Peter F. Drucker on Business and Society

CHAPTER ONE

The New Markets and the New Entrepreneurs

I

THE THIRD MERGER wave to wash over the American economy in this century is receding fast. It leaves behind a landscape changed even more fundamentally in economic structure than its predecessors did, sixty-five and forty years ago.

The first merger wave, the one that reached its climax between 1900 and 1910, was the merger wave of the “tycoons,” with J. P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company as their prototypes. In these mergers a dominant industrialist or financier tried to gain and occupy a commanding height in the economy by obtaining control of a major material ...