ABSTRACT
The rising importance of the men at the head of firms followed naturally from the growing anonymity of industrial ownership and its separation from managerial control. This importance has sometimes been represented as the triumph of the firm itself. That corporate firms to a large and growing extent financed themselves and that so many of them behaved as self-perpetuating entities may lend conviction to this picture of an economy made up of and dominated by the institution of the firm. But impersonal as corporate firms may appear to be, their powers were exercised by groups of men representing and conducting them. It would, therefore, be simpler, as well as more accurate, to speak not of independently functioning firms but of the growing power and authority of professional directors and managers at their head.
