Author Description

Every day our economy grows more and more unlike the one we used to know. Twenty years ago, best-selling economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted that America's giant corporations would dominate world markets through integration and long-term planning. But the Fortune 500 took a beating and became the prime targets for the headlines of the 1980s: bailout, divestiture, takeover, and collapse. John Case, author of Understanding Inflation, looks beyond the headlines and the economic theories and shows there is an important and encouraging transformation taking place. The Fortune 500 employed 3.5 million fewer workers in 1990 than in 1980, but new companies--smaller, more maneuverable, and definitely entrepreneurial--have emerged and are growing. The center of gravity in the American economy is shifting. In the least and most likely places, John Case discovers the real people and real businesses that are setting a bold course for our economic future: innovators exploring the niches the bigger companies couldn't risk going into, and suppliers filling the gaps the bigger companies had given up on. The signs of entrepreneurial regrowth are widespread: from Kennedy Die Castings, a small family-run business outside Worcester, Massachusetts, where new technologies have broadened the company's capabilities, to Thrislington Cubicles, a West Coast bathroom partition manufacturer founded by a former Hollywood actor, where determination and cleverness turned a shoestring operation into a budding nationwide supplier. If Silicon Valley was once a landmark of American technological leadership, the 1980s certainly changed that. The microchip giants not only stumbled but fell. The Japanese were gaining the upper hand. Yet Case digs deeper and finds the chip industry itself still flourishing--just differently. A crop of new companies, agile and clever, are focusing on small niches in the rapidly changing high-tech field, and are learning new ways to thrive by developing intimate and interdependent business relationships. Akron, Ohio, should be a modern-day ghost town in the heart of the Rust Belt. But John Case takes us to the former factories of B.F. Goodrich, where the buildings have been converted into a successful industrial park, filling up with specialized manufacturers and related service businesses that are reshaping the regional economic landscape. By the end of the 1980s, even the giant steel manufacturers were getting leaner and meaner, but they didn't rule the industry the way they used to. The specialty mills had arrived. Case examines one of them, American Steel & Wire, and demonstrates how an exceptional entrepreneur instituted novel management techniques, blurred the lines between blue-collar and white-collar workers--and succeeded, winning major contracts. From the Ground Up looks squarely at the foundations of the American economy and finds the building blocks for a dynamic future.