The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrongfnew ec

"John Kay is well known to FT readers, because for a long time he wrote a column and still is an occasional FT contributor. This book is supposedly the first in a trilogy that he’s producing. It’s looking at what has happened to the archetypal vehicle for modern capitalism: the company or corporation. What happens to it when we move, as we have moved, from a world of making mainly things, into a world where lots of products are essentially digital, immaterial or services? The book looks mainly at the history of corporate capitalism since the late 19th century, and in much more detail in the 20th century. He writes that it’s a book that you would want to read if you were learning about business. It’s not aimed at people who already know a lot about business and the corporate economy. He writes in a very witty, sometimes acerbic style about some of the scandals and setbacks of the corporate model over the years and looks at the way the change in the economic landscape is changing the way companies are run. I think possibly for later in the trilogy, we’ll want to know more from him about the future of the company. This book is sold as being about what’s going to happen, but it doesn’t touch very much on the weird models that are beginning to emerge for decentralizing management and so on. It’s more about what’s happened in the recent past. That’s a bit of publishing hyperbole. The book seems to be a straightforward analysis of how the corporate model has evolved and challenges some of the ways in which one might think about shareholder value. That’s classic John Kay but it’s also something that we know to be a challengeable fact in economics. There are plenty of books out there, and have been for some time, that take issue with shareholder value as the only way of running companies. As I say, it’s wonderfully written, quite tart in places, and very accessible—notwithstanding the fact that John Kay is a very distinguished and intellectually high-level economist."