I met Al Chandler in late 1962 (or early 1963), when he visited the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, as a guest of Associate Dean Clarence Walton. Chandler gave a seminar, based on his new book Strategy and Structure. I was then at Columbia Business School, completing my (and Frank Ernest Hill's) archive-based history of Ford Motor Company's international operations, which was my first book. As my next project, I was seeking to write an overall history of US business abroad. I wanted to figure out whether patterns I had found in my research on Ford abroad were typical (or atypical) of US corporations, in general, as the latter expanded worldwide.