Dinosaur & Co: Studies in Corporate Evolution

First published in 1984, Dinosaur & Co captures a critical moment in British economic history, when the nation was widely regarded as caught in a chronic process of decline, known as de-industrialisation’. At that time, many feared that unless this decline was arrested, Britain would eventually reach a position where it could not export enough to pay for the imports needed to maintain a reasonable standard of living. Tom Lloyd, a leading writer on financial matters, refused to take such a bleakly pessimistic view of the British economy. In this thought-provoking analysis of the British business landscape, Lloyd applies the principles of evolution to the world of business and to its population of companies. Writing from the vantage point of the mid-1980s, Lloyd makes a testable prediction that over the following two decades the genus company would be forced by changes in its environment to undergo dramatic adaptation. He anticipates that the most conspicuous result of this adaptive activity would be the emergence of the small, high technology company as the dominant corporate species and the gradual disappearance of the giant companies that dominated the era. Lloyd recounts seven stories of UK companies and the entrepreneurs who ran them, providing anecdotal evidence about how well Britain was equipped to ride out this evolutionary upheaval. In a final section, he draws together the common threads running through the book, considering the implications of his arguments and the evidence, and concluding by discussing the problem of the prevailing anti-business attitude in Britain. Dinosaur & Co offers readers a fascinating historical lens through which to examine the transformation of British business and the lasting questions about industrial evolution and economic adaptation.