It’s easy to forget that we are creating and living the history we will look back on years hence. For reasons that are too complex to go into here, too many of us have too little acquaintance with the history that made the world into which we born, and this deficiency underlies Professor George Santayana’s time worn warning that the history we’ve forgotten (or never knew) we are likely to repeat. This is especially true with business history.
In a past issue, I shared a graphic that dynamically explored how the size rankings of the largest companies changed over the past three decades. Looking further back, there are great companies, some now forgotten or only vaguely remembered, that could claim to be more important than the giants of today such as Apple, Microsoft, Google etc. The publisher of the American Business History Center published an article in 2020 in which he shared his list of the companies he thought had had the greatest impact on American life. These are companies that truly changed how American lived not only in degree but in kind. We would not be the same country after they rose to prominence.
Before you click on the link below, make your own list of which three American companies you think deserve to be listed as the greatest of all time.
Then check out the publisher’s list of the The Three Greatest American Companies of All Time
