Bloomberg Businessweek December 23, 2019
at MIT, back when formal management education was a novelty. Business
Week was quick to recognize the huge importance of the shift. From the
article “Can You TeachManagement?”inApril1952:“Thedayofthetruly
professional general management man isn’t here
yet, but it’s not far away.” (The acceptance of pro-
fessional women managers would take quite a bit
longer.) Indeed, the rise in incomes and the amount
of leisure time enjoyed by an increasingly subur-
ban middle class meant money was to be made in
newindustriessuchasentertainmentandtravel,
and professional managers-without-portfolio
became a prized commodity. The magazine would
play a modest part in their development, espe-
cially after the introduction of our annual business
school ranking in 1988.
Business Week’s coverage continued to evolve.
A November 1951 issue examined the poten-
tial impact of color television. In August 1952 the
headline of the magazine’s cover story on the air-
lineindustry’splantoshifttojetsasked,“HowBig
CanIt Get?”A July 1955 coverstorydetailedthe$17million—yes, $17 mil-
lion—betWaltDisneyProductions was taking to open the original Disneyland
inAnaheim,Calif.
AndanAugust 1958 cover story predicted that American Express Co.’s
newnationalcreditcardwould be “perhaps the closest thing yet to a ‘uni-
versal’cardadequateforall the needs of a traveler or stay-at-home host.”
Thatwasalmosta decade before BankAmericard (now Visa) expanded out-
sideCaliforniaandthefounding of Master Charge (now Mastercard), but
BusinessWeekreaderswere already well aware of the potential for plastic
tochangeAmericanconsumption forever.
Meanwhile,ourwritersand editors increasingly spent time tracking broader
societalshiftsthatwouldhave an indelible impact on business. One of the
moststrikingwastheinclusion of women. The magazine had put a group of
femaleworkers on its cover in May 1942 to illustrate the
phenomenon of women entering the workforce to fill in for
menduringWorldWarII. Soona fewfemaleentrepreneurs
wouldappearonthe cover, starting with Hazel Bishop, the
chemist-turned-businesswoman who developed the first
nonsmearable lipstick, in 1951 and Tupperware saleswoman
BrownieWise three years later.
Thencame our 1975 cover “The Corporate Woman: Up
theLadder, Finally,” showing a confident General Electric
Co.vicepresident, Marion Kellogg, seated in a black chair.
The11-page package by our Corporate Women depart-
menteditors provided an inside look at the discrimination
andslights, overt and subtle, that women experienced as
theyclimbed the ranks in male-dominated businesses.73● 1950
Elliott Bell becomes
Business Week’s chairman
of the board of editors
after serving for seven
years as New York state’s
superintendent of banks.
Bell was said to have been
Thomas Dewey’s choice
for Treasury secretary
if he’d been elected
president in 1944 or ’48,
leading to the joke that
Business Week was edited
by “the greatest living non-
secretary of the Treasury.”
● 1950s
The magazine is printed 150 miles north of New York in the Albany suburb of
Menands. Page layouts are sent up on a New York Central train out of Grand Central
Terminal; galleys—long strips of newsprint—come back on another train. Before the
blessing of computer-generated rubber type, “the proofreading, cutting, and adding
and fitting took most of a day, with fixes and emendations transmitted by telephone”
to Menands, recalls retired editor Eph Lewis.
● 1956
A cover story promises
that boron is “poised for
a burst of exciting new
uses.” Longtime staffer
Jack Dierdorff, who
started that week, later
called the cover image
“an artistic disaster even
by the standards of 1956.”● 1954
Tupperware’s top saleswoman, Brownie
Wise, graces the cover.
▼ 1950s