“Make money, be proud of it; make more money, be prouder of it.” – Henry R Luce, 1967
So begins a special report that Time magazine published on “Builders and Titans: The 20 Most Influential Business Geniuses of the Century” in its December 7, 1998, issue. The article is worth reading by anyone in business with the ambition to be better. Rental dealers who want to get ahead in their chosen field of endeavor could do well to take a lesson or two from some of these 20 men and women who prospered so in their chosen fields. Each leader was unique—uniquely gifted, idiosyncratic and, yet, as the lives and accomplishments of these 20 people were laid out briefly by Time, certain words kept being repeated and certain themes emerged about the characters, personalities and business philosophies of these variously famous, infamous and virtually unknown over-achievers.
The words that the Time authors kept repeating were “visionary,” “passionate,” “iron-willed,” and “optimistic.”
Each of those descriptions merits some brief comment.
VISIONARY can mean dreamy, but in the context of business leadership it means “having foresight and imagination.” People like David Sarnoff, Walt Disney and Ray Kroc were able to look into the future accurately and then plot the future course of their businesses to take maximum advantage of what they saw.
David Sarnoff, longtime CEO of RCA, foresaw the commercial possibilities first of radio and then of television. Charles Merrill, founder of Merrill Lynch & Co., foresaw the growth of business chains and underwrote several of the most successful ones, riding their expansion to great wealth. Akio Morita, CEO of Sony, foresaw an international economy before most people and pushed his company into a leadership role of international commerce.
PASSIONATE means affected by intense feeling. The Time magazine 20 business greats all felt great passion about what they were doing. They were not indifferent. They did not hedge their bets in their enterprises. Dale Carnegie was quoted as saying, “Put all your eggs in one basket, then watch that basket.” These business legends all felt deeply about the rightness of what they were doing and how they were doing it. Occasionally, such passion led to judgment errors as when Henry Ford insisted on producing only one model car, the Model T, in one color, black, instead of diversifying at a time when he controlled the U.S. car market. The passion he felt for his car and doing business his way allowed General Motors to gain a foothold by offering car customers some variety.
But even when they stumble or fall, these titans prove that greatness demands a passionate commitment to one’s vision and work. It is the energy such passion unleashes that allowed these men and women to climb to the top of their endeavors.
They were all IRON-WILLED, these business legends. Critics may have called them hard-headed, obstinate, savage, controlling or bullying, but what they possessed was the will power to carry through despite whatever obstacles that appeared in the way of their vision. Most of these business people fought hard battles along the way to success. There were battles with competitors or colleagues or established ways of doing business or all three. What they all possessed was a “never-quit” attitude that pushed them on in spite of opposition and over initial failures to ultimate success.
A part of this characteristic was a willingness to risk everything they had on their vision. Walt Disney did it with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Juan Trippe, head of Pan Am airlines, did it with his persistent efforts to offer affordable tourist air travel at a time when air travel was for the rich. Of Bill Gates, Time quotes Rob Glaser, a former Microsoft executive: “He’s relentless. Darwinian. Success is defined as flattening competition, not creating excellence.” In a similar vein, Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, is quoted as having said of competition in the fast-food industry: “This is rat eat rat, dog eat dog. I’ll kill ’em and I’m going to kill ’em before they kill me.” David Sarnoff, CEO of RCA during the initial days of television, is quoted as saying, “Competition brings out the best in products and the worst in people.”
Almost every single one of the 20 giants was described as OPTIMISTIC. Optimism is an inclination to put the most favorable construction on events and to anticipate the best possible outcome. In the piece on the founder of McDonald’s, Time quotes Ray Kroc on the beginnings of McDonald’s: “I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.” Without this inveterate sense of hopefulness, most of these titans either would have feared to launch their endeavors to begin with or else would have lost courage and foundered along the way.
Optimism is not necessarily cheerfulness, as many of these giants were hard-nosed, flinty and ultra-competitive. But they all thought that they were doing the right thing and were confident that their efforts would succeed.
Beyond the descriptions of character offered in the Time articles, there was some good business advice offered by these 20 legends. Many of these business people’s guiding principles involved their view of customers. A.P. Giannini, who forged modern-day banking in the United States held as a guiding principle that “there is money to be made [doing business] with the little guy.”
Giannini could have made a lot of money when he built Bank of America, the largest bank in the United States when he died in 1949, but he purposefully didn’t. He died with less than $500,000 because he feared great wealth “would make him lose touch with the people he wanted to serve.”
“Money itch is a bad thing,” he once said, “I never had that trouble.” While Giannini’s eschewal of great wealth was the exception, rather than the rule, note that greed was not one of the attributes associated with Time‘s 20 greatest.
Acknowledging the supremacy of the customer in the Ray Kroc profile, the Time author noted of the once dominant Howard Johnson’s chain, “You ignore the clientele at your peril.” The same author quoted Joe Bauer, a restaurateur, “There is no victory over a customer” Jeffrey Bezos, founder and CEO ofAmazon.com, is quoted as saying, “I tell my employees they shouldn’t be afraid of our competitors, they’re not the ones who give us money. They should be afraid of our customers.” These are words of great wisdom for the rental industry; rental chains of some prominence have been built during the ’80s and ’90s on just such customer-oriented philosophies.
As iron-willed and self-confident as these business leaders were, they also were, most of them, wickedly bright, possessed an insatiable curiosity and a love of learning. Many mastered their domains by knowing more than the next guy. Sam Walton, the founder of WalMart, and the man many say is responsible for changing the face of retailing in America, was an active student of the retail trade. The article on Walton recalls how all family vacations included time for him to make store visits, so he could continue to fine-tune this company. Willis Carrier, inventor of air conditioning, said, “I could never be an expert golfer. That, too, is education — to learn where one lacks aptitude.”
The Time piece makes for inspirational reading. Rental dealers doubtless want to be the best that they can be in their chosen callings. The Time authors write succinctly and admiringly of those few who actually were the best at what they did in business this century. We can all take lessons from their good example.
Ed Winn III is APRO’s legal counsel.
