Pulitzer Prize Winners

"I wake up angry every morning and start reading. Then I'm furious."

"Increase on productivity and decrease in unit costs (often identified with economies of scale) resulted far more from the increases in the volume and velocity of throughput then from a growth in the size of the factory and plant."

"There are very few scholars who can legitimately say that they founded a discipline. Al Chandler is one of them. Prior to Chandler, business history tended to be the study of individual businesses or entrepreneurs with little theoretical importance. To paraphrase one criticism of history as "damn fact after another," business history tended to be "damn business after another." Histories came out in conjunction with anniversaries of companies: They were highly celebratory, sometimes informative, but not very useful to practitioners. Studies of entrepreneurs were just hagiographies.Chandler developed for business history a coherent theoretical framework built around his "3-pronged investment" in manufacturing, marketing, and management, and the notion of "organizational capabilities." The firm was something much more than a network of individual contracts or the vision of its entrepreneur. The people inside firms learned, developed effective routines, and innovated. While we have sophisticated theories of competition in economics, the cooperative teamwork inside firms is just as important. Chandler stressed the importance of organizational capabilities, technological innovation through R&D, problem solving, knowledge, and continuous learning—investment in human capital and technology that only firms could generate. Chandler placed the issue of managerial coordination squarely in the center of understanding economic life."

"In most British enterprises senior executives worked closely in the same office building, located in or near the largest plant, having almost daily personal contact with, and thus directly supervising middle and often lower-level managers. Such enterprises had no need for the detailed organization charts and manuals that had come into common use in large American and German firms before 1914. In these British companies, selection to senior positions and to the board depended as much on personal ties as on managerial competence. The founders and their heirs continued to have a significant influence on top-level decision-making even after their holdings in the enterprise were diminished."

"Effective coordination of throughput required the placing of vigorous management controls over these despots."

"The minutest details of cost of materials and labor in every department appeared from day to day and week to week in the accounts; and soon every man about the place was made to realize it. The men felt and often remarked that the eye of the company were on them through the books."

"The swift victory of the railway over the waterway resulted from organizational as well as technological innovation. Technology made possible fast, all-weather transportation; but safe, regular, reliable movement of goods and passengers, as well as the continuing maintenance and repair of locomotives, rolling stock, and track, roadbed, stations, roundhouses and other equipment, required the creation of a sizable administrative organization. It meant the employment of an administrative command of middle and top executives to monitor, evaluate, and coordinate the work of managers responsible for the day-to-day operations. It meant, too, the formulation of brand new types of internal administrative procedures and accounting and statistical controls. Hence, the operational requirements of the railroads demanded the creation of the first administrative hierarchies in American business."

"Men's mind and abilities grow and expand with use of responsibilities."

"Modern factory management (but not it must be stressed the management of large modern multi-unit enterprises) had the genesis in the United States in the Springfield Armory."

"Multi-unit business enterprise replaced small traditional enterprise when administrative coordination permitted greater productivity, lower costs, and higher profits than coordination by market mechanisms."

"In the 1850s and 18605 the modern commodity dealer who purchased directly from the farmer and sold directly to the processor took over the marketing and distribution of agricultural products. In the same years the full-line, full-service wholesaler began to market most standardized consumer goods. Then in the 1 870s and 188os the modern mass retailer — the department store, the mail-order house, and the chain store — started to make inroads on the wholesaler's markets."

"Complete accountability is established and enforced throughout; and if there there is any error committed, it will be discovered on a comparison with the books and can be traced to its source."

"To maintain and continue a high volume of flow demanded organizational innovation. It would be achieved only by creating an administrative hierarchy operated by many full-time salaried managers."

"The systems and controls developed at the armory were as critical to the development of what became known as the 'American System of Manufacturing' as the new metalworking machinery and machine tools."

"The market remained the generator of demand for goods and services, but modern business enterprise took over the functions of coordinating flows of goods and services through existing processes of production and distribution, and of allocating funds and personnel for future production and distribution. As modern business enterprise acquired functions hitherto carried out by the market, it became the most powerful institution in the American economy and its managers the most influential group of economic decision makers. The rise of modern business enterprise in the United States, therefore, brought with it managerial capitalism."

"Strategy can be defined as the determination of the long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals"

"He had a feeling that somewhere in the course of her life something had happened to her, something terrible which in the end had given her a great understanding and clarity of mind. He knew, too, almost at once, on the day she had driven up to the door of the cottage, that she had made a discovery about life which he himself had made long since . . . that there is nothing of such force as the power of a person content merely to be himself, nothing so invincible as the power of simple honesty, nothing so successful as the life of one who runs alone. Somewhere she had learned all this. She was like a woman to whom nothing could ever again happen.”"

"Truth may be found in the heart of a philosopher but seldom in the figures of a statistician; it is far too delicate a thing to be pinned down to columns of numbers on ruled paper."

"She had come long ago to understand that loneliness was the curse of those who were free, even of all those who rose a little above the level of ordinary humanity."

"I was brought up to look upon falling in love as something natural...something that was pleasant and natural and amusing. I've been in love before, casually, the way young Frenchmen are...but in earnest, too, because a Frenchman can't help surrounding a thing like that with sentiment and romance. He can't help it. If it were just ... just something shameful and nasty, he couldn't endure it. They don't have affairs in cold blood the way I've heard men talk about such things since I've come here. It makes a difference, Mrs. Pentland, if you look at things in the light they do. I've learned now, and it is a thing which needs learning, the most important thing in all life. The French are right about it. They make a fine, wonderful thing of love."

"I have no thesis except that people get a very raw deal from life."

"She had turned her back upon them all and no awful fate had overtaken her; instead, she had taken a firm hold upon life and made of it a fine, even glittering, success; and this is a thing which is not easily forgiven."

"Much of the material is controversial, but if controversy means the stimulation of thought and ideas, so much the better. It is only thus that the citizens of a republic may protect themselves from the evils threatening them from within their borders as well as those which threaten from beyond."

"In its wisdom, the law said: No man shall be the judge of his own cause. [...] The law, nothing but reason, took judicial notice of man's nature, of how far his conscience could guide him against his interest. For the slake of others, for his own sake, the law would not let him be led into temptation. In its wisdom, the law aimed only at certainty, could not, did not, really hope to get there. This science, as inexact as medicine, must do its justice with the imprecision of wisdom, the pragmatism of a long, a mighty experience. Those balances were to weigh, not what was just in general, but which might be just between these actual adversaries."

"He's an amazing man … When he was 12, one of our schoolmasters said: "My boy, you are a literary genius. My strong suggestion is to go to America. They will appreciate you there." Over the years I've read what he's written that never got published, and I always said it still holds. He is a literary genius. Also the most nonjudgmental decent guy. He forgives."

"If there was a circle, I was never a part of it. I prowled the periphery."

"If I went to the pub lunch and cleared my head with a pint surely there would be an insight, a flash of inspiration. Surely. My money went over the bar. The pint came back. Nothing else."

"I don't want to sneer, but old habits die hard. It's the resentment. Not even anger. Just resentment. I shake my head over the things that concern them, that middle-class stuff, it's too hot, it's too cold and this is not the toothpaste I like. Here am I after three decades in America still happy to be able to turn on the electric light or reach for a towel after the shower."

"I wanted to be the Great Liberating Teacher, to raise them from their knees after days of drudgery in office and factories, to help them cast off their shackles, to lead them to the mountaintop, to breathe the air of freedom. Once their minds were clear of cant, they’d see me as a savior."

"Remember, if this is your world, you're one of them, a teenager. You live in two worlds. You're with them, day in, day out, and you'll never know, Mac, what that does to your mind. Teenager forever. June will come and it’s bye-bye teacher, nice knowin' you, my sister's gonna be in your class in September. But there’s something else, Mac. In any classroom, something is always happening. They keep you on your toes. They keep your fresh. You'll never grow old, but the danger is you might have the mind of an adolescent forever. That's a real problem, Mac. You get used to talking to those kids on their level. Then when you go to a bar for a beer you forgot how to talk to your friends and they look at you. They look at your like you just arrived from another planet and they're right."

"I thought some day I'd run into June and find my tongue and we'd go to a movie together. I'd choose something foreign with subtitles to show how sophisticated I was and she'd admire me and let me kiss her in the dark, missing a dozen subtitles and the thread of the story. That wouldn't matter because we'd have plenty to talk about in a cozy Italian restaurant where candles flickered and her red hair twinkled back and who knows what that would lead to because that was as far as my dreams would go."

"No, young man. No jokes here. There's a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You're the teacher. You say you went out with a sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish."

"They know it's a forty-minute showdown, you versus them. … They have you by the balls and you created the situation, man. You didn't have to talk to them like that. They don’t care about your mood, your headache, your troubles. They have their own problems, and you are one of them."

"I ate the sandwich."

"I hoped I might become a debonair, hard-drinking, poetic Irishman like him. I'd be a New York character. I'd set the table on a roar and dominate the bars of Greenwich Village with song and story. At the Lion’s Head Bar I drank whiskey after whiskey to give myself the courage to be colorful. Bartenders suggested I slow down. Friends said they didn't understand a word coming out of my mouth. They lifted me out of the bar and into a taxi, paid the driver and told him to drive nonstop till I reached my door."

"... you, the privileged, the chosen, the pampered, with nothing to do but go to school, hang out, do a little studying, go to college, get into a money-making racket, grow into your fat forties, still whining, still complaining, when there are millions around the world who'd offer fingers and toes to be in your seats, nicely clothed, well fed, with the world by the balls."

"I can't go back. The past won't go away in this family."

"I put my books in a bag because I don't care anymore if people in the subway look at me admiringly. I can't hold on to a girl, I can't keep an office job, I make a fool of myself in my first literature class and I wonder why I left Limerick at all. [...] I could have read Jonathan Swift to my heart's content not giving a fiddler's fart whether he was a satirist or a seanachie."

"I'd like to stand up in those classes and announce to the world that I'm too busy to be Irish or Catholic or anything else, that I'm working day and night to make a living, trying to read books for my courses and falling asleep in the library [...]."

"But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me."

"I like the lemon meringue pie but I don't like the way Americans leave out the 'r' at the end of a word."

"Why can't this priest go back to Los Angeles and leave me alone? Why is he taking me to lunch when he should be out there visiting the sick and the dying? That's what priests are for."

"Why is it the minute I open my mouth the whole world is telling me they're Irish and we should all have a drink? It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen."

"I know it wasn't the dinner wine that had me against the wall in a fit of remorse. It was the thought of my mother being so lonesome she had to sit on a street bench, so lonesome she missed the company of a homeless shopping bag woman. Even in the bad days in Limerick she always had an open hand and an open door and why couldn't I be like that to her?"

"If you don't settle down to something very soon you’ll be forty and wondering where your life went. She pointed to the people all around us, happily married, productive, settled, content, having children, developing mature relationships, looking to the future, going on nice vacations, joining clubs, taking up golf, growing old together, visiting relatives, dreaming of grandchildren, supporting their churches, thinking of retirement. I agreed with her but I couldn't admit it. I gave her a sermon on life and America. I told her life was an adventure, and maybe I was living in the wrong century."

"Sing your song. Dance your dance. Tell your tale."

"There’s no use saying anything in the schoolyard because there’s always someone with an answer and there’s nothing you can do but punch them in the nose and if you were to punch everyone who has an answer you’d be punching morning noon and night."

"It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head."

"I don't know what it means and I don't care because it's Shakespeare and it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words."

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."