Book about major figure in the world of business? any suggestions ?
Irina N asked:
Need a little help with Term project:
Need a little help with Term project:
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Feedback on business books for people all around the world
How about “Starbucked” - subject is Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks. It includes interviews and observations by others in the coffee industry and is a very balanced handling of the subject.
try doing the project about someone from the industrial age in the early 20th century like Henry Ford, Hearst, or the like. Those are pretty interesting stories.
Books about Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, or maybe The Donald?
But business *is* boring, unless you’re learning from what someone else did, or you’re doing it yourself.
Do you need a contemporary figure, or can it be an historical figure?
I’m an old leftist who got politically radicalized in the 1960s, and I’ve mostly looked at historical business figures who had some kind of scandal attached to their name. So I’m not sure my advice would be helpful in terms of your project.
But from the historical standpoint, there are some fascinating business leaders whose lives illustrated many of the good things as well as many of the bad things about business and about capitalism.
1. One example - John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the Standard Oil Company. At one time, he was one of the world’s richest and most powerful people, and his company, the Standard Oil Company, had nearly monopolized the oil producing industry in the USA. He was doing what he could to win the oil business of the world, too. And as a muckraker named Ida Tarbell pointed out in a famous expose of Standard Oil, Rockefeller built his Standard Oil Company through very ruthless methods - effectively squeezing out and financially destroying large numbers of smaller oil company tycoons who refused to cooperate with him.
That’s the negative side of John D. Rockefeller, and there was a lot of negative side. But on the other hand, it can be argued that by enormously centralizing the production of petroleum in the US, Rockefeller “rationalized” the industry and put it on the only kind of business basis that the industry could tolerate in the long run.
Before Rockefeller’s involvement, the oil fields of western Pennsylvania, where the modern oil industry began, were wracked by ruinous competition. Dozens if not hundreds of tiny companies all were trying to drain the same big pool of oil as fast as they could, and their competition caused the price of oil to plunge below the price of the wooden barrels it was shipped in, while a good deal of the oil coming out of the ground was wasted.
By “rationalizing” the industry, by putting the entire production of western Pennsylvania under one corporate umbrella, JD Rockefeller brought the price up, made the production process more orderly, and put the industry on a workable financial basis for the first time. So as Daniel Yergin points out in an excellent history of the oil business, “The Prize,” you can look at Rockefeller as a villain, as Ida Tarbell obviously did, and you can also look at him as an economic hero. He was a bit of both - and as an historical figure, of course, he enormously influenced the development of the world economy we see today.
2. Another very interesting capitalist from American economic history is Andrew Carnegie. The son of a poor Scottish weaver with radical political notions, who was essentially ruined by the mechanization of the British textile industry, Carnegie became a major titan of American industry and came close to monopolizing the steel industry here with the establishment of U.S. Steel. His company was involved in some scandalous labor disputes, notably the violent Homestead, Pa. steel strike of the 1890s. But he also seems to have been ambivalent about the “gospel of wealth” that he followed throughout his life - maybe because of his father’s experiences, he believed in playing the game of business to win, but he also thought that if he died rich, it would be something of a disgrace. And partly with this in mind, he made a point of giving away large sums of money for the establishment of public libraries in the US, with the idea that free access to books might help other poor men to escape from poverty and become economic successes.
In the 1890s, when many other American businessmen were enthusiastic backers of the Spanish American War, Carnegie was unusual in being strongly anti-imperialist, and belonged to an Anti-Imperialist League along with a number of other prominent Americans, including the writer Mark Twain.
I’m not sure, but I think he also opposed US involvement in World War I — if you choose to write about him, you ought to look this up to get the details right. But at any rate, you can see in Carnegie a major business leader who was both a ruthless participant in the scramble for wealth in the so-called Robber Baron era, and also a public figure who protested against what he saw as some of the abuses of that scramble.
The business historian Alfred Chandler has written some about Carnegie (as well as other American business leaders in history) and might provide you with a good introduction to learnign more about Carnegie.
3. Henry Ford is another really interesting figure in American business history. He is famous partly for inventing the modern use of the the assembly line, which allowed him to produce his Model A and Model T cars much more cheaply than his competitors at the time.
Ford also is famous for agreeing to pay workers on his assembly line $5 a day — at that time, a good wage — on the grounds that if his workers earned more, they could then be better customers. Many economic historians call this notion “Fordism,” and credit it with making a big difference in how modern capitalism operates, and making a big difference in how much benefit many modern corporations provide to ordinary people. Before Ford’s experiment, many business owners believed in paying their workers as little as possible, and arguably Ford proved to them that this was not only morally questionable, but also bad business.
So Ford in many respects was an American economic hero.
On the other hand, at around the time of World War I, Ford came under the influence of executives in his employ who saw a sinister cabal of Jewish bankers - the Rothschilds, etc. — as essentially running the world and manipulating global politics. And beginning in the 1920s, in a Ford-owned newspaper called the Dearborn Independent, Ford published a huge volume of anti-Semitic propaganda. His book “The Eternal Jew” was apparently one of the books that ****** drew on in writing “Mein Kampf” in the 1920s and after ****** came to power in the 1930s, Ford eagerly did business in Germany and accepted honors from the **** government there.
Despite his admirable introduction of the $5 day, and despite his success in turning automobiles into goods that even people with relatively low incomes could afford, Ford also became a determined enemy of labor organizers who were attempting to organize the workers at his Dearborn, Michigan plants into unions. During the 1920s and 1930s, Ford employed a security chief named Harry Bennett who became notirious for using brutal and violent tactics against would-be union organizers.
So in the case of Ford, as in the case of Carnegie and Rockefeller, you can see elements of greatness, but also some very negative characteristics at the same time. And like Rockefeller in oil and Carnegie in steel, Ford through his influence on the automobile industry played a huge role in shaping the way American capitalism developed during the twentieth century and up to our own day.
4. Another interesting American capitalist - to my mind - is the English-born utility executive Samuel Insull. Brilliant, and requiring only about 4 hours of sleep a night instead of 8, Insull began his business career as secretary to Thomas Edison, but after Edison lost control of the “Edison General Electric Company” (which became just the General Electric Company), Insull ended up in the electric utility industry in Chicago.
At the time that Insull took over the leadership of Commonwealth Edison Co., which at the same time was a fairly small power company, the electric utility industry in the US mostly operated on a fairly small scale and mostly sold electricity at very high prices to rich people: electricity at that time was a luxury good.
Insull figured out that if the utilities produced power on a much larger scale and sold it at fairly cheap rates to large consumers — government buildings, hospitals, electric streetcar lines and the like — they could greatly reduced the average cost per kilowatt and sell it at much cheaper rates to ordinary consumers.
However, this also required that a given utility would have a monopoly or near-monopoly on electricity generation and transmission in a particular area. And because political radicals at the time were promoting muncipally-owned utilities in many American cities, as opposed to the privately owned monopoliies that Insull was advocating, Insull found it necessary to influence state and national politics to protect the utility industry’s interests.
Insull’s story is a long one, and if you do a project on his you’ll have to research it yourself. But essentially, between about 1895 and 1930, he turned Commonwealth Edison Co. into the basis for an enormous utility holding company empire, one that controlled electric power companies in dozens of different states and in a number of foreign countries.
He also was a pioneer in using corporate campaign contributions to influence politicians of both major political parties, and during World War I he served as a volunter coordinator of a “Committee on Public Information” that used advertising and public relations techniques to sell World War I to the American people, and to get people to buy bonds supporting the war effort. After the war ended, Insull then used these same advertising and PR techniques to advance the utility industry’s interests and to label critics of the industry as “socialists” and “radicals” that all decent people should shun.
And after getting caught up in certain stock market scandals associated with the Wall Street crash of 1929, Insull fled overseas as a fugitive, but was brought back to the US and tried for various financial crimes, although I believe he was acquitted.
When his financial e