年收入破五百億美元的企業秘辛,科氏工業集團的崛起與衝擊
媲美揭露華爾街內幕的《大到不能倒Too Big to Fail》,
當人們看見經濟表面上的起伏跌宕,真正巨大的勢力早已悄然滲入經濟與生活的所有層面
科氏工業集團年收入之高,連高盛銀行、Facebook及美國鋼鐵公司三巨頭加總都難敵。科氏工業集團無所不在:栽種食物所需的肥料、製作水管所需的化學物質、地毯及尿布製成所需的化學纖維,乃至在華爾街上販售的商品,皆與科氏工業集團息息相關。
然而,在科氏兄弟刻意低調下,少有人了解科氏工業集團。
五十年來,科氏集團執行長查爾斯.科赫放遠目光、不貪圖近利,從錯誤中學習,理解自由市場的無情、但也崇尚自由市場的價值,低調地經營著科氏工業集團,與自己的弟弟大衛.科赫合力打造出財富更勝比爾.蓋茲的企業王國。
然而,凡事總有一體兩面,成功的企業王國背後自然不只歡欣鼓舞的成功故事。這國家為何逐漸分崩離析、貧富差距為何越來越大、氣候變遷為何停滯,乃至我們的企業為產業帶來的影響,在在潛藏於成功企業王國的背後。
本書耗時七年打造,道出私人企業如何鞏固自己的勢力逾半世紀,而這又為什麼讓現今的美國人不再視資本主義為唯一市場機制。讀來驚險生動,令人欲罷不能。更是對於我們當今社會經濟制度,不容忽視的警示之聲。(文/博客來編譯)
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"Superb...Among the best books ever written about an American corporation." --Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review
Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard's Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that's because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way.
For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He's a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.
But there's another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.
Seven years in the making, Kochland "is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard's work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time" (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire).