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    Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
    Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
    Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America
    Audiobook23 hours

    Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America

    Written by Christopher Leonard

    Narrated by Jacques Roy

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    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).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateAug 13, 2019
    ISBN9781508296874
    Author

    Christopher Leonard

    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.

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    Reviews for Kochland

    4.5/5

    160 ratings19 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Mind blown!! Amazing case study of economics, psychology and influence... a must read by everyone no matter your political lean.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Extensively researched and highly engaging story of Koch Industries and Charles Koch, a control freak and right-wing ideologue without parallel.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Kochland is a complete smear piece. I was interested in learning more, not being told what to believe.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book about Koch Industry. I always wondered about the Koch brothers when they were mentioned in the media. This book gives a deeper understanding about the Koch philosophy- Basically, let the free markets do their things- Always, take a super long view and be conservative- Great way to run a business. Hope we have more firms like this that can take the long view and create value. Hope Koch shares that value more with community.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book made me want to look into market based management so much more and admire the way Koch plans for the future in decades rather than years. Great story. Greatly told history on the company.
    • 5/5
      Insightful. Half the time you can't tell if the author is approving or condemning of Koch's actions, so that must mean it's a balanced take, right?
    • 4/5
      Fascinating story and well told by the actors. Look forward to the sequel!
    • 3/5
      This book was SOOO much longer than it needed to be, or I wanted it to be. The author introduces all these real life personalities and then they exit and we wonder why we needed their personal history, since none of that history is tied together. I’ll read the abridged version next time.
    • 5/5
      Wow, I was engaged every minute, I didn't want it to end especially considering it ended it's timeline right before the pandemic, an obstacle that I'm sure completely stirred things up in an unprecedented way, would be great to get one more chapter that covers 2020 - 2022.
    • 5/5
      A close look into the Koch brothers and Industries that are not know even if their impact is huge
    • 5/5
      A very insightful deep dive into the history of the Koch empire, great book!
    • 2/5
      This reads as more of a Love letter to Charles Koch than anything else.
    • 4/5
      The Koch brothers are fucking bond villains total evil. Read this book
    • 5/5
      This is an eye-opening book that analyzes and critiques Koch industries business and the political climate from a very empirical standpoint. can be a dense read at times but very eye-opening and educational.
    • 5/5
      In 2 words : absolutely terrifying. The whole book is scary without even trying and offers an eye opening perspective into the deep pockets and playmaking tendencies of corporate America. A highly enjoyable read and excellent narration.
    • 3/5
      Kochland is a thoroughly researched, extensive history of Koch Industries, which is a new angle in the slightly crowded genre of "how the Koch brothers fucked everything up for the rest of us," so it's worth a read if that's a subject that you're interested in. However, I found the structure very frustrating. It's constantly jumping around between topics and times, so I would get invested in learning what the outcome of a particular situation was and would then have to sit through five chapters about other stuff before finally getting the resolution, at which point I'd forgotten some of the details from the first chapter about the thing and would have to page back to look at it again. Also, Part II is almost entirely about commodities trading and although the author is trying very, very hard to make it interesting, there's only so much you can do to make that appeal to general audiences.

      I was also extremely disappointed to see a book from one of the big publishers with multiple spelling errors. It may be that these were only in the ebook version, but it does feel like part of a trend of sloppily edited books that I've been noticing in the past several years, across genres and publishers.
    • 3/5
      This is a long book - the hardcover edition runs 574 pages, while the audiobook (which I listened to) is over 23 hours long. It tells the story of the rise of Koch Industries.

      To tell the story of the growth of Koch Industries, the author goes into many individual tales to illustrate the turns in that growth. As someone who spent 30 years working in corporate America, in Fortune 500 manufacturing companies, there were many many things discussed that are similar to what I saw at the companies I have worked with. The fixation on Edward Deming and his quality / continuous improvement practices are part of the foundation of Lean Manufacturing which is very common throughout industry. When the company made mistakes they learned from them and modified their approach to the benefit of the corporation - for example, when early emphasis on productivity and continuous improvement led the company into quality and environmental issues that garnered negative attention and large regulatory fines, Koch shifted to a "100% compliant, 100% of the time" approach to keep the company's reputation intact and to keep regulatory issues at bay. Again not an uncommon story across industry. Even the much discussed Koch "market based management" seems to be an amalgam of America's long-running push for entrepreneurialism, coupled with reliance on activity based costing within a corporate setting, designed to make managers feel more like business owners. This approach has been quite common in corporate America since the late 70s.

      What's different is Charles Koch. He kept his company private and kept the profits plowed back into the company early on to ensure growth. He emphasized growth and pursued a "trader's philosophy" of seeking out and exploiting "holes" in markets where his firm with it's private knowledge of it's own activity could leverage those opportunities. The author makes the case that Koch was an early entrant into the mergers and acquisitions game and that as a private company willing to play "the long game" they had distinct advantages in that game. All of these things set Koch Industries apart and played a role in contributing to it's success.

      What's really different about Charles Koch are his corporate-libertarian beliefs, and the political power he has amassed to pursue those beliefs, which he has done with much success. This story is told at the very end of the book and the story is one of a methodical concentration of political power that is quite chilling.

      While the book is clearly well researched and holds your attention throughout I gave it three stars because I think it could have been just as effective without being as long. I learned alot about Koch Industries and Charles Koch that I didn't know, and I think the book is worth reading. Just be ready to invest the time into it.
    • 5/5
      I lived in Wichita, KS for three years in the late 1950s. I think I recall that Fred Koch the founder of Koch Industries had an office building on Douglas street in downtown Wichita. Fred was one of the founders of the John Birch Society. The book is about his children: Fred, Charles, William and David. Son, Charles became the CEO of the privately held, Koch Industries and very active in political action organizations such as Americans for Posterity. I enjoyed reading this 574 page book and learning about the influence of the Koch family on our country.
    • 4/5
      If you want a clearer understanding of how Trump taxes help the super rich, this is the book. If you want to study how American economy works, read this book. I found the book very informative as I watched the impeachment hearing. Many of the politicians involved were mentioned in the book under how Kock got into political activities. Well worth the time to read and understand part of the economy in the USA