Synopses & Reviews
The First Big Business
"We hear no more the clanking hoof, And stage-coach rattling by; For the steam-king rules the traveled world, And the pike is left to die."
--Rev. John Pierpont Morgan, the grandfather of rail titan J. P. Morgan
In the fall of 1829 the "Stephenson Rocket," spewing thick clouds of black smoke, raced along the new iron tracks of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway and hurtled over the finish line at the unheard-of speed of twenty-nine miles an hour. A Britisher, George Stephenson, had vanquished all rivals this day, in a race so alluring that Americans crossed the Atlantic by steamship to watch it. Flush with victory, the illiterate inventor invited Fanny Kemble, the darling of the London stage, for a ride, and she quickly accepted. Fresh from starring in "Romeo and Juliet" to packed houses at Covent Garden, the twenty-one-year-old actress wore a bonnet over her brunette locks as she stood behind the hulking locomotive, its vertical smokestack ascending from the front of its round horizontal boiler, like a giant black "L." "The engine was set off at its utmost speed, thirty-five miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies," Kemble wrote later. "You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was; the motion as smooth as possible too. I stood up, and with my bonnet off drank the air before me." The trip made her fall "horribly in love" with both Stephenson and his locomotive.
The United States would soon experience a similar enthrallment, which would infect businessmen and the general populace with railroad fever. Nineteenth-century America was a nation of entrepreneurs, a fact crucial to understanding this watershed in the country's history.Raised in a land of individual opportunity, free from the whims of arbitrary authority, farmers and merchants for two centuries had earned their living by taking risks for the promise of profit. Before the Iron Horse, reliance on the flesh-and-blood equine had limited how people related to time and space. A rider could carry a small load five to ten miles a day over dirt paths, defining the radius within which a farmer could sell his produce before it rotted. So a farmers' market was a local market. Neighbors were the customers. The farmer usually carried his own crops to the point of sale. And if another entrepreneur agreed to carry the farmer's crops to market for him, they could haggle face to face about the shipping price and shake hands on it.
Railroads Sprout Like Daffodils
That intimacy of one-to-one trading was about to end. The American engineers and mechanics who had traveled to England for Stephenson's celebrated race now scurried to their workshops, to apply the new technology. Merchants in Charleston, South Carolina, seeking to halt their city's economic decline, hired Horatio Allen to build them a six- mile railroad to draw business from the interior. In 1830, the "Best Friend of Charleston" became the first steam locomotive to haul a train of cars in America. Soon, eastern cities were vying to attract the new railroads, which began to sprout like daffodils in April. By 1835, eleven states had granted charters over a thousand miles of track to two hundred fledgling operators.
The pulsating black beast had an arresting effect on both sides of the Atlantic. The editor of the "Cincinnati Enquirer" returned from an 1846 excursion on a new section of railroad, toreport seeing "herds of cattle, sheep and horses, stand for a few seconds to gaze at the passing train, then turn and run a few rods with all possible speed, stop and look again with eyes distended, and head and ears erect, seemingly so frightened at the tramp of the iron horse as to have lost the power of locomotion." From London, Charles Dickens described an early locomotive's approach: " A dull light advancing, quickly changed to two red eyes, and a fierce fire, dropping glowing coals; an irresistible bearing on of a great roaring and dilating mass; a high wind, and a rattle--another come and gone."
That this new mode of travel was literally unnatural unsettled some. One writer, describing the "Moral Influence of Steam," wondered whether by fostering effortless travel the railroad would "disturb the moral economy of the world, by opposing that great law of the universe, which makes labor the portion of man, and condemns him to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow." The French novelist Victor Hugo complained that "the flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks of red or white." When a Vermont railroad began running trains on the sabbath in the 1850s, the state legislature made sure that conductors read a passage of Scripture to the riders.
Yet few could help but marvel at the impressive display of engineering achievement the railroads represented and the promise they held for industrial growth. "Steam is annihilating space," one author gushed, in an oft-repeated theme. But not everyone was so enthused. Henry David Thoreau warned darkly: "We do not ride upon the railroad; it rides upon us." Yet few could disagree with William MakepeaceThackeray: "We who have lived before the railways were made belong to another world."
The Early Development of Railroads
Three phases mark the early development of American railroads. In the mid-nineteenth century, several major companies constructed basic routes, led by the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania. Then came the land-grant era, as the congressional bounty of free land led to westward expansion, overbuilding, and rampant competition, as rivals competed to buy up profitable feeder lines. By the mid-l890s, the third stage began, as the remaining titans sought to swallow up each other.
Rapid Expansion of Basic Routes
Long before land grants to railroads, canvas-covered Conestoga wagons had snaked westward over primitive dirt paths filled with settlers bent on charting a future that would be uniquely theirs. But some worried how a fledgling democracy could hold together while becoming so widely separated. Then came the railroad and the telegraph, which writers such as Walt Whitman, who called these innovations "the pulse of the continent," saw as the tie to unify the nation's far-flung people. So the burgeoning early railroads seemed to have a nobility of purpose--a heavy burden to place around the neck of men who viewed themselves as mere capitalists. The railroad journalist Henry V. Poor set the idealists straight in l852 by observing that railroads were "merely commercial enterprises, and are. . . to be conducted upon commercial principles, which never sanction an enormous sacrifice for a contingent good."
Before the Civil War, the railroads had their way with the American people, who were entranced by this invention that changed theway they lived. The railways' presence or absence caused major cities to rise or fall in relative prominence. Philadelphia's city fathers invested heavily in the Pennsylvania Railroad, fearing commercial competition from New York City, whose gentry had committed a stunning $23 million toward building the New York Central. So rapidly did the railroads grow that by the l850s, the Pennsylvania employed more people than the state in which it was located. Such relative size, together with government's hands-off attitude toward business, gave railroads greater power than that of the states to affect people's lives, thus making railroads corporate states unto themselves. Indeed, when the railways spread west, companies created states out of whole cloth and then, predictably, controlled those states' policies. Such a railroad Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a judicial being, which has no judicial sovereign."
For railroads offered the public more than the state could: wider markets for b
Synopsis
Let's face it. In this chaotic world of teams, matrix management, and horizontal organizations, it's tougher than ever to get things done. How do you lead when you're not the one in charge? How can you be effective when joint action is needed? You need an edge in order to reach solutions and effectively work with others.
Getting It DONE is your edge.Cowritten by Roger Fisher, an acknowledged authority on negotiation, Getting It DONE is the book to help you make things happen when you're not the boss. Fisher is the man who redefined the way the world negotiates with his megabestseller Getting to YES. Now he has teamed up with management consultant Alan Sharp to move beyond negotiation and give us the definitive book on collaboration.
Introducing the technique of lateral leadership, Fisher and Sharp take collaboration to the next level and offer surefire ways to help anyone get better results from coworkers. Gleaned from their decades of experience as negotiators, mediators, and consultants to organizations, Getting It DONE gives you the practical tools you need to influence your peers and bosses and get the results you seek.
Getting It DONE explains how you can best help a group formulate a clear vision of the results they want, suggest a course of action that you can all implement, and learn from past experiences. It describes how to ask questions effectively, offer ideas that will be heard, and influence the actions of others through your own behavior. The invaluable skills of lateral leadership enable you to achieve the ultimate goal--successful collaboration:
- Diagnose: identify the causes of a problem in order to solve it
- Prescribe: create an approach that deals effectively with differences
- Lead: engage others to implement the plan
A simple guide with profound impact, Getting It DONE will help people effectively manage themselves and others well into the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
Let's face it. In this chaotic world of teams, matrix management, and horizontal organizations, it's tougher than ever to get things done. How do you lead when you're not the one in charge? How can you be effective when joint action is needed? You need an edge in order to reach solutions and effectively work with others.
Getting It DONE is your edge.Cowritten by Roger Fisher, an acknowledged authority on negotiation, Getting It DONE is the book to help you make things happen when you're not the boss. Fisher is the man who redefined the way the world negotiates with his megabestseller Getting to YES. Now he has teamed up with management consultant Alan Sharp to move beyond negotiation and give us the definitive book on collaboration.
Introducing the technique of lateral leadership, Fisher and Sharp take collaboration to the next level and offer surefire ways to help anyone get better results from coworkers. Gleaned from their decades of experience as negotiators, mediators, and consultants to organizations, Getting It DONE gives you the practical tools you need to influence your peers and bosses and get the results you seek.
Getting It DONE explains how you can best help a group formulate a clear vision of the results they want, suggest a course of action that you can all implement, and learn from past experiences. It describes how to ask questions effectively, offer ideas that will be heard, and influence the actions of others through your own behavior. The invaluable skills of lateral leadership enable you to achieve the ultimate goal--successful collaboration:
- Diagnose: identify the causes of a problem in orderto solve it
- Prescribe: create an approach that deals effectivelywith differences
- Lead: engage others to implement the plan
A simple guide with profound impact, Getting It DONE will help people effectively manage themselves and others well into the twenty-first century.
About the Author
Alan Sharp has been a senior manager in the eletronics and chemical industries. He is now a management consultant based in England and a director of Coverdale Scanas, a Danish consultancy firm. He has trained many top executives in business and governmental agencies in building effective teams.Alan Sharp has been a senior manager in the eletronics and chemical industries. He is now a management consultant based in England and a director of Coverdale Scanas, a Danish consultancy firm. He has trained many top executives in business and governmental agencies in building effective teams.