A current awareness resource for students & faculty members in Business & Economics
IDCH for job hunters & strategic planners... history informs the present!
Published
by Mark Bodnar
It can be hard to promote a history resource in a discipline such as Business where the focus is usually on the future. However, a good company history can help you understand the many strategic choices (successful or not) an organization has made, plus how those choices have shaped the company.
Such information is invaluable for...
job hunting: displaying a depth of knowledge about your target company and its competitors during a job interview is generally a good thing;
strategic planning: understanding how key companies in an industry have evolved will help you understand the pitfalls and potential of the industry overall, and help you map out an informed strategy for the future; and
analyzing investments: there's no substitute for stock market and company fundamentals when it comes to investing, but such numbers don't always provide the full story -- What steps and missteps has a company taken as it has grown? How have the personalities of its key people affected its strategy and its profits?
All that to help you see the value of our online International Directory of Company Histories (IDCH) - almost 200 cross-searchable volumes containing brief histories on a gazillion (approx) companies. For a quick taste, check out this tiny subset of the entries available:
As you can see, the coverage of our IDCH is international in scope and includes private, public, government, and nonprofit organizations, the sole listing requirement being that each organization is "a leading influence in a particular industry or geographic location. "
