hat were the top dozen business stories of the 20th century? It's a game anyone can play. Here's my list, in chronological order.
Dupont/GM. John J. Raskob stopped by General Motors on his honeymoon in 1914 and bought 50 shares. Four years later he persuaded his boss, Pierre S. Dupont, to buy control of the company for $25 million. That put GM firmly on its feet and established Dupont as the model of a diversified manufacturing corporation with autonomous divisions and a centralized general office.
Ford/Sloan. Henry Ford was a manufacturing genius who developed the affordable car and the $5 day. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of GM swept past him in the late 1920s by offering ''a car for every taste and pocketbook,'' plus the comfort of closed bodies, the convenience of installment financing, and the excitement of annual model changes.
Sears/Ward. When World War II ended, Sears Roebuck & Co. and Montgomery Ward & Co. were roughly on a par with one another: mail-order houses that had built an extensive network of retail stores during the 1930s to serve cities. But Ward feared postwar depression and sat on its horde of cash. Sears expanded aggressively, as did newcomers Woolworth, Grant, and Kresge. ''Monkey'' Ward never recovered from its caution.
General Electric and strategic planning. Thomas Edison's company was among the first to establish an industrial research laboratory; by the 1890s it was manufacturing light bulbs all over the world. In the 1950s it intensified its strategy of diversification, moving into jet engines, appliances, and synthetic diamonds. Its strategic planning department was the best in the world; its labor relations department the most inventive. Its spokesman was a Hollywood actor named Ronald Reagan.
McDonald's. Branding was a relatively little-understood concept when Ray Kroc used the capital he had accumulated selling paper cups and milkshake machines to buy out the McDonald brothers in 1954. Over the next 40 years, he followed the example of Coca-Cola and Pepsi to show that just about anything could be mass-marketed.
Justice Dept. sues IBM. Little-noticed when the antitrust division sued IBM on the last day of the Johnson administration in 1969 was the fact that IBM unbundled its software in trepidation a month before. The government folded its hand 14 years later, after a powerful independent software industry had grown under its mostly unwitting protection - including a little firm called Microsoft.
Penn Central bankruptcy. It was one thing when the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co. went broke in the 1970 recession. But the nation's premier railroad? The government's willingness to let fail the merger of the Pennyslvania Railroad and the New York Central signaled new limits to bailout policy.
Volunteer Army / reserve clause. Whether it was Curt Flood breaking baseball's reserve clause in the courts - a device to control players' salaries by restraining bidding - or the recommendation by a panel of experts that soldiers be paid competitive wages instead of drafted, markets in the early 1970s dissolved old conceptions of teamwork.
MayDay and Reg Q. The end of fixed brokerage commissions in 1975 marked the beginning of deregulation in the United States. The end of interest rate ceilings on bank deposits a few years later accelerated the far-reaching transformation by which mutual funds replaced banks as savings repositories.
Toyota et al. The avalanche of Japanese high-quality automotive imports that commenced in the mid-1970s taught a generation what globalization was all about, and stimulated a higher degree of competitiveness from virtually all American industry.
Milken. Michael Milken changed the rules of corporate governance in the early 1980s, backing greenmail artists and corporate builders alike with his junk bonds. His discovery of the possibilities of the savings and loan industry did him in.
AT&T breakup. Antitrust chief William Baxter knocked the world on its ear on Jan. 8, 1982, when he negotiated the breakup of the Bell Telephone system. Nearly 20 years later, with the world embroiled in a telecommunications revolution, it looks as though his theory of the case was correct.
