Sango Bath (Saint-Gobain) founding and long-term strategy

Abraham Thévart, 1688, pours glass on metal table, rollers, anneal, grind, polish. Saint-Gobain provides windows and mirrors to Versailles. French trade secret in stirring molten glass (Guinand 1798, perfected 1805) holds for ~100 years before British acquire it. MIT departmental tie: alum Kapoor ran Saint-Gobain Northborough research center; funds MadMec.

Plate glass manufacturing, on the other hand — which is what you were asking about — was invented about 1688 by Abraham Thévart, and that became the Saint-Gobain company. Anybody ever heard of Saint-Gobain? Saint-Gobain's got a lot of contacts with this department, in part because one of my former doctoral students, Kapoor, was head of their research center in Northborough, and he started the MadMec and all this other stuff — they fund those things. But Saint-Gobain, in 1688, Abraham Thévart learned to pour glass onto a metal table, spreading it with rollers, annealing, grinding and polishing. That was the beginning of Saint-Gobain.

Origin (1688) as a mirror-glass maker pouring molten glass onto plates and polishing with corundum. Used to make the long-time-horizon company-strategy point; contrasted with U.S. firms of which only five of the 1900 top 100 survived to 2000. Tom's former student is among Saint-Gobain's top 100 managers.

Opener for the long-term-economics framing. Saint-Gobain's 400-year history and "will we be in business 100 years from now" decision criterion is contrasted with the 95% mortality rate of 1900-era top-100 US companies.

There's only one company I know of that is more concerned about long-term viability than about next quarter. Well, plenty of companies worry about more than next quarter, but let me give the extreme example: the French company Saint-Gobain. Saint-Gobain made glass for the Versailles palace four hundred years ago. I have a former student who's risen fairly high in Saint-Gobain. He tells me the question they ask at their top management is, if we go into this business — and they're about a thirty-billion-dollar company, they make construction materials for homes, glass and drywall and things like that — will this help us be in business a hundred years from now? They're very proud of the fact that they've lasted for four hundred years as a company.