Seven business innovators and the empires they built.
The pre-eminent business historian of our time, Richard S. Tedlow, examines seven great CEOs who successfully managed cutting-edge technology and formed enduring corporate empires.
With the depth and clarity of a master, Tedlow illuminates the minds, lives and strategies behind the legendary successes of our times:
. George Eastman and his invention of the Kodak camera;
. Thomas Watson of IBM;
. Henry Ford and his automobile;
. Charles Revson and his use of television advertising to drive massive sales for Revlon;
. Robert N. Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of Intel;
. Andrew Carnegie and his steel empire;
. Sam Walton and his unprecedented retail machine, Wal-Mart.
You seem to be in prosperity. Could you lend an admirer a dollar & a half to buy a hymn book with? God will bless you. I feel it. I know it.... P.S. Don't send the hymn-book, send the money. I want to make the selection myself.
Money
Sometime between 1886 and the turn of the century, Andrew Carnegie was visiting his widowed sister-in-law Lucy at the estate his late brother had bought in Dungeness, Florida, just off the coast of the border between Florida and Georgia. Andrew and Lucy got along well. He had named his first blast furnace for the production of pig iron after her (it was the custom in the iron trade to name furnaces after women); and she had named one of her sons (she and Tom were the parents of nine children) Andrew.
During this visit, Lucy was complaining to her bemused brotherin-law that her son Andrew neglected to write her from the college which he was attending. Without missing a beat, Carnegie told her that he could induce a response from the young collegian by return mail. He was sure enough that he bet her $10, a wager to which she immediately agreed.
So Andrew drafted what has been described as a "nice, newsy" letter to his nephew and namesake. He added a postscript that he was enclosing a check for $10 as a gift. He then deliberately left the check out of the envelope.
In no time, young Andrew Carnegie wrote back to his uncle, gratified by the gift but distressed that it had not been enclosed. Carnegie triumphantly presented the letter to Lucy; she paid him the $10 she had lost on the bet, and Carnegie sent that $10 off to his nephew.
Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were the two greatest American businessmen produced during the nineteenth century. They were the two richest and the two most powerful. As individuals, however, it would be hard to imagine two people less like one another. Carnegie was ebullient; until the very end of his life he was incurably optimistic; he was by turns genuinely sincere and hypocritical, intensely realistic and grandiose. Slightly manic, he was a man of enthusiasms which could be painlessly transformed into wholly different enthusiasms. He was capable of physical exertion, but he was also a physical coward. He was loyal; he was fickle. He could love. He could betray.
There was an unbridgeable gulf between the man he wanted to be and the man the business world rewarded him for being. This is a critical attribute of Carnegie's career, and one which he shares with many another businessperson. There can be no better illustration than what Joseph Frazier Wall called "the most traumatic and highly publicized episode in his business career," the bloody lockout of labor at the Homestead plant in 1892.
Carnegie had an insatiable thirst for public approbation, a need which comported ill with his insatiable thirst for money and power. He wrote incessantly, and what he wrote was as liberal and fair-minded as the image he wanted to have of himself. In April of 1886, he wrote in Forum magazine that "my experience has been that trades-unions, upon the whole, are beneficial both to labor and to capital."
Not many employers were publishing words like that in 1886. The month after the April article, the Haymarket "riot" occurred, placing labor and radicalism in the same boat to much of middleclass America. Nothing daunted, Carnegie rushed back into print. In his "Results of the Labor Struggle" in August of 1886, he wrote: "To expect that one dependent upon his daily wage for the necessities of life will stand by peaceably and see a new man employed in his stead, is to expect much. There is an unwritten law among the best workmen: 'Thou shalt not take thy neighbor's...
