Kochland : the secret history of Koch Industries and corporate power in America / Christopher Leonard.

Title:

Author:

Leonard, Christopher, 1975-

ISBN:

9781476775388

1476775389

Edition:

First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.

Publication Info:

New York :

Description:

x, 687 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Contents:

Preface: The fighter -- Part 1: The Koch method. Under surveillance ; The age of volatility ; The war for Pine Bend ; The age of volatility intensifies ; The war for Koch Industries ; Koch University ; The enemies circle ; The secret brotherhood of process owners ; Off the rails ; The failure -- Part 2: The black box economy. Rise of the Texans ; Information asymmetries ; Attack of the killer electrons! ; Trading the real world ; Seizing Georgia-Pacific ; The dawn of the labor management system ; The crash -- Part 3: Goliath. Solidarity ; Warming ; Hotter ; The war for America's BUTs ; The education of Chase Kock ; Make the IBU great again ; Burning ; Control -- Appendix: Alphabetical directory of significant characters in Kochland.

Summary:

Uses the extraordinary account of how the biggest private company in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America. The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that's because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way. For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He's a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies have made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates. But there's another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book. Seven years in the making, Kochland reads like a true-life thriller, with larger-than-life characters driving the battles on every page. The book tells the ambitious tale of how one private company consolidated power over half a century--and how in doing so, it helped transform capitalism into something that feels deeply alienating to many Americans today.

Corporate Subject:

Koch Industries -- History.

Subject(s):

Petroleum industry and trade -- United States -- History.

Corporate power -- United States.

Holds: Copies (not including on-order items):

Available:*

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Summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * WINNER OF THE J ANTHONY LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * FINANCIAL TIMES' BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * NPR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 * FINALIST FOR THE FINACIAL TIMES/MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF 2019 * KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOKS OF 2019

"Superb...Among the best books ever written about an American corporation." -- Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail , Christopher Leonard's Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that's because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way.

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He's a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.

But there's another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

Seven years in the making, Kochland "is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard's work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time" (Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire ).

Author Notes

Christopher Leonard is a business reporter whose work has appeared in The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , Fortune , and Bloomberg Businessweek . He is the New York Times bestselling author of The Meat Racket and Kochland , which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

Reviews (4)

Publisher's Weekly Review

American capitalism at its most successful and domineering is at the center of this sweeping history of a much-vilified company. Business journalist Leonard (The Meat Racket) recounts the 50-year growth of Koch Industries, a privately held, infamously secretive conglomerate--with interests in oil refineries, pipelines, lumber, commodities trading, fertilizer, and greeting cards--under CEO Charles Koch, whose libertarian ideology and political donations make him a godfather of the Republican right. Leonard paints Koch as a brilliant businessman whose fanatically entrepreneurial company--employees fervidly embrace his "market-based management" philosophy--thrives on turning underperforming assets into moneymakers. He also probes a very seamy underbelly: an oil-theft scandal and illegal dumping of toxins (the company has since cleaned up its act, Leonard notes), a penchant for gaming government regulations while denouncing the regulatory state, and heavy-handed lobbying and political organizing to stymie climate change legislation. The company's ruthlessness is spotlighted in his accounts of Koch's sometimes violent battles with unions; Leonard profiles workers whose wages and security dwindled while computerized regimentation and staffing cuts made their jobs grueling and unsafe. Leonard's superb investigations and even-handed, clear-eyed reportage stand out. Agent: Lauren Sharp, Aevitas Creative Management. (Aug.)

Booklist Review

Ask the average American what, exactly, Koch Industries does, and they may be uncertain. Energy? Building materials? Paper products? All of the above, and much more. There is hardly an aspect of the American manufacturing and consumer marketplace that can't be linked back to a Koch company. And yet, the full schematic of the infrastructure of this business behemoth is one of corporate America's abiding secrets, and that's just the way the notoriously reticent Charles Koch likes it. His was a vision based on an unrelenting drive, an uncanny market sense, and an often-unscrupulous pursuit of untold wealth. Leonard covers the specific properties of the energy industry that was, and is, the foundation of the Koch family fortune, as well as Charles Koch's singular management philosophy, which propelled the company's massive expansion into a diverse field of products and services. Ultimately, Leonard's intricately developed and extensively researched history of the Koch empire is a colossal corporate biography that sheds important light on this closely guarded enterprise while simultaneously scrutinizing the nefarious underpinnings of American economic policies and practices.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist

Choice Review

Power. Secrecy. Control. And, of course, profit. These words thread their way through Kochland, Leonard's brilliant history of the half-century since Charles Koch inherited leadership of Koch Industries and built it into a colossus. That Leonard (a respected business reporter) does not describe Koch as self-righteous shows his evenhandedness as he details Koch's efforts both to limit government action to the support of private property, especially that of the rich and influential, and to manage employees as if they exist only to generate profits. Koch's massive funding for think tanks, public relations, university programs, and lobbying has influenced national conversations and policies, while teams of lawyers have mitigated legal challenges resulting from environmental and safety violations. Vivid portraits of a wide array of people and their lives, both inside and outside the company, draw the reader through the high-powered, increasingly global drama that still centers on Wichita, Kansas. Leonard excels at concise, accurate contextualization that explains everything from economic and financial intricacies to combat over climate change. Exhaustive research and compelling writing combine in this page-turner, illuminating as much about the US and its recent economic and political history as about Koch Industries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Pamela W. Laird, emerita, University of Colorado Denver

Library Journal Review

Investigative business reporter Leonard (The Meat Racket) provides a far-reaching history from the late 1960s onward of the privately owned Koch Industries and its role in tearing away America's New Deal consensus. Depicting Charles Koch's control of the company as complete, Leonard says Koch, using a system called market-based management, has molded the company to mirror his libertarian philosophy. According to the author, after some acquisition missteps, brushes with government regulators, and a family schism, Koch Industries became successful by playing to its strengths of reacting to change quickly, taking a long-term view, and sourcing information from multiple channels. Leonard details the company's commodities trading, expansion efforts, and union busting. He shows how Koch's political power has intimidated elected officials, elected friendly ones, and influenced both tax and environmental policy to its advantage. VERDICT Based on six years of research and with a fast-paced writing style that interweaves multiple stories, this illuminating work on the exceedingly influential Koch and his company will be welcomed by all readers of business or politics. Leonard does for Koch what Andrew Sorkin's Too Big To Fail did for the 2008 financial crisis.--Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA