In its early years, the disk drive industry was led by a group of large-scale, integrated firms of the sort that Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., observed in his studies of several of the world's largest industries. The purpose of this history is to explore why it was so difficult for the leading disk drive manufacturers to replicate their success when technology and the structure of markets changed. The most successful firms aggressively developed the new component technologies required to address their leading customers’ needs, but this attention caused leading drive makers to ignore a sequence of emerging market segments, where innovative disk drive technologies were deployed by new entrants. As the performance of these new-architecture products improved at a rapid pace, the new firms were eventually able to conquer established markets as well. As a consequence, most of the integrated firms that established the disk drive industry were driven from it, displaced by networks of tightly focused, less integrated independent companies.

Over the past decade, numerous studies have counselled managers to attend to the fourfold task of increasing quality, developing leadership, building teams, and shaping the organizational culture. Today, these recommendations and the once-exciting examples of the “vanguard” corporations (O’Toole, 1985) who first advanced the frontiers of practice appear to be the staples of conventional wisdom. We’ve heard the sermon, yet, it would be hard to contend that the challenges posed by the four-fold agenda have been universally mastered or implemented across the corporate landscape.

The United States Sentencing Commission’s guidelines for the sentencing of organizations found guilty of violating federal laws recently became effective. Dramatically increased penalties are possible under these gudelines, but so too is a substantial reduction in the penalties imposed on organizations that have an effective program in place to prevent and detect violations. This provides corporations with a tremendous new incentive in inaugurate organizational ethics audits both to avoid violations in the first instance and to reduce the penalty imposed in the event that a violation occurs. We argue, however, that there have always been very good reasons for organizations to conduct such audits, which emphasize the identification of the organizational factors that create incentives for unethical behavior. Corporate ethics programs initiated without reference to such factors cannot reasonably be expected to be effective in improving a company’s internal ethical environment.

The editor of the Business History Review has asked me, as the oldest “new” economic historian, to make a comment on the 1993 Nobel Prize award in Economics—a comment directed to “real” historians—which I am not—and especially to business historians, of whose product I have been an often satisfied—though occasionally restless—consumer. Needless to say, I find this to be an assignment difficult to fulfill. Praise will be put down to “trendy” insincerity and criticism to jealousy. Nor will Historians miss the irony in all the excitement generated by the award within a sub-tribe whose main charge has been to minimize the biographical, the “human” element in historical explanation. The self-styled “new” economic history movement, christened half-jokingly as early as 1968 by an ingenious neologism, “Cliometrics,” was now, twenty-five years later, awarded what is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Science in Honor of Alfred Nobel, in the persons of two of its very keen and most prolific, best-known, energetic, and indomitable practitioners, Douglass C. North of Washington University (St. Louis, Mo.) and Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago (Chicago, Ill.). Surely there is some lesson in marketing in all this to make business and entrepreneurial historians sit up and take notice.