Company Men: The Invention of Shareholder Value and the Splintering of the American Economy

How an esoteric economic theory—and its most devout believers—changed the world forever. In the modern economy, stock price is king. The value of a corporation is measured in how it enriches its shareholders, even when doing so subtracts from long-term growth or social good. Greed, in the last half-century of corporate practice, has become very good. Company Men is a sweeping intellectual history of how shareholder value rose from the lesser-known edges of academic theory to the vanguard of corporate practice. Historian Sean Delehanty marshals archival resources to reveal how a group of motivated consultants, activist investors, and academic economists successfully branded shareholder value as the antidote to problems of management and economic stagnation in the 1970s. In their success, they created a class of well-heeled managers who executed shareholder-value theory as an everyday practice—and at the expense of most everything else. Delehanty’s history of the modern American corporation is a sobering account of the business regime that would rule the world and produce no shortage of regrets—even amongst those who championed it. Company Men is intellectual history at its most vital, offering a surprising origin story of our economy’s discontents.