Enterprise On The Edge Of Industry

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This auto/biographical business history is based primarily on the life of one working man, Stan Dibben, who fashioned an entrepreneurial mindset to contend with the industrial realities of the second half of the 20th century. It is also in part a biography of that man’s great friend, Andrew Mustard. A study of their lives and of the numerous businesses they were associated with, worked for and established, shows that the shift in industry from small to large, from entrepreneurial to corporate, is not simply a shift in scale. It is a shift of mindset, outlook, attitude to others – a shift not all choose to make and for good reason. Stan Dibben and Andrew Mustard, and their families, are united by a serendipitous yet multi-generational experience of, and resistance to, coporatisation. Theirs were lives on the edge of industry. Rarely has it been possible to study multiple industries in multiple countries and multiple generations over 100 years, to uncover the challenge of business growth and the times when owners decided against it – as well as the implications of their decisions for them and their employees. This story is helped considerably also by a biography of another of Stan’s friends, and greatest business associate, the Japanese business leader Noboru Torii. Our purpose in this book is to apply the ideas of the Anglo-German economist E.F. Shumacher in telling the otherwise unobservable entrepreneurial business history that is embedded within the personal life-stories. In so doing, we question the economic nature of our lives in the twenty-first century”

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