, all the same as this one, on the Roaring dot.com 1990s, with the same nonsense: holding companies, synergy and over paid executives. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Rating:
Summary: Whiz Kids and the Holding Companies
Review: This is a great read for today's corporate watchers (think Enron, Qwest, Tyco, WorldCom). After WWII, the early speadsheet types, geeks, nerds and whiz kids went on a roll in the 1950s and 1960s. They created holding companies (we call it today "synergy") like the electrical and railroad guys did a generation (30 years) earlier. The names were great: Teledyne, Litton, LTV, etc. The holding company or parent owned lots of divisions or profit centers. Think of it as a mutual fund, like the Sage of Omaha has today. Government contracts, the cold war, all helped them grow. They flew Braniff 707s and AA Convair 990s between LA and Dallas and NYC, drank martinis, dressed like the movie "Down with Love." They used computers to figure out market share and P&L, big IBM and Sperry Univacs. Like all parties it ended with Vietnam going south, Nixon taking away the punch bowl and the NYSE dropping. Like the 1920s, the 50-60s needed this book and many will be done, all the same as this one, on the Roaring dot.com 1990s, with the same nonsense: holding companies, synergy and over paid executives. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
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