R. R. Donnelley & Sons was founded in 1864. By it had become the world's largest commercial printer, with 41,000 employees in 22 countries. A privately held, family-run, Chicago-based company for almost a century, Donnelley went public in 1956: the first outsider was named chairman 20 years later. Donnelley had begun printing telephone directories and the Montgomery Ward catalog in the late 1800s, and still generated 60 percent of its revenues from directories,
Catalogs, and magazines ( see Exhibits 1 and 2). Its major customers were telephone operating companies, retail and direct-mail merchandisers, and publishers of books, magazines, and software. In 1995, the company was organized into 38 divisions: the divisions, in turn, were collected into
eight business groups, which were part of three sectors.