Eminent Corporations

I wish this book had been available when we made the very bad mistake of becoming a public company, it is the antithesis of becoming a human company. It confirms my belief that closing down The Harvard Business School would be doing a service to mankind….

If you want to understand why we’re paying the price for decades of economic folly, read this book. The chapter on BP alone is worth it. If you want to ensure that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past, read this book. In these extraordinary tales, Andrew Simms and David Boyle point the way forward, revealing how enterprise can become more socially and environmentally useful.

This book is the essential guide to what went wrong with British business. From BP to Cadbury and Virgin - oil and chocolate to almost anything - these tragi-comic tales reveal how our own fates have become linked to the rise and fall of massive corporations.

Eminent Corporations is a coruscating but amusing account of what goes wrong when corporations grow too large. This book is the last word in why companies should never be allowed to become ‘too big to fail’.

Andrew Simms is Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and a board member of Greenpeace UK. He is the author of the hugely successful Tescopoly and Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?

David Boyle is a fellow of NEF and the author of a series of books about history, social change and the future, including Authenticity: Brands, Fakes, Spin and the Lust for Real Life, The Tyranny of Numbers and The Sum of Our Discontent. Funny Money: In search of alternative cash launched the time banks movement in the UK.