Reprints from Chemical & Engineering News Keeping broadly informed challenges every person today. Lf you missed these features from recent issues of C&EN, you can still get copies by filling in the coupon at the bottom of the page. Career Opportunities
A C&EN Feature March 13, 1967, 152 pp.
2H
An annual guide for chemists and chemical engineers covering chemical manpower needs, career counseling, automation, and continuing education. A list of major U.S. employers of chemists and chemical engineers is included. 03137
The Next Approach to Free Trade
Earl V. Anderson, C&EN March 6, 1967, 11 pp. 50fé Four regional trade blocks, permitting tariff-free trade among member countries, exist today, and plans have already been suggested for the U.S. to join in a regional trade block with Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, and New Zealand. 03067
Progress Toward A ComputerBased Chemical Information System.
Dr. Fred A. Tate Chemical Abstracts Service Jan. 23, 1967, 12 pp. 5Qt By mid-1969 CAS expects to complete conversion of its method of handling scientific and technical information to a computer-based system which will improve its service to chemists and chemical engineers. 01237
The Chemistry of Flavor
Dr. Irwin Hornstein Dr. Roy Teranishi U. S. Department of Agriculture April 3, 1967, 16 pp. 50^ Chemists may be able to tailor make flavors as they learn more about the mechanism of odor and taste reception. 04037 Copies of these Feature articles are available at the following prices: 1 to 49 copies—single copy price 50 to 99 copies—20% discount Prices for larger quantities available on request
D D D D 03137 01237 03067 04037 TO: REPRINT DEPARTMENT Dept. D ACS Publications 1155 Sixteenth St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 FROM: Name Street City State Amount enclosed $
22 C&EN JULY 24, 1967
Zip Code
BUSINESS PERSPECTIVES By DAVID M. KIEFER, Senior Editor
The entrepreneur reborn
Corporate diversification is perhaps the most talked about business trend of the past few years. It has even added a new name to the business lexicon: the conglomerate corporation, also frequently called the multimarket or free-form company. Such enterprises operate across a wide array of diverse, often unrelated product lines and services. The merits, pitfalls, and potentials of the conglomerates are discussed with increasing frequency at business meetings, written about in business publications, argued over by antitrust lawyers. You might easily get the impression from all the noise that conglomerates are a totally new development in the economic world. Their rise, nevertheless, probably is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Diversification itself, of course, is nothing new—not for companies like General Electric, General Motors, or General Mills. True, it certainly is being practiced by today's breed of aggressive business acquisitors with a wild abandon that does indeed seem new. But expansion obviously is a trait inherent in any successful, dynamic enterprise. Until about 50 years ago, corporations were more likely to expand within a single line of business. Chemical companies grew by becoming bigger chemical companies; steel companies by becoming bigger steel companies. The bigger they became the more they could control their markets and their prices and the greater their chance of survival. One result was a tendency toward monopolization of trade and the formation of business trusts. The entrepreneurial drive of tycoons and financiers such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, or J. P. Morgan led them to put together mighty industrial empires, even though they sometimes did it by practices which might send them to jail under present rules of business conduct. That entrepreneurial drive may appear to be largely dormant among the managerial echelons that now direct the fortunes of many major corporations. (It was no common quality, to be sure, among the industrialists of the late 19th century.) But it is by no means dead in the business world. Only today it has been forced by antitrust laws into new channels. The mantle of yesterday's capitalist seems to rest, for better or worse, largely on the shoulders of today's conglomerator. Critics of conglomerates frequently focus on the apparent illogic or unwieldiness of this type of organization. Is it logical, they ask, for a single enterprise to run breweries and steamships at the same time it manufactures fertilizers, plastics, paper, and candy and invests in oil wells? Or for one company to make tires, plastics, mining equipment, steel castings, and pipe while it is also deeply involved with rocket propulsion, ordnance, and electronics, not to mention the operation of TV and radio stations? The argument is still unresolved. Yet while it may be difficult to make sense out of some conglomerate structures, it is equally difficult to show that they are nonsense. Clearly, some conglomerates have been highly successful. Others have been flops. In this they are little different from the more traditional type of firm which sticks doggedly to the single field it knows best. One thing is new. The chance for success in such organizations has been immeasurably aided by tools only recently available to corporate management. The advent of computers and other data processing equipment and of the techniques of operations research and systems analysis make more feasible the control of complex industrial entities. For all that, today's conglomerates are largely the reflection of a single man of enterprise and talent. And they may well add a new dimension to industrial competition. For they may be in the best position to challenge the entrenched giants of American business. Such competition, after all, is the name of the game in a free enterprise system.
