Value Creation and Value Capture in American Business History

1 Course Unit

This course examines how the kind of firms in which most Wharton students will spend the next stage of their careers came to be as they are today. At a superficial level, the course's objectives are descriptive and narrative. But history, considered thoughtfully and critically, is never just description and a narrative and the course's deeper purpose is to give students some idea of how to think about the future evolution of firms and industries. In this the course is as much an applied strategy course as it is a historical survey. The course considers the development of the business enterprise as an economic institution. It also covers the evolution of competition and strategy, marketing institutions, some aspects of the history of operations management, and corporate finance. Issues arising in these different management disciplines are considered in part for the purpose of showing off their interrelationships. Questions of how value can be created and captured at the enterprise level form the core of the perspective. The course's focus is on American developments, since many of the innovations took place here, but there is scope for comparison with Japan and the leading European economies if there is student interest. Chronologically the course runs from Franklin's days through the early twenty-first century. The individual classes proceed through discussion of actual business decisions and performance in a series of challenging and otherwise interesting moments in the evolution of the American business environment. The materials are unusual for the Wharton School--they are not just often case-like but wherever possible draw on documents contemporary to the decisions such as correspondence, internal memoranda, minutes of meetings, old newspaper and magazine stories, and eyewitness accounts. The objective in this is to give students as minimally mediated access as is feasible to what the embedded actors knew and thought. The materials require thoughtful preparation. Weekly short writing assignments during the first twelve weeks of the term develop students' skill in turning such preparation into crisp analytical prose. (This will be valuable to most ex- students in the early phases of their post-Wharton careers.) The course as a process is much more focused on the students than many and the most productive experience of it demands that the students both engage with the materials when they prepare and then take an active role in the class discussion. The largest single element in the grading is a substantial term paper on a topic agreeable to both the student and the instructor. (To everyone's surprise, the lack of easy access Mutually Exclusive: MGMT 2250 1 Course Unit