|
Business icons of the century
|
 |
December 26, 1999: 2:32 p.m. ET
Who had the biggest impact on business in the 20th century? A few nominees …
|
NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The who’s who list of the 20th century is made up of legions of industrialists, inventors, moguls, entrepreneurs -- and even a few politicians -- who left a lasting mark on how America does business.
Here’s a selected list of some of the most influential business figures of the past 100 years. (Take the CNNfn.com poll to make your pick of the century’s most notable business personality -- choose one of these nominees or write in your own.)
Warren Buffett
(1930-present)
Buffett’s legendary investment strategy - hunt for bargain stocks, hold them long term and watch the share prices rise - flies in the face of today’s craze for the latest hot IPO or quickly won day-trading gains. But the self-made billionaire and head of Nebraska-based holding company Berkshire Hathaway Inc. will go down as one of the most successful investors of the century, earning the moniker of the "Oracle of Omaha” for his stock-picking acumen.
Walt Disney
(1901-1966)
When this aspiring young cartoonist returned home after serving as an American Red Cross truck driver during World War I, he and a partner set up a movie studio that made short animated films. A film starring his mischievous creation, Mickey Mouse, which featured a novel technology in movies - sound - caused a sensation. This cartoon king went on to produce scores of animated features and other entertainment as well as plan a fantasy amusement park, Disneyland. His savvy merchandising efforts have become a hallmark of his company, which is now one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates in the world.
Charles Henry Dow
(1851-1902)
His surname has become one of the most widely used terms in the American business lexicon. Dow and Edward D. Jones founded the financial news service Dow Jones & Co., which delivered daily updates to Wall Street brokerages. One of those daily reports was a news sheet that was the precursor of The Wall Street Journal, which Dow edited from 1889 until his death in 1902. In 1884, Dow compiled the first average of selected U.S. stock prices. In its current form, the Dow Jones industrial average is the most closely watched barometer of Wall Street’s performance.
Henry Ford
(1863-1947)
Ford, considered the father of the auto industry, launched a business that revolutionized American life perhaps more than any other. He founded Ford Motor Co. in 1903 and five years later introduced the Model T, the first car to target the mass market. Ford became the biggest automobile producer in the world, manufacturing low-cost automobiles by cutting production costs, controlling raw materials and using an assembly line. When his factory workers began quitting because of the monotony of the work and rising production quotas, he doubled wages and offered a profit sharing plan. Fortune magazine this year named him its "businessman of the century”.
Bill Gates
(1955-present)
The world’s wealthiest man and most famous Harvard University dropout, Gates has become the symbol of the high-tech revolution and the new era of young entrepreneurs revolutionizing American business. He and friend Paul Allen began developing computer software in 1975 and went on to form Microsoft (MSFT). The fledgling company licensed its MS-DOS operating system to IBM for use on its first personal computer, the IBM PC, which set the standard for the PC industry, and MS-DOS became crucial to the computer giant’s operations. By the early 1990s, Gates had amassed enormous control over the PC industry. The U.S. government’s antitrust case against Microsoft has brought even more attention to Gates and his powerful corporation.
Alan Greenspan
(1926-present)
It’s become a famous ritual for Fed watchers - look carefully as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan rushes across the street into a Fed policy meeting. If his briefcase is bulky, the theory goes, that foretells a hike in interest rates. If Greenspan’s load is light, that means rates will remain unchanged. More than any other Fed chief, Greenspan’s every move - particularly his famously critic comments about the economy - have been scrutinized by legions of Wall Street observers wondering what he will do to keep inflation in check. Greenspan, in his third four-year term as Fed chairman, has presided over one of the longest peacetime economic expansions in U.S. history. His admirers cite his inflation-fighting policies for helping fuel the expansion, which began in April 1991.
William Randolph Hearst
(1863-1951)
At the turn of the century, this publisher of the San Francisco Examiner and The New York Journal was in a down-and-out battle with another famed publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, fighting for readers by publishing the most lurid articles they could drum up. Hearst’s Journal, through sensational reporting tactics later labeled as "yellow journalism,” wielded enormous influence over American opinion, stirring up public sentiment against Spanish atrocities in Cuba to help spur American involvement in the Spanish-American War in 1898. By 1927, Hearst controlled 25 newspapers published around the country. He also published magazines, newsreels, produced feature films and controlled several radio stations. But Hearst, who built an extravagant castle at San Simeon, Calif., lost much of his fortune during the Great Depression and by 1940 had lost control of his publishing empire. Denounced by some as an ultra-nationalist and isolationist and praised by others as a patriot, he was the model for the title character in Orson Welles’ film "Citizen Kane.”
Steve Jobs
(1955-present)
The founder of Apple Computer Corp., Jobs helped bring about the personal computer revolution. Jobs and a friend, Stephen Wozniak, built their first computer in 1976, when he was 21, putting the machine together in Jobs’ garage. The introduction of the Apple II a year later marked the first mass-marketing of the computer, and the launch of the Macintosh in 1984 further helped alter the face of personal computing. A year later, Jobs was ousted from Apple, only to return in 1997 to find the company he helped create teetering on the brink. Jobs quickly ordered Apple’s team of designers to focus on creating innovative computers that would be easy to use. Within a year Apple was back in the black. Today, Jobs serves as Apple’s interim chief executive officer.
Phil Knight
(1939-present)
Knight, the co-founder and CEO of Nike (NKE), has made his athletic shoe company one of the world’s most recognized brands through ubiquitous advertising and celebrity endorsements. A former runner at the University of Oregon, Knight went on to receive an MBA from Stanford University and worked as a CPA while launching his sneaker business. Almost overnight, Knight changed professional sports by signing athletes such as Michael Jordan to multi-million dollar endorsement contracts. Under the Nike manufacturing concept, shoes are designed in the U.S. and manufactured at low cost in Asia - a system that has fueled criticism from labor rights activists but helped Nike bolster profits.
Ray Kroc
(1902-1984)
In the early 1940s, a one-time real estate salesman and jazz musician named Ray Kroc became the exclusive distributor of a blender that could mix five milkshakes at once. On a visit to a restaurant that used his "multimixers,” Kroc encountered the two owners, the McDonald brothers, who used an assembly-line system to prepare hamburgers, french fries and shakes. Kroc liked what he saw, and set up his own chain based on the owners’ method, paying the brothers a small percentage of his gross receipts. He bought them out entirely in 1961 for $2.7 million, when his company’s sales had reached $37 million. McDonald’s, like Coca-Cola, has become one of the most recognized symbols of American business and spawned numerous fast-food imitators.
John Pierpont Morgan
(1837-1913)
A titan of Wall Street finance and a railroad magnate, J.P. Morgan was one of the leading industrialists of the early 20th century and a preeminent symbol of American capitalism. He began as an accountant with a New York banking firm and later became a partner in the firm Drexel, Morgan and Co., which became the main source of U.S. government financing. A railroad organizer, he arranged a deal between the two largest U.S. rail lines, the New York Central Railroad and the Pennsylvania Railroad, to reduce competition between them. He went on to organize two more railroads and became a member of their boards of directors, amassing great influence over the rail industry. Morgan also consolidated United States Steel, International Harvester and General Electric.
William S. Paley
(1901-1990)
One of the most influential media personalities of the century, Paley founded the Columbia Broadcasting System from a number of radio stations he had purchased in 1928. Paley built the TV and radio network into one of the world’s leading broadcasters at a formative time in the development of television. He encouraged Edward R. Murrow to build CBS’s news division and he produced popular shows such as "I Love Lucy” and "Gunsmoke,” making CBS the dominant TV network from the 1950s through the 1970s.
T. Boone Pickens
(1928-present)
Called "the most hated man in corporate America” by Fortune magazine, this Oklahoma geologist became emblematic of the ruthless "corporate raider” of the 1980s, aggressively pursuing companies such as Gulf Oil and Philips Petroleum. Pickens got his start in business in 1956, borrowing $2,500 and, together with two partners, forming two companies that he later merged to form oil and gas company Mesa Petroleum Co., the launching pad for his hostile takeover attempts.
John D. Rockefeller
(1839-1937)
At the turn of the century, Rockefeller was one of the most powerful men on the planet. In the mid-1850s, he had begun laying the groundwork for his vast empire, sensing the potential of the burgeoning oil production business. He built his first refinery near Cleveland in 1863, then incorporated his business into the powerful Standard Oil Co. (Ohio). By the 1890s, Rockefeller controlled 90 percent of the oil refineries in the country by driving out rivals and buying out competitors. But Rockefeller’s aggressive practices led some states to enact anti-monopoly laws and triggered passage of the federal Sherman Antitrust Act. In 1911, his Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey) was forced to break up after the Supreme Court declared it a monopoly, an episode that has foreshadowed the antitrust case nearly a century later against another powerful U.S. corporation: Microsoft.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
(1882-1945)
The New Deal reforms launched by Roosevelt to bolster the economy after the Great Depression have had an enormous effect on how American business operates and how the federal government regulates it. Among his presidential initiatives with wide-ranging impact on Wall Street were the Truth-in-Securities Act of 1933 and an act establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934. Under his urging, Congress enacted the Social Security Act in 1935.
Charles Schwab
(1937-present)
A pioneer of the discount brokerage concept, Schwab’s firm is one of the most recognized financial names among the general public. Schwab started his business in 1971, originally as a full-service broker, but then shifted to discount brokerage services after the SEC forbade fixed commissions in 1975. Schwab cut its rates while many other brokers raised them. He sold the business to Bank of America in 1983 for $55 million, but then bought it back in 1987 and took it public. Many rivals have duplicated his original concept of carrying out trades for investors who do their own research.
Martha Stewart
(1941-present)
Catering queen and decorating doyenne Martha Stewart has built a cottage industry around her instructions for cooking, crafts and good taste, with a multimedia homemaking empire ranging from book and magazine publishing to a syndicated television program, plus her own line of budget housewares sold through Kmart Corp. and electronic commerce. Stewart learned her business acumen as a successful Wall Street stock broker, then opened a catering business. In the fall of 1999, she raised $129.6 million in an initial public offering of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc.
Frederick Taylor
(1865-1915)
At the turn of the century, the typical solution for any production or operational problem in American business was to "throw more workers at it." Taylor, through his time-motion studies in the steel industry, introduced a new philosophy -- instead of adding workers, businesses should use the ones they already have more efficiently. The result, businesses found, was more production for the same cost, which added up to more profits. Taylor's theories, radical at the time and derided by labor unions, were a foundation for the mass production and assembly line operations that dominated U.S. business growth in the 20th century. His seminal work, Principles of Scientific Management (published in 1911), is still a mainstay of business school curricula and credited by many modern management theorists as a basis for their own work.
Ted Turner
(1938-present)
A cable TV pioneer, Turner bought a financially ailing UHF TV station in Atlanta in 1970 and turned it around within three years. The station, which became known as TBS, gained a nationwide audience on cable television. In 1980, Turner founded CNN, which introduced the ‘round-the-clock news concept and, particularly during the Persian Gulf war, reshaped the way broadcast TV covers breaking national and international events. In 1996, Time Warner Inc. acquired TBS, making Turner vice-chairman of Time Warner. (Time Warner is the parent company to CNNfn.com.)
Sam Walton
(1918-1992)
Sam Walton opened his first discount store in 1962 on the theory that large-scale budget retailers could do well in rural areas with little competition through volume buying and a well-organized distribution system. Walton’s Wal-Mart stores became known for a folksy atmosphere, employee loyalty and low prices, but the Bentonville, Ark-based company -- now the world’s largest retailer -- also was termed a "category killer” for driving out small businesses that can’t compete with its low prices and huge amounts of merchandise.
Jack Welch
(1935-present)
John F. (Jack) Welch Jr., considered one of the best managers in corporate America, joined General Electric in 1960 and became chairman and CEO in 1981. Under his management, he has reshaped the company from an industrial giant into a business conglomerate, which now owns NBC and has seen its share price soar. After Microsoft, GE is the most richly valued company in the world.
Oprah Winfrey
(1954-present)
One of the most successful entertainers of the late 20th century, Winfrey controls a media realm that now includes books, film, music and TV. Winfrey began as a radio reporter and then a TV talk show host, getting her own syndicated program in 1986. The success of "The Oprah Winfrey Show” and Winfrey’s own management of her businesses has made her one of the highest-paid women in the entertainment industry.
Got another candidate in mind? Take CNNfn.com’s poll and see how your choice fares with other readers. 
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
