UTAH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS < fruitful. I asked Gene Sessions (no relation), a professor of history at Weber State and the author or editor of several books, to join me. He agreed; and we made research trips to San Francisco delving into detailed project histories, internal publications, and other material from the firm’s archives. Gene undertook the laborious task of constructing the history of the company, from its earliest days until 1976, when Utah International merged with General Electric, from the perspective of a professional historian. Next, Ed Littlefield, who remained devoted and indefatigable throughout this effort, James T. (Jim) Curry, former CEO of Utah Development, Co., and I went over this historical document to add a business perspective. Gene then performed the final polishing of the manuscript. Finding a form to reflect the scope of Utah’s activities was a major challenge. A chronological approach worked well when we described the company’s early years; but its rapid diversification into a variety of fields and the major projects it generated—each of which had its own life cycle—was more difficult. Constructing the Hoover Dam was a comparatively brief project, but other major activities such as the Navajo Coal Mine (the nation’s largest), mining iron ore in Peru, building up one of the world’s largest fleets of transport ships, and developing its iron ore and coking coal mines in Australia spanned decades. A chronological approach would have yielded chapters resembling six-layer sandwiches, but a thematic approach meant repetition and recapitulation. After some experimentation, we settled on a combination of both chronological and thematic approaches. It was evident that Utah International’s significant record, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century, reflected the expertise of a senior management team skilled in making decisions under uncertainty. Naturally, the firm stumbled from time to time, but even such “failures” are instructive for the student of business. As Arjay Miller, former vice chair of Ford Motor Company and a member of Utah’s board of directors, commented, “No other firm, to my knowledge, has so successfully shifted from one major business [construction] to another [mining] so smoothly and with such an outpouring of net operating profits.” Utah International: A Biography of a Business tells about this transformation from horse collars to gigantic earth-moving