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134 books match the query 'Business' and 3 start with l

cover of Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries

Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries

Edited by Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Learning by Doing in Markets, Firms, and Countries draws out the underlying economics in business history by focusing on learning processes and the development of competitively valuable asymmetries. The essays show that organizations, like people, learn that this process can be organized more or less effectively, which can have major implications for how competition works.

The first three essays in this volume explore techniques firms have used to both manage information to create valuable asymmetries and to otherwise suppress unwelcome competition. The next three focus on the ways in which firms have built special capabilities over time, capabilities that have been both sources of competitive advantage and resistance to new opportunities. The last two extend the notion of learning from the level of firms to that of nations. The collection as a whole builds on the previous two volumes to make the connection between information structure and product market outcomes in business history.


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cover of Living the Faith: A Life of Tom Monaghan

Living the Faith

A Life of Tom Monaghan

James Leonard

University of Michigan Press, 2012

Who is Tom Monaghan?

Is he the four-year-old kid whose father died on Christmas Eve and whose mother sent him to an orphanage and then a juvenile detention home?

Is he the entrepreneurial genius who built Domino's Pizza from a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria in Michigan into an American brand as world-conquering as Ford or Coke?

Is he the religious visionary who sold Domino's for $1 billion to create an orthodox Catholic university, law school, and special interest law firm with the goal of transforming America to reflect his conservative values?

He's all that and more. With extensive interviews with friends and enemies plus unprecedented access to the man himself, but wholly without his authorization, Living the Faith illuminates Tom Monaghan, the man and the myth.

Living the Faithis the much-needed, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the realms of American business and religion. Through eighteen hard-boiled chapters, journalist James Leonard follows Monaghan on his path from a heartbroken kid who climbed into his father's coffin to the business tycoon who purchased the world-champion Detroit Tigers and spent a fortune on his own air force, navy, and island to the religious visionary who founded a university to make saints and a public interest law firm to overturn evolution.

A sympathetic but critical perspective of the man and his works, this book is for believers, nonbelievers, and agnostics; for conservatives, liberals, and independents; for the rich, the poor, and the shrinking middle class. Mainly, however, this book is for those who want the facts about Tom Monaghan—and the truth about the effect religion had on one man and the effect that man had on the world.

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cover of Louis Bamberger: Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist

Louis Bamberger

Department Store Innovator and Philanthropist

Linda B. Forgosh

Brandeis University Press, 2016

Louis Bamberger (1855–1944) was the epitome of the merchant prince as public benefactor. Born in Baltimore, this son of German immigrants built his business—the great, glamorous L. Bamberger & Co. department store in Newark, N.J.—into the sixth-largest department store in the country. A multimillionaire by middle age, he joined the elite circle of German Jews who owned Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Filene’s. Despite his vast wealth and local prominence, Bamberger was a reclusive figure who shunned the limelight, left no business records, and kept no diaries. He remained a bachelor and kept his private life and the rationale for his business decisions to himself. Yet his achievements are manifold. He was a merchandising genius whose innovations, including newspaper and radio ads and brilliant use of window and in-store displays, established the culture of consumption in twentieth-century America. His generous giving, both within the Jewish community and beyond it, created institutions that still stand today: the Newark YM-YWHA, Beth Israel Hospital, and the Newark Museum. Toward the end of his career, he financed and directed the creation of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, which led to a friendship with Albert Einstein. Despite his significance as business innovator and philanthropist, historians of the great department stores have paid scant attention to Bamberger. This full-length biography will interest historians as well as general readers of Jewish history nationally, New Jerseyans fascinated by local history, and the Newarkers for whom Bamberger’s was a beloved local institution.
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