Hints and tips:
...The compensation payable to shareholders equalled 40 per cent of Britain’s annual expenditure and constituted at the time “the largest single financial operation undertaken by the British state”....
...“Being an ethical Quaker-type proprietor he charged cost plus [while] all the other restaurants charged what they could get away with,” Grantham recalls....
...Chinese internet groups such as Alibaba or Baidu are influenced by the strictures of the state, and yet they find ways to remain creative and nimble....
...Sophisticated debt instruments allowed corporations to hedge risk much more efficiently....
...Cadbury is mythologised in the UK as a Quaker confectioner hijacked by greedy Americans....
...It is also a system in which hostile takeovers can too easily destroy jobs, markets and ethics in long-established companies – as he describes vividly in relation to the takeover of the Quaker-founded Cadbury...
...Isn’t history on the side of state power? There is growing anger with that....
...I think the United States represents the greatest meritocracy in the world.”...
...For Quakers, career options in the early 19th century were limited....
...“Compensation of the top three officials in the 1,500 biggest corporations has about doubled as a percentage of profits – from 4.3 [per cent] to 9.2 [per cent]....
...Even large quoted corporations such as Ford, established in 1903, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bear the strong imprint of the founding family....
...Most large corporations have abandoned corporate bases in the provincial towns where their employees lived, preferring to locate to London. Cadbury has its head office in Berkeley Square....
...Acheson, the architect of early US cold war policies, said Kennan had an “abstract” sense of the national interest and a “Quaker gospel”....
...The Anji Jiffy Lube chain will use an established US brand, Jiffy Lube, that Shell acquired when it bought Pennzoil-Quaker State in 2002....
...He showed me where the Quaker State headquarters used to be. The mammoth Pennzoil refinery is being dismantled, its giant pipes and tanks disabled....
International Edition