ABSTRACT
193 And now, gentle reader, we enter the realm where wise historians tread warily: contemporary history, defined here as anything younger than the writer, which includes all three companies considered in this chapter—McDonald’s, Walmart, and Dell. Their very success can trap anyone who tries to explain it, for the history of business contains no lesson starker than the perishable nature of power. Today’s gifted analyst can look the dunce tomorrow. McDonald’s, Walmart, and Dell have all topped various Fortune lists of companies “Most Admired” for this and that, but so too have some that later encountered a world of hurt. A partial list of past “Most Admired” includes Enron, soon after exposed as a case study in corporate misfeasance, nonfeasance, and malfeasance, run by thieves and mountebanks, and headed by a man whose subsequent defense consisted of the claim that he had no idea what went on in his company. Other list toppers fell on hard times: General Motors, whose future in 2005 looked perilous and, bankrupt, hung by a federal government thread in 2010; A.T.&T, which somehow mismanaged itself from the top of the telecom tree to a precarious perch on one of its former branches; Sears; IBM; Hewlett-Packard; and so on down the lugubrious list of past paragons, some of which have since managed to restore their fortunes.
