Masters of Enterprise
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From the early years of fur trading to today's Silicon Valley empires, America has proved to be an extraordinarily fertile land for the creation of enormous fortunes. Each generation has produced one or two phenomenally successful leaders, often in new industries that caught contemporaries by surprise, and each of these new fortunes reconfirmed the power of fanatically single-minded visionaries. John Jacob Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt were the first American moguls; John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan were kingpins of the Gilded Age; David Sarnoff, Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, and Sam Walton were masters of mass culture. Today Oprah Winfrey, Andy Grove, and Bill Gates are giants of the Information Age. America has again and again been the land of dizzying mountains of wealth.
Here, in a wittily told and deeply insightful history, is a complete set of portraits of America's greatest generators of wealth. Only such a collective study allows us to appreciate what makes the great entrepreneurs really tick. As H. W. Brands shows, these men and women are driven, they are focused, they deeply identify with the businesses they create, and they possess the charisma necessary to persuade other talented people to join them. They do it partly for the money, but mostly for the thrill of creation.
The stories told here -- including how Nike got its start as a business-school project for Phil Knight; how Robert Woodruff almost refused to take control of Coca-Cola to spite his father; how Thomas Watson saved himself from prison by rescuing Dayton, Ohio, from a flood; how Jay Gould nearly cornered the gold market; how H. L. Hunt went from gambling at cards to gambling with oil leases -- make for a narrative that is always lively and revealing and often astonishing. An observer in 1850, studying John Jacob Astor, would not have predicted the rise of Henry Ford and the auto industry. Nor would a student of Ford in 1950 have anticipated the takeoff of direct marketing that made Mary Kay Ash a trusted guide for millions of American women. Full of surprising insights, written with H. W. Brands's trademark flair, the stories in Masters of Enterprise are must reading for all students of American business history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Readers who can imagine a favorite history professor sitting across the table talking about the evolution of American business will have a pretty good idea of the style, substance and approach taken by Brands, a history professor at Texas A&M. Relying entirely on secondary sources, Brands picks 25 businesspeople and shows how they are all the spiritual descendants of one another. While John Jacob Astor and Cornelius Vanderbilt would have difficulty understanding the technology behind the companies Andy Grove and Bill Gates built, they would have completely understood their business models. Brands constantly relates what all 25 people profiled have in common: they work hard; they identify with their work; their desire for success is almost tangible. Perhaps most important, they know exactly what they are trying to create. Fans of any of the business people included here are not likely to learn anything new about them, but that isn't the author's point. It is their connection to one another that matters. Brands does an excellent job at showing that there is a natural evolution to the way American business has developed.
