Not just of the conglomerate but all of the post-war corporations.

They were seen as too big, too bloated, too focused on nothing, in fact.

The lack of focus was their problem.

They needed to be retrenched back to their core competencies.

Now we think of this, most especially, with the rise

of something called the BCG or Boston Consulting Group growth matrix.

That gave us the term cash cow.

That is an old venerable part of a business

that produced cash but didn't grow that much.

What the BCG matrix told us was now, instead of putting that cash back

into the old business, we should find something new.

We should find something new in which to invest.

Something that would grow and produce more cash in the future.

And those parts of the company that produce no cash and no growth

should be cut off.

And so in this we see the carving up of these old companies,

whether it's LTV, which was just financial chicanery,

or companies like General Electric, one of the most important companies

in America and one of the largest employers in both the post-war

and through the 1990s.

General Electric had gone in whole hog with the conglomerate

craze of the 1960s.

And in the 1980s it began to think how can it become smaller.

Jack Welch, one of the most celebrated CEOs of the 1980s famously

said, "If we're not going to be one or two, we should be out."

And General Electric began to downsize all of its operations,

becoming a company that focused on just a few core areas.

Those few core areas, medical imaging technology,

very high expensive jet engines, and of course consumer finance.

And it's in this movement of the conglomerate

into this new, more narrowly defined corporation, the lean corporation,

the corporation that focused on just one little part of the supply chain, that

minimized inventories, that was flexible,

but did not try to bring everything into itself,

we see a new kind of corporation.

That's more market oriented, that does not

try to minimize risk or minimize exposure to the world.

In fact this lean corporation depends on suppliers.

Suppliers that can provide goods as needed through all those container

ships.

And it's in this lean corporation that we

see the origins of a new kind of labor regime,

of downsizing and flexible work, as well as a new kind of capital regime

that focused less on retained earnings and more about dispensing

all the profits back to shareholders.

This shareholder value then is part of how

we understand this new relationship of labor and capital after the 1970s.