Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land
"One of the best approaches is that adopted by Victor McElheny in his definitive account of Polaroid, a model of the genre.For 30 years, first as a science correspondent in Washington and New York, and as director of a fellowship programme at MIT, McElheny pursued the company's founding genius, Edwin Land. Land was a private man...[and] although he and his family were always courteous to their inquiring neighbour, they steadfastly withheld all cooperation.Land was indeed 'the Magellan of modern technology,' exploring several fields and acquiring on the way more patents than any American since Edison. Polaroid was the archetype of the modern innovation-driven company.McElheny shows you the corporate entity, its culture, its joys and its frustrations, by piecing together the many bits of a remarkable jigsaw accumulated over decades, getting, in the process, inside the founder's incessantly creative brain.The craft of corporate biography gets no better."