Top Highlights

• In the business world we see giant corporations taken apart and put back together, their CEOs often dumped, along with thousands of their employees. A “golden parachute” or goodbye package of money and benefits may soften the shock of landing for a top manager, but gone are the appurtenances of power: the corporate jet, the limousine, the conferenc...
• Power isn’t just shifting at the pinnacle of corporate life. The office manager and the supervisor on the plant floor are both discovering that workers no longer take orders blindly, as many once did. They ask questions and demand answers. Military officers are learning the same thing about their troops. Police chiefs about their cops. Teachers, in...
• THE END OF EMPIRE The entire world watched awestruck as a half-century-old empire based on Soviet power in Eastern Europe suddenly came unglued in 1989. Desperate for the Western technology needed to energize its rust-belt economy, the Soviet Union itself plunged into a period of near-chaotic change. Slower and less dramatically, the world’s other ...
• Twenty years ago General Motors was regarded as the world’s premier manufacturing company, a gleaming model for managers in countries around the world and a political powerhouse in Washington. Today, says a high GM official, “We are running for our lives.” We may well see, in the years ahead, the actual breakup of GM.
• look elsewhere proves otherwise. While U.S. economic power faded, Japan’s skyrocketed. But success, too, can trigger significant power shifts. Just as in the United States, Japan’s most powerful Second Wave or rust-belt industries declined in importance as new Third Wave industries rose. Even as Japan’s economic heft increased, however, the three i...