Company Men

"How an esoteric economic theory-and its most devout believers-changed the world forever. In the modern economy, share price is king. The value of a corporation is measured in how it enriches its shareholders, even when doing so subtracts from long-term growth or social good. Greed, in the last half-century of corporate practice, has become very good. Company Men is a sweeping intellectual history of how shareholder value-the shaping of American business practices around share price-rose from the backwater of academic theory to the vanguard of Wall Street corporate practice, then took root forever. Historian Sean Thomas Delehanty marshals archival resources to reveal how a group of motivated consultants and academic economists successfully branded shareholder value as the antidote to problems of management and economic stagnation in the 1970s. In their success, they created a class of well-heeled managers who executed shareholder-value theory as an everyday practice-and at the expense of most everything else. Delehanty's history of the modern American corporation is a sobering account of the business regime that would rule the world and produce no shortage of regrets. Company Men is intellectual history at its most vital and an essential origin story of our economy's discontents"--

Sean Delehanty is a historian of American political economy, including the history of capitalism in the United States in the twentieth century. He received a PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University and an MBA from the University of Rochester's Simon Business School. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.