Stories
Stories
Professor, Historian, and Storyteller
Topics: History-Business HistoryInformation-BooksNews-NewspapersStrategy-Corporate StrategyA Conversation with Nancy Koehn
Editor’s Note: The Story of American Business itself has a back story. Explains Jacqueline Murphy of Harvard Business Press: “About five years ago, after we held discussions with the New York Times about possible collaborations, the idea for this book rose to the fore. The Times was eager to have a prominent individual as the editor, so when Nancy Koehn agreed to do it, that was a big selling point for everyone.” As the September Bulletin was going to press with excerpts from her new book, we spoke with Professor Koehn.
What criteria did you use in selecting the New York Times articles for the book?
The book is organized around three broad themes: The rise and role of the corporation; the impact of technological change, as exemplified in the communication and transportation revolutions; and the changing workplace, which encompasses the birth of the consumer society, the shift away from an industrial economy, and the decline of the social contract between companies and workers.
So the Times articles were chosen — from a huge array of possibilities — to fit into one of those three central themes. We wanted to cover some of the big inflection points and in particular, some of the events that did so much to define the story of American business: the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, the crash of the stock market in 1929, the rise of the Internet in our own time, for example. Events were important but so too were people. Often ruthless, insatiably curious, amazingly driven, the fascinating men and women that helped create American business history are a very important thread in this book.
History is really a pendulum that swings back and forth between a focus on people and a focus on large, impersonal forces and events. Indeed, in the field of business history, it was HBS professor Alfred Chandler who shifted the focus of scholars and others away from individual heroic entrepreneurs toward a concentrated examination of the role of broader forces such as the rise of the railroads and the corporation. In very recent years, we have seen the pendulum swing back again with a resurgence in popular interest in understanding the lives and impact of specific business leaders. In my book, I tried to keep the pendulum from staying too long in either position; I believe it’s at the intersection of large historical forces and individual human agency that we have our best hope of reconstructing the past truthfully.
Of those dozens of Times articles you selected, do you have any favorites?
My favorites range from Times columnist William Safire writing about owning 38 shirts and what that says about him and our present-day consumer society, to a story about the rise of the Negro middle class in the South in the 1960s, to a fascinating obituary of Jay Gould, the nineteenth-century speculator, to a wonderful piece on cell phone manners and how cell phones make us rude.
What’s most surprising to me about the articles generally is how thoughtful they are: They are a real lens and filter for helping people understand the broader importance and reach of a particular person or event. I’m quite impressed by how consistent that kind of thoughtfulness has been throughout the Times’ pages —pages that span 140 years of history. And I do not say this lightly. I read at least 600 stories to cull them down to the 100-plus that made the cut.
Did you consider other approaches before settling on the three-theme approach?
I’ve been thinking about the story of American business for almost 20 years and those three themes really came out of all the work I’ve done on people, events, and the big drivers of history. I was particularly concerned with making the book relevant to people today, to the questions, possibilities, and daily rhythms that animate our lives now. That’s why a big portion of the book is devoted to the demand side, if you will, of history: to working and consuming and how Americans have spent their leisure. Toward the end of the book, I spend some time considering not only the exuberance and stimulation of modern life but also its exhaustion.
“Exhaustion” is an evocative word. Can you elaborate?
We are living in an age in which we are simply much more tired! laughter It’s the white-hot speed of the information revolution. It’s the technology that’s brought an astounding amount of choice, not to mention 24/7 access, to the farthest corners of the earth. And it’s psychological. Life feels like it just keeps moving faster! We are not the first generation to experience such quickening, but it’s never affected so many people before. I think that overall we are not quite sure what to do with the rapid speed with which the flywheel of capitalism is turning. That’s on the macro level. At the individual level, most of us do not have enough space and downtime to make consistent good sense of what we’re experiencing and of what this means for the journey each of us is on.
Speaking of exhaustion, has the American Century indeed come to a close?
There’s no doubt that America’s global preeminence is fading. The imperial torch is being passed to other actors. It’s happening as we speak, and for a range of reasons. Some are those Edward Gibbon pointed to in the late eighteenth-century when he wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Others are those Paul Kennedy examines in his 1987 book The Rise and Fall of Great Powers — issues of imperial overstretch, fiscally, economically, and geopolitically.
There are other reasons too. The events of the last ten years — the recent financial crisis, budget deficits, wars, the rapid economic rise of nations such as China and India — have all accelerated what would have been an inevitable decline. I don’t think the decline will be as pronounced for American business in the next two decades as for the nation-state per se. That’s because U.S. business is so global now. It’s almost an oxymoron to say “American” business when talking about companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Starbucks. Yes, America rose to astounding power beginning in the late nineteenth-century and now this influence is declining. As it did for the British Empire in the early twentieth-century. As it did for the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth-century. As it does for great powers throughout history.
You write about the great figures of the past, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford. Where have all the titans gone? We have Bill Gates, but is he really comparable? Or do time and history help make titans out of more life-sized, contemporaneous individuals?
I think our age has many figures of great impact in addition to Bill Gates. Other interesting people of his era have risen to the fore, individuals like Oprah Winfrey, who is an astoundingly important person and successful businesswoman with great reach and influence. Or take Warren Buffett, who has played a key role in the global capital markets for several decades. Steve Jobs is another example of an entrepreneur who changed the world. So too is Bono, the lead singer of U2. Here is a musician who became a very savvy businessman who then became a global activist who is responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of Africans’ lives. When the history of business in the early twenty-first century comes to be written, all of these and other people will play big roles.
Historians usually have the advantage of hindsight and the test of time, but there’s also a great benefit to charting individuals as they live out their lives. For example, I’ve spent years writing about Oprah and Bono. I am blessed with an astounding amount of contemporaneous information about what makes these people tick, where their love handles and warts are, and what that means for how they navigate the human journey as a person of great influence. That’s something I could never do with the Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, whom I’ve also written about extensively. I never was able to talk to him, as I am with Oprah.
What do you hope ordinary readers will take away from the book?
I hope they’ll take away a sense of the extraordinary richness and relevance not only of these amazing people and events but also some of the great arcs of progression related to business: the development of work and of our modern consumer society, and of the corporation, and of our collective expectations about what constitutes the American dream. I hope readers will have a richer sense of how relevant the past is to the present. So much of this bewildering turbulence and idealism and disappointment that we’re experiencing right now has already come before, in different shapes and sizes. That is what Mark Twain meant when he said history doesn’t repeat itself precisely but sometimes it does rhyme. These rhymes are interesting and powerful. They are heartening too because they tell us that we as a people have done much more than muddle through other very challenging moments, that we have come through an extraordinary inflection point. The rhymes tell us we’ve learned, evolved, and recovered from those difficult moments in the past.
Another important lesson I hope readers come to is that history is never finished. It’s like a clay pot to which you’re adding layer after layer of glaze. You can’t have the pot, or its beauty, without each consecutive layer of color and shine. We are the sum total of where we came from. It’s clear when you browse through this book that the American Experiment has been a unique and powerful one, filled with great courage, hope, and possibility.
And what lessons do you hope business executives will find?
I hope business people will also enjoy the book for the reasons I just mentioned. But I hope they take away a bigger picture, a sense of how broad the stage really is and how important what they do is, not just for their company and for their industry, but for their country, for society, and for the mainstream. You can see how John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould, for example, were powerful people who for much of the time weren’t really conscious of their own authority. We live in an age now when business leaders have enormous impact, greater than that of most politicians I hope to offer business leaders some inkling of this impact: that what they do now is, in Abraham Lincoln’s words, not just for today “but for a vast future” as well.
Did you enjoy working on this project?
I should say at the outset that it really was a great experience working with the New York Times and Harvard Business Press on the book. I can be very demanding in creating a book but both these partners were gracious and helpful throughout.
The great pleasure that came with this book and sending it out into the world has to do with the nature of stories. With the proliferation of books and newspapers in the late eighteenth-century, and then perhaps even more markedly in our own time with the explosion in bytes, stories, which were an essential mode of communication for many centuries, stopped being our primary way of thinking about how we know what we know. But now I believe that once again stories are becoming incredibly important. Awash in a tsunami of information, we are looking for more than data and facts. Out of this information overload, we’re trying to make sense of what we’re experiencing and locate it with some kind of stability and meaning attached to it. Stories have always done that. So for me, the wonderful thing about this book is that it is basically a storybook, about people and events that all add up to our moment, here and now. I’m pleased and proud to be a storyteller in that context.
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