Business History

Business History

Pushkin IndustriesPushkin Industries
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The Factory That Was Wiped Off The Map (From Cautionary Tales)

Business History will be back on July 22nd - but here's an episode from another Pushkin Industries show we're sure you''ll enjoy, Cautionary Tales. A giant chemical plant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material ...  Show more

 . 38min 19sec
The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy

John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage - the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a pr ...  Show more

 . 47min 36sec
A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price Tag

Shopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfair and stressful - and made shoppers distrustful that they were getting a good deal. J ...  Show more

 . 40min 27sec
The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of Disruption

Why have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to explore these David versus Goliath battles - and came up with a theory to expla ...  Show more

 . 40min 42sec
Ida Tarbell: The "Muckraker" Who Beat John D Rockefeller and Big Oil

At a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how John D Rockefeller and his company Standard Oil bought or bullied independent firms ...  Show more

 . 46min 27sec