11. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. (1875-1966)
General Motors’ Empire Builder
If the name Alfred P. Sloan Jr. is recognized today, it’s likely because of his Sloan-Kettering Institute, which does cancer research, or the Sloan School at MIT, or the Sloan Foundation education grants. But in the world of business, the Sloan legacy lives on in the professional discipline that came to be known as management. He invented it during a remarkably long stint at the helm of General Motors, from 1920 to 1946, during which he built it into the world’s largest enterprise. Sloan was the first to systematically organize a big company. It was reflected in GM’s production of cars for every taste and pocketbook: from Chevrolet to Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac. He did so using a maximum of interchangeable parts to turn out, in effect, five different automobiles at the cost of what competitors would spend to produce one or two. Late in the century, of course, the GM model hasn’t fared well. But it is still the world’s biggest auto maker. And for most of its history, GM has been a masterpiece of industrial organization--a symbol, admirers said, of the success of capitalism itself. Sloan laid out the story in “My Years With General Motors,” a business autobiography that has become a classic. He wrote it during retirement, but withheld it from publication until all the other principals were dead, by which time he was 88. Sloan studied electrical engineering at MIT, then worked for a roller bearing company that his father partly owned. Sloan was put in charge of the company at age 26. He continued running the firm until it was purchased by GM.
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12. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
Trustbuster
President Roosevelt (1901-09) revived the Sherman Antitrust Act by filing trustbusting cases against 44 major corporations. The first big case came in 1902 when the Roosevelt administration took on J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Co. for its monopoly of Western railroads. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the case in 1904; Northern Securities was dissolved. Roosevelt also filed an unfair business practices case in 1906 against John D. Rockefeller’s vast Standard Oil Co.; the company later was broken up into 33 companies. Roosevelt, appalled by unsanitary conditions in the meat industry portrayed in Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle,” also pushed Congress to pass the Meat Inspection and Food and Drugs acts in 1906, the basis of modern consumer protection legislation. He also actively campaigned for the Panama Canal treaty, arguing that access through Central America was critical to speeding the U.S. naval fleet between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The U.S. spent $380 million to build the Panama Canal, in the process shortening by 7,000 miles the shipping distance between the Eastern and Western coasts of the U.S. (170 million short tons of freight now pass through the Panama Canal annually). Roosevelt was the first president to fly in a plane; in 1908 his War Department signed a deal with the Wright brothers to buy its first military airplane.
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13. George C. Marshall (1880-1959)
Marshall Plan
Architect of the successful $13-billion U.S. economic aid package to Europe after World War II, which dramatically helped rebuild a war-ravaged economy. In 1947, as Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, Marshall outlined his economic recovery plan to combat Europe’s chronic food and housing shortages and unemployment. Marshall’s motive was political and economic. Europe was impoverished and rebuilding its economy was critical to slowing the growth of communism, he reasoned. Marshall also wanted Europe to again be a valuable trading partner of the U.S. This flood of economic and technical aid to 16 European nations in 1948-52 boosted their gross national product by 25%. During World War II, Marshall was the U.S. Army’s chief of staff, responsible for mobilizing 8.2 million soldiers. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
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14. John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913)
Financier and Power Broker
Morgan was the nation’s most powerful business figure at the start of the 20th century. He controlled U.S. Steel Corp., General Electric, AT&T; and International Harvester as well as numerous other corporations by arranging loans through his investment banking company. In 1901 Morgan bankrolled the creation of U.S. Steel, formed in part by purchasing Andrew Carnegie’s steel business. U.S. Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation, with 65% of the nation’s steel industry. After the 1907 stock market panic, Morgan led a group of bankers who bailed out major banks and corporations, but this prompted concerns about the “House of Morgan” and its deep influence across the U.S. economy. This led to the creation in 1913 of the Federal Reserve System to serve as our centralized banking authority.
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15. Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) AND Orville Wright (1871-1948)
Airplane Inventors
The Wright brothers designed, built and successfully flew the first airplane in 1903. Their invention would alter lifestyles and commerce worldwide. Self-taught tinkerers, they ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. In 1896, they read about German Otto Lilienthal, who died during a glider flight, prompting their interest in aviation. Unlike other would-be aviators of the period, the Wrights realized the value of warping, or twisting, wings for lift. They also built wind tunnels to test different designs. In winter, they closed their bike shop and traveled to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to fly their own innovative gliders. After three years of glider flights, the Wrights built a biplane with a homemade gas motor. A coin flip determined who flew first. Orville Wright made the first successful airplane flight on Dec. 17, 1903, before five witnesses. Flying distance: 120 feet. Flight time: 12 seconds. For years afterward, press coverage of the Wrights was scant and doubting. The Wrights continued refining their plane designs in anonymity. In 1908, Wilbur Wright flew a plane around the Statue of Liberty, cementing their celebrity. The Wrights struck a deal that year to sell a plane to the U.S. War Department. The brothers were soon overwhelmed by legal battles to protect their invention. By the time of Wilbur’s death, other plane makers had come up with more sophisticated designs. Orville sold his stake in the Wright Co. in 1915.
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16. Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924)
Father of Communism
Lenin established the first Communist nation in 1917, which triggered a wave of socialist states from Asia to Europe and created a series of totalitarian, government-controlled economies closed off from the Western world for most of this century. Lenin was enthralled by the writings of German philosopher Karl Marx. Marx wrote that free enterprise would destroy itself as business owners became rich at the expense of workers too poor to buy the goods they produced. These workers would revolt, he said, take over factories and establish an efficient government-planned system to ensure jobs and create a new classless society. Lenin decreed that such a revolution would take place only if professional revolutionaries led it. After Czar Nicholas II gave up the throne, Lenin returned from exile in 1917, with Russia beset by strikes and food shortages. His party’s slogan was “Bread, peace, land.” Lenin abolished private land ownership, required peasants to turn over most of their production and set in place a rigid state bureaucracy to run Russian industries. He formed the Soviet Union with neighboring republics in 1922. After Lenin’s death, the Soviet Union remained intact for decades. But communism was a woefully inefficient economic model, as state-regulated prices failed to reflect the true costs of goods and workers had no incentive to be productive. In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, most Communist-run states had essentially gone bankrupt.
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17. Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) AND Mikhail Gorbachev (1931- )
Communist reformers
Deng and Gorbachev were Communist leaders who triggered vast economic change, ultimately opening the Chinese and Russian markets to foreign investment and world trade. After Mao Tse-tung’s death, Deng turned the world’s most populous nation into a major economic power by lessening rigid government control over businesses, opened the way for privately owned firms and encouraged foreign investment in China. Last year, China’s exports to the U.S. climbed to $57 billion. Los Angeles-area firms export some $2.4 billion in goods annually to China. Deng also led negotiations for the return of Hong Kong to China, while planning to maintain the colony’s booming capitalistic economy. Gorbachev took power in 1985 with the Soviet Union’s economy severely weakened after decades of Cold War spending. He shifted from a centralized, planned economy to a more decentralized, open system. His reforms, called perestroika, made Gorbachev popular overseas. Despite his reforms, the Soviet economy continued to falter and the added freedoms triggered a wave of social upheaval. In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and Gorbachev accepted it. Two years later, most of the Soviet republics broke away and Gorbachev resigned as the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist. Under Boris Yeltsin, the Russian economy has run amok and some estimate 50% of its economy is tied to organized crime. Gorbachev has embraced capitalism somewhat, though, appearing in a Pizza Hut commercial last year.
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18. OPEC
Oil Crisis
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries dramatically altered the world’s economy in the 1970s by suddenly raising oil prices. This led to gasoline shortages and triggered a worldwide wave of inflation. It also prompted industries and governments to conserve energy, develop alternative energy sources and produce more fuel-efficient products--a movement that continues to this day. OPEC was formed in 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela (OPEC now has 11 members) to have a unified front in negotiating prices with foreign oil companies who had operations in their countries. But as demand for oil kept rising, OPEC shifted the balance of power in October 1973 by raising oil prices 70%. OPEC nations were using oil as a political weapon in response to the Arab-Israeli war. In December 1973, OPEC raised crude oil prices by another 130% and placed embargoes on U.S. oil shipments, which led to long lines at the gas pumps. OPEC kept boosting prices and by 1980 a barrel of crude oil cost $30, compared with $3 in 1973; some predicted that oil prices would hit $100. But Western nations turned to coal, nuclear and solar power as alternative sources of energy and businesses became more efficient and reduced their energy needs. As Western nations weaned their dependence on imported oil, OPEC in 1983 cut its prices. Since then, efforts by OPEC to set production quotas have often failed as some member countries ignored the limits.
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19. Eiji Toyoda (1913- )
Led Japanese Car Exporting
Toyoda, a family scion, helped lead Toyota Motor Corp.’s aggressive push into the U.S. auto market. Toyota’s exports inspired other Japanese car makers to follow, and their collective success dramatically altered the American auto industry, reducing the dominance of GM, Ford and Chrysler. Toyota also influenced assembly line manufacturing techniques with its emphasis on production efficiency and quality control that turned out cars with few defects. Toyota entered the American market after an executive, Shotaro Kamiya, visited the U.S. and noted the popularity of the Volkswagen Beetle. Toyoda backed the plan and in August 1957 the first Toyota was unloaded in Los Angeles: a pokey, four-door sedan called the Toyopet Crown. Toyota’s U.S. sales in its first year: 288. Last year: 1.4 million. The first Toyotas sold here handled poorly when driven over 60 mph and tended to overheat in the mountains or desert. But Toyota kept investing in new models while refining its quality-control production methods. By the late ‘60s, its Toyota Corolla had developed a reputation for reliability, low cost and fuel efficiency. The 1973 OPEC oil crisis cemented demand for Toyota’s economy cars and left Detroit’s auto makers scrambling to make fuel-efficient models. Toyoda served as Toyota president and chairman; he retired in 1994. His cousin started the company as a loom factory; in 1935 it began making cars. Toyota Motor is now the world’s third-biggest auto maker with $92 billion in sales; its American work force numbers 28,000.
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20. John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
Basis for Government
Economic Intervention
Keynes was the most influential economist of this century. He advocated that governments play an active role to stabilize their economies by using spending programs to reach full employment and to avoid depressions. In the last 60 years his theories have been adopted by most Western nations. Early in his career, Keynes worked for the British Treasury. His most important work, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936), was published during the Depression. Until then, most economists believed that a free market would ultimately lead to prosperity. But this laissez-faire approach failed in the Great Depression. Instead, Keynes wrote about the impact of total spending in an economy--from businesses, public agencies and consumers. Consumers were limited by their income, he said, and did not trigger business cycles; rather, the keys to business cycles were spending by businesses and government agencies. Thus, in a depression, governments had to radically boost public spending--to the point of running a deficit--to stimulate a rise in demand for goods, to boost sales and to lead to full employment. Keynes was knighted in 1942. After his death, Keynesian theory evolved into a series of government interventions to stabilize the economy, such as boosting taxes and interest rates in boom periods to slow the economy and avoid inflation. However, in the 1970s, as high inflation and unemployment spread across Western nations, the Keynesian theory lost some of its gloss.
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21. Drs. Donald Ross (1893-1981) and Clifford Loos (1882-1960)
Fathers of Managed Health Care
Ross and Loos invented managed health care at their Los Angeles clinic in 1929 as a way to provide affordable coverage for employees of the Department of Water and Power. The Ross-Loos Clinic then charged $1.50 a month for a full range of medical services, including hospitalization, transport by ambulance and physical therapy. Their idea, called prepaid health care, was viewed as leftist and threatening by the mainstream medical establishment and the two doctors were expelled from the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. But Loos, a California-born surgeon, and Ross, a native Canadian who had worked as a doctor for the Canadian-Pacific Railroad, fought the expulsion and were reinstated by the American Medical Assn. “This form of medical service is here to stay, and there will be great expansion along this line,” Loos predicted in 1931. Their clinics did grow, and by 1935 enrollment exceeded 42,000. In 1933, another pioneering doctor, Sidney Garfield, set up a similar plan for construction workers building the California Aqueduct. Garfield was later hired by steel magnate Henry J. Kaiser to provide health care for his employees, and the Kaiser-Permanente health system was born. Today, 23 million Californians are covered by various managed-care health plans. The Ross-Loos clinics have had several owners, most recently MedPartners Inc., which exited the managed-care business after years of losses and sold the clinics to KPC Medical Management of Long Beach.
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22. Harry Warner (1881-1958) and Jack Warner (1892-1978)
Pioneers of Sound Films
Harry, Albert, Samuel and Jack Warner released the first talking picture, which revolutionized the film industry and turned Warner Bros. into one of the dominant studios during Hollywood’s golden age. The Warners bought a nickelodeon in 1903 and in the next two decades distributed and produced films. In 1923 they formed Warner Bros. Harry, who was president, realized they were overly dependent on independent film distributors, so he bought a distributor and eventually owned 500 theaters. Sam pushed the company into sound films. Bell Labs had developed a sound technique, which other studios passed on. But Warner Bros. worked with Western Electric to develop a sound-on-disc process for synchronized sound. In “The Jazz Singer” (1927), Al Jolson spoke some dialogue, and audiences went wild. The next year, Warner Bros. released the first complete sound film, “Lights of New York,” which cost $40,000, but grossed $2 million. Jack was film production chief and Warner Bros. thrived in the Great Depression by turning out gangster films and other features faster than its rivals, while paying its stars (Jimmy Cagney, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart) less than other studios. Warner Bros. declined in the ‘50s with the advent of TV and a government-ordered sale of its theaters. Jack was the last remaining brother when he sold his stake in 1967. Warner Bros. is now part of Time Warner.
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23. Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957)
Movie Studio Magnate
For three decades, Mayer ran Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and developed a stable of movie stars that turned MGM into the most celebrated film studio of its time. Born in Russia, raised in Canada, Mayer was running a junk business in Boston when he bought a struggling movie theater in 1907. Within a few years he’d built a regional theater chain. He then began producing films and in 1918 moved to Los Angeles to open Louis B. Mayer Pictures. By 1924 Loew’s theater chain had bought three studios to create MGM and put Mayer in charge as vice president and general manager. The studio thrived in the ‘30s as MGM turned out films with expensive production values while Mayer created a storied roster of stars from Greta Garbo to Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Judy Garland. Mayer’s taste for patriotic, escapist, family films led to the Andy Hardy series, as well as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.” At once ruthless and patriarchal, Mayer had 6,000 employees and at his peak was the nation’s highest-paid executive at $1.25 million a year. As television began to take hold and MGM’s fortunes dropped, Mayer was replaced in 1951 by his former assistant Dore Schary. Several years later, Mayer failed in an attempt to win back control of the studio.
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24. Thomas Watson Sr. (1874-1956)
IBM’s Visionary Leader
Watson turned a mediocre key-punch card counting firm into one of the world’s most dominant corporations. The IBM name became synonymous with “Big Blue,” the nickname for Watson’s army of well-trained salesmen who followed his strict dress code of dark suits and white shirts. In 1914, Watson became president of Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co., which made clocks, scales and tabulating machines. Watson saw its future in the machines that calculated data by sorting key-punch cards. A former salesman, Watson built a highly motivated, well-paid sales staff that emphasized customer service, not just product sales. The company sold higher-priced, large, custom-built tabulating machines to government agencies and bigger companies. By the mid-1920s, it had changed its name to International Business Machines, and began selling the first electric typewriter. IBM benefited greatly from the growth of the federal bureaucracy during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. In 1935, IBM sold calculating machines to the new Social Security Administration. Also in the ‘30s, Watson expanded IBM sales overseas. During World War II, IBM built the first large digital computer for the military. When Watson died in 1956, IBM had grown to 60,000 employees--from 235 in 1914. Watson’s son, Thomas Watson Jr., became IBM president in 1952 and led the company’s big push to develop computers for the business market. By the late ‘60s, IBM controlled 65% of the U.S. computer industry. Watson Jr. retired in 1971.
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25. Akio Morita (1921-1999)
Japanese Industrialist
Morita’s Sony Corp. led the vanguard of Japan’s dominance of the consumer electronics industry. Morita and Masaru Ibuka started their firm in 1946 with $500. Their first product was a rice cooker, which failed. Morita pushed the company into making new electronic goods. Its first big seller in Japan was a tape recorder. In 1955, the company started making compact radios, using newly developed transistors instead of bulky vacuum tubes. By 1958, the company changed its name to Sony, derived from the Latin word for sound. In the late ‘50s, Morita went to New York to begin selling Sony products in the U.S. He believed in the value of brand recognition and refused to build products for other companies under contract. He also invested heavily in technology, looking to develop innovative products. In 1968, Sony began selling a state-of-the-art color TV set called the Trinitron, which helped cement its reputation for excellent products. A decade later, Morita pestered his engineers to come up with a tape player that could be used while exercising and in 1979 the Sony Walkman was introduced. Another technological development came in 1982--with Philips Electronics--when the compact disc was introduced, creating a new standard for music products.
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26. Ray Kroc (1902-1984)
Fast-food Pioneer
Kroc turned McDonald’s into a worldwide hamburger chain and triggered the explosive growth of the fast-food industry. In the early ‘50s, Kroc was selling machines that mixed five milkshakes at once; one customer owned eight mixers. So Kroc visited the place, a San Bernardino drive-up hamburger restaurant owned by Dick and Mac McDonald. The McDonalds had transformed their eatery into a speedy, assembly-line production center, selling French fries, shakes and burgers at such a high volume that they cut hamburger prices to 15 cents from 30 cents each. Impressed, Kroc set out to copy their format and build a fast-food chain and agreed to pay the McDonalds half a cent for every $1 in gross sales. Kroc opened his first McDonald’s in Illinois in 1955. By 1960, 228 McDonald’s were generating $37 million in sales. The next year, Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million. Kroc began by setting up franchises outside urban areas, benefiting from the middle-class move to suburbia. Kroc also advertised heavily to promote traffic at “the golden arches.” In time, the Big Mac, Egg McMuffin and Chicken McNuggets became part of the American lexicon. Kroc was a stickler for details and uniformity, requiring restaurant operators to attend a 19-day training course at his “Hamburger University” so that food at all McDonald’s tasted the same. Even chef Julia Child lauded their French fries. By 1970, McDonald’s restaurants were in all 50 states. Today, there are 25,000 McDonald’s in 117 countries. Estimated 1999 revenue for McDonald’s Corp: $13.4 billion.
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27. William Levitt (1907-1994)
Suburban Housing Developer
Levitt built the first residentialtract-housing subdivision after World War II in Levittown, N.Y. Levitt transformed the housing business by using prefabricated parts and teams of workers, who in assembly line fashion moved from house to house to do their jobs, which cut costs. Levitt’s family set up a construction firm during the Depression, and after World War II he took advantage of the nation’s housing shortage and a federal program that offered mortgages to veterans. From 1947 to 1951, Levitt turned 1,200 acres of Long Island potato farms into a community of 17,450 nearly identical two-bedroom homes that sold for about $8,000 apiece. Levitt shipped pre-cut parts to the sites for quick assembly and contractors with specific jobs--windows, roofs, doors, heating systems, etc.--shifted from house to house. This construction technique saved about $1,000 per home. Levitt also built community swimming pools, schools and recreation areas. His construction method was widely copied. But Levittown quickly became a target for sociologists who complained that, by selling so many homes in a narrow price range, Levitt had created an overly homogeneous community.
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28. Theodore Vail (1845-1920)
Telephone Pioneer
In the early 1900s, Vail built AT&T; into the nationwide, omnipotent, technologically advanced phone company that would endure until its government-ordered breakup in 1984. Vail worked at Bell Telephone (then AT&T;’s parent) from 1878 to 1889, but he retired when investors didn’t support his idea for creating a nationwide phone system. In 1907, after the death of his wife and only child, Vail returned at age 62 to run AT&T; at the request of financier J.P. Morgan. AT&T; was heavily in debt and the phone industry was chaotic. Independent companies had more than 50% of the telephone market, and some communities were served by rival companies whose phone systems were not connected. With Morgan’s help, Vail set out to build a monopoly by buying up financially troubled independents. He also spent heavily to upgrade AT&T;’s phone service and technology, which became a worldwide model. If Vail couldn’t buy a rival firm, he’d charge them a fee so they could access AT&T;’s increasingly sophisticated long-distance network. In 1915, the first transcontinental phone line was established when Alexander Graham Bell in New York talked with his old colleague Thomas Watson in San Francisco. That same year, AT&T; sent the first radio message over phone lines across the Atlantic. When Vail retired in 1919, AT&T; had more than 10 million phones in service, compared with just 3 million in 1907.
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29. Ralph Nader (1934- )
Father of the Modern Consumer Movement
Nader’s efforts led to seat belts, air bags and padded dashboards as standard equipment in cars, plus federally mandated automobile recalls. “Nader’s raiders” have investigated and hounded all manner of industries, from meatpacking to pesticides, banking to baby food. Nader also led a successful campaign for airlines to reimburse consumers when they overbook seats. His support helped pass California’s Proposition 103 auto-insurance rebate in 1988. Nader made his reputation with the publication of “Unsafe at Any Speed” in 1965. His book criticized the auto industry for what he considered a profits-before-safety mentality and focused on the dangerous handling of General Motors’ Chevrolet Corvair. GM hired private detectives to follow Nader; this revelation embarrassed GM at congressional hearings. Nader’s book led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. He set up the nonprofit Public Citizen Inc. and other public-interest groups, staffed largely by college students and recent grads. Nader ran for president on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and got 2% of the vote in California.
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30. George Meany (1894-1980) AND Walter Reuther (1907-70)
Union Builders
The pair created a unified national labor front. Meany and Reuther rose from blue-collar jobs to achieve prominence in the U.S. labor movement during its heyday in the 1950s. They helped institute eight-hour workdays, health benefits and pensions for millions of workers. Meany, a plumber, was elected business agent of his local union in 1922 and became president of the New York State Federation of Labor in 1934, where he helped promote the passage of dozens of pro-labor bills. He became secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Labor in 1939 and moved up to the presidency 13 years later. Reuther, a tool-and-die maker, became shop foreman in a Detroit automobile plant before being fired in 1932 for his union activism. After three years of travel in Europe, he returned to organize auto workers during a period of extreme anti-union violence. He was elected president of the United Automobile Workers of America in 1946, and in 1952 became president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In 1955, Meany and Reuther merged the two groups to create the labor behemoth, the AFL-CIO, with Meany as president and Reuther as vice president. Despite disagreements in later years over politics and civil rights, the two jointly continued to lead the federation until Reuther died in a plane crash in 1970. Today, the AFL-CIO represents 68 unions with 13 million members.
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31. Juan Trippe (1899-1981)
International Aviation Pioneer
Trippe created the first international airline with Pan American World Airways and he popularized air travel. Using his inheritance, Trippe bought World War I surplus planes to start an airline on Long Island, N.Y. By 1927, he was running his third airline, which merged to form Pan Am. That year, Trippe scheduled an eight-passenger flight for a 90-mile, over-water trip between Key West, Fla., and Havana, Cuba, marking the first international airline flight. By 1930, Trippe had government contracts to fly airmail routes to South America, which financed his passenger service to Latin America. An innovator, Trippe bought flying boats for long-distance flights and added new navigation gear to make flying safer. He signed Charles Lindbergh as a consultant. By the ‘30s, Pan Am was flying mail and passengers from California to Asia on the China Clipper. After World War II, Trippe wanted the federal government to license Pan Am as a monopoly carrier to compete with foreign airlines. He was turned down. Trippe was Boeing’s first customer for the 707 jetliner, which moved Pan Am into the jet age. By the ‘60s, Trippe had steered Pan Am into the hotel and real estate business, while creating a Byzantine, 81,000-mile air route system servicing 85 countries. Trippe retired as chief executive in 1968. By then, Pan Am was nearly bankrupt. Various executives kept trying to right the company, but soaring fuel costs and deregulation were too much to handle. Pan Am went out of business in 1991.
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32. James Watson (1928- ) AND Francis Crick (1916- )
Fathers of Biotechnology
Watson and Crick discovered the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical strands that help form chromosomes in cells and contain the gene code that is the basis of heredity. Their stunning discovery also led to the creation of a new industry, biotechnology. In the early ‘50s, scientists knew that DNA played a factor in cells and heredity, but its exact role was unclear. Crick, a British physicist, had worked on radar technology during World War II. Watson was a young PhD from Indiana University. Working together in England, Watson convinced Crick that if they could understand DNA’s exact structure they could solve its mysterious role. Using X-ray research on protein molecules passed along by biophysicist Maurice Wilkins, Watson had the insight that DNA consisted not of one but a pair of chemical strands. Watson and Crick clarified DNA’s structure to be that of a double helix--a shape resembling spiral staircases--and that if these strands were separated, each would hold a set of chemicals identical to its former partner. This copying process explained how genes are reproduced in dividing cells. Watson, Crick and Wilkins won the Nobel Prize in 1962. In the 1970s, scientists began inserting bits of DNA into bacterium to create mini cell factories that reproduced specific proteins. This led to the creation of biotechnology companies, such as Genentech and Amgen, whose gene-spliced drugs now treat everything from AIDS to cancer.
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33. Peter Drucker (1909- )
Father of Management Theory
Drucker created the field of modern management with a body of work dating back to the 1940s. He came up with the concepts of “privatization” and “knowledge workers” for a new class of employees, and he cited the importance of nurturing employees both for society’s betterment and to enhance corporate profit. As Drucker put it, “An organization is a human, a social, indeed a moral phenomenon.” A Vienna native, Drucker was working as a journalist when he first came to the U.S. in 1937. His breakthrough book “Concept of the Corporation” (1946) was based on his first-hand observation of General Motors. He analyzed everything from GM’s top managers to its labor relations. His 1954 book, “The Practice of Management,” was based on his study of General Electric. Before Drucker, business theory chiefly concentrated on specific tasks such as accounting or engineering. But Drucker sought to make management theory into a new discipline that covered everything from setting objectives to risk taking. He hired himself out as a consultant to organizations ranging from the Girl Scouts to Sears, Roebuck & Co., but Japanese businesses warmed to his theories quicker than did American firms. In 1961, Drucker was one of the first to note the rising importance of Japan’s economy. Still active, Drucker has written 32 books and has taught at Claremont Graduate University since 1
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34. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
Champion of Interstate Highways
During Eisenhower’s presidency (1953-61), one pet project he shepherded through Congress in 1956 was funding of the interstate highway system. Since then, a vast ribbon of 46,000 miles of interstate highways was built across the country at a cost of $130 billion, clearing the way for all manner of commerce and civil transport. The interstates connect more than 75% of U.S. cities with populations over 50,000, and they carry about 20% of the nation’s road traffic. Eisenhower, who led Allied forces during World War II, had seen Germany’s autobahns and was impressed by how the high-speed roads connected that country. The first U.S. freeway opened in Pennsylvania in 1940. Four years later, Congress voted for interstate roads to be selected, but construction languished until Eisenhower’s bill was passed. That measure committed the federal government to pay 90% of the cost, with states picking up the rest.
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35. Ted Turner (1938- )
Cable TV Pioneer
Turner popularized cable television by creating superstations with a basic programming menu of sports, news and old movies. After his father’s suicide in 1961, Turner took over Turner Advertising Co., a struggling $1-million billboard firm. In 1970, Turner got into television by merging with a small Atlanta UHF station. To boost his advertising revenue, in 1976 he started broadcasting his station’s signal by satellite to reach cable systems nationwide. To provide sports programming for his WTBS channel, Turner bought the Atlanta Braves baseball team in 1976 and the Atlanta Hawks basketball team in 1977. In 1980, Turner started Cable News Network despite few advertisers seeing any potential in a 24-hour news network. CNN then made its mark covering disasters such as the Challenger space shuttle explosion and the Persian Gulf War. Turner Broadcasting System Inc. was heavily in debt, but Turner kept expanding. In 1986, with the help of junk bond financing, he bought the MGM film library, which led to the creation of another channel, Turner Network Television. In 1996, Turner sold his company to Time Warner for $9 billion. Turner is now Time Warner’s biggest shareholder.
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36. Robert W. Woodruff (1889-1985)
Made Coke a Worldwide Brand
Woodruff turned the red-and-white Coca-Cola trademark into a brand known worldwide as an American product. Coca-Cola Co. was sold in 1919 for $25 million to a group of investors, including Woodruff’s father. Woodruff was installed as Coca-Cola’s president in 1923 and he directed the company until 1955. Under his leadership, Coke’s popularity leapfrogged, thanks to heavy spending on market research, production controls--so Coke tasted the same everywhere it was sold--and catchy advertising such as “The Pause That Refreshes” (1929) and “It’s the Real Thing” (1941). Woodruff’s predecessor marketed Coke to upscale audiences, but Woodruff wanted Coke to be a drink for the masses, and the company launched campaigns in the ‘50s aimed at black audiences. During World War II, Woodruff promised he’d sell Coke for a token 5 cents a bottle to U.S. servicemen anywhere. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower asked the company to provide Coke in Africa and Europe to boost the morale of GIs. In the process, Woodruff won approval to open 64 overseas bottling plants. Woodruff’s successors have continued to make Coke ubiquitous; the soft drink is sold in about 200 countries.
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37. Robert E. Wood (1879-1969)
Pioneer of Modern Retailing
Wood catapulted Sears, Roebuck & Co. from a rural mail-order catalog firm into the nation’s biggest retail chain by selling everything from washing machines to TVs and baseball gloves under one roof. Wood was an executive at rival Montgomery Ward in 1924 when he jumped to Sears as vice president. Wood foresaw how the popularity of automobiles would bring more rural customers to urban stores, so in 1925 Sears opened its first retail store in Chicago. By the end of the decade, Sears had more than 300 stores and Wood was president of the company. In 1931, Sears’ retail store sales surpassed that of its mail-order business; that same year Wood got into auto insurance by creating Allstate. As World War II ended, Wood correctly anticipated an economic boom across the country and aggressively opened stores in the Sun Belt. Sears was the first retail chain to set aside free parking areas next to its stores. When World War II ended, Sears was only slightly bigger than Montgomery Ward; by 1954, Sears’ $3 billion in sales was triple that of its rival. Wood retired in 1954. In 1967, Sears was the first retailer to hit $1 billion in monthly sales.
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38. Bella Abzug (1920-1998), Betty Friedan (1921- ) and Gloria Steinem (1934- )
The Women’s Movement
Like the Communist Manifesto a century before, the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” launched a revolution that changed the world. Friedan’s articulation of women’s entrapment and malaise struck a profound chord of independence, and the notion of a career outside the home took hold. It also didn’t hurt that the first safe and reliable form of birth control--the Pill--had just come on the market, and that Helen Gurley Brown’s “Sex and the Single Girl” helped reinforce the idea of equality with men. Friedan’s credo that the personal is political led her, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and many others to found the National Organization for Women, to pressure the courts and legislatures to enforce the anti-job discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By the 1970s, Steinem had begun Ms. magazine for those on the front lines of the movement--the millions of working women pouring into the workplace. Abzug, a civil rights lawyer, was elected to Congress in 1970 with the slogan “A woman’s place is in the House--the House of Representatives,” and helped pave the way for other women to enter politics. She also never gave up the charge to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. But by 1982 ratification by three-fourths of the 50 states proved an implacable obstacle--although 35 states had voted in favor of it. But by then the women’s movement had moved far beyond Friedan’s urgings to women to compete in a man’s world; today, women comprise nearly 50% of the U.S. work force.
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39. Amadeo P. Giannini (1870-1949)
Banking Innovator
Giannini laid the bedrock of modern banking. He built Bank of America into the world’s largest bank, set up the first branch bank network and opened lending practices to include loans to ordinary individuals and installment payments. In 1904, he opened Bank of Italy in San Francisco. Two years later, during the great San Francisco earthquake, Giannini hauled out $80,000 in cash before his building burned down and soon after was making loans from a counter top on the waterfront. Sensitive to the great distances his depositors traveled, he bought a bank in San Jose in 1909 and opened his first branch. He kept buying banks throughout California and in 1927 consolidated them into Bank of America of California. Giannini envisioned that his field would be dominated by a handful of large banks, and in 1928 he set up a holding company called Transamerica. He purchased banks in New York, Washington, Arizona, Oregon and Nevada. Bank of America began offering installment loans on everything from real estate to used cars and home appliances, innovations that his competitors would copy. Giannini was chairman of Transamerica until his death in 1949.
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40. Ida Tarbell (1857-1944)
Muckraker, Trustbuster
A groundbreaking investigative journalist, Tarbell’s reporting played a key role in breaking up John D. Rockefeller’s monopoly of the U.S. oil industry. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. controlled about 90% of the nation’s oil-refining capacity, but much of his business was hidden in a Byzantine maze of operations. Tarbell’s book, “The History of the Standard Oil Company” (1904), thoroughly documented the creation of this monopoly and caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, the government sued Standard Oil under provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and in 1911, Standard Oil was broken up into 33 companies. Tarbell’s father was a small-time oil producer.
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41. Frederick Smith (1944- )
Overnight-Delivery Innovator
With Federal Express, Smith created the overnight air delivery business. At Yale University, Smith wrote a term paper about the need for overnight air freight; his teacher gave him a C. Undaunted, Smith started Federal Express in 1971 with $91 million from venture capitalists, plus his $4-million inheritance. Smith devised a hub system where all packages would be picked up and flown to Memphis, Tenn., sorted at night, then flown to cities and delivered by truck to the customer’s door. To avoid federal shipping regulations, the company owned its own planes. Service began in 1973 with 14 jets flying to 25 cities. In two years, Federal Express lost about $29 million. As its reputation for reliability grew, by 1976 it was profitable and the company was delivering blood, organs, documents and computer parts and counted IBM and the federal government as customers. As more businesses relied on just-in-time inventory systems, Federal Express kept growing; its revenue hit $1 billion in 1984. The next year, Smith, worried about the growth in digital communications, offered ZapMail--the delivery of documents by fax and courier within two hours. Federal Express lost $300 million on ZapMail before abandoning it. Despite competition from UPS and other package delivery concerns, FedEx and its parent company, FDX Corp., keep growing. It now delivers to 210 countries with 600-plus aircraft, 46,000 vehicles and 141,000 employees.
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42. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968)
Civil Rights Activist
King eloquently inspired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. His work led to passage of the federal Civil Rights Act, calling for equal opportunity in the workplace and education, and passage of the Voting Rights Act. King also encouraged others to push for more employment opportunities for minorities. King began his civil rights work in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala., by leading a boycott of city buses after a black woman was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus. The next year, the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery to provide equal seating on its buses. In 1957, King set up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to protest racial segregation in schools, hotels and restaurants. King was often jailed. To prod Congress into passing a civil rights bill, he organized a march in Washington that drew more than 200,000 people. King also complained that poverty created social injustice and he planned a campaign to help the poor in their battle for economic opportunity. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., while supporting a strike by black garbage workers. One King disciple, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, later created the Rainbow/PUSH coalition to challenge corporations to include more African Americans and other minorities in their operations.
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43. Howard Jarvis (1902-1986)
Tax Rebel
Jarvis led the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, which drastically cut California property taxes and triggered a wave of grass-roots taxpayer initiatives across the country. A retired businessman, Jarvis was a political gadfly who had managed regional campaigns for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential races and later failed in his own U.S. Senate bid. By the late ‘70s, runaway inflation and soaring California home prices had quadrupled property taxes for some homeowners--while their personal incomes lagged--threatening some with loss of their homes. Proposition 13, authored by Jarvis and retired Realtor Paul Gann, cut property taxes 58% by rolling them back to 1975 levels. Proposition 13 was opposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. But with Jarvis’ support, the measure passed by almost a 2-1 margin. Proposition 13 slashed California property taxes by $6 billion and sent cities and counties scurrying for new revenues as they dramatically boosted fees for local services and began to rely heavily on sales taxes. Proposition 13 also hampered spending on public schools, as California’s per-pupil spending dropped from 18th in the nation in 1977 to 35th today.
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44. Rachel Carson (1907-1964)
Environmental Inspiration
Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” with its frightening descriptions of how pesticides can kill wildlife and poison the food chain, helped usher in the modern environmental era. Carson was a marine biologist and spent much of her life working for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Carson’s book blasted chemical companies as she unveiled the dangers of DDT and other pesticides, whose residues pollute the environment as their toxins slowly work into the food supply. She described poisoned robins falling out of trees and DDT-damaged eggshells collapsing from the weight of nesting birds. Her book sold 500,000 hardcover copies and triggered a storm of denials by the chemical industry. But President John F. Kennedy read her work and ordered an investigation; his Science Advisory Committee backed Carson and called for stricter pesticide controls. Carson died of cancer in 1964. Her book continues to inspire environmentalists, and her work is credited with having an impact on everything from the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 to the Greenpeace movement.
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45. Edward C. Johnson III (1930- )
Mutual Fund Kingpin
Johnson turned the mutual fund group his father started, closely held Fidelity Investments, into the industry’s giant. Fidelity’s current assets under management: $711 billion. Known as “Ned,” he took over as president in 1972 and, with famed stock picker Peter Lynch, lifted Magellan and Fidelity’s other funds into national prominence. Johnson turned Fidelity into mainstream America’s most familiar mutual fund family, especially in the 1980s, when the middle class flocked to the stock and bond markets. He followed his father’s strategy of having his fund managers buy stocks with growth potential rather than blue-chip steadiness--with enormous success. He also helped pioneer such mutual fund practices as selling direct rather than through brokers, offering discount brokerage services, forming a unit to handle big institutional accounts and creating dozens of funds that specialize in specific industries or geographic regions. He turned over most of his ownership of Boston-based Fidelity’s parent, FMR Corp., to his daughter, Abigail, in 1995. According to Forbes magazine, Johnson’s net worth is $2.2 billion. He graduated from Harvard in 1954 and joined Fidelity in 1957.
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46. Milton Friedman (1912- )
Leader of Conservative Economics
The most influential conservative economist of our time, Friedman argued against governmental efforts to manage the economy, preferring a largely hands-off approach. Friedman led opposition to Keynesian economic theory--popular since the 1930s--that calls for governments to stabilize the economy by increasing spending in recessionary times and boosting taxes in boom periods to slow the economy and halt inflation. Friedman insisted that Keynesian economics doesn’t work. Instead, for 40 years Friedman has argued that the supply of money is the single most important influence on business and therefore the Federal Reserve Board should pump a steady money supply of 4% into our economy, “month in and month out, year in and year out.” Friedman believes in free competition, opposes farm price supports and supports enforcement of antitrust laws. The son of immigrants from Austria-Hungary, Friedman developed his theories while teaching at the University of Chicago. He served as an advisor to President Nixon. Friedman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1976.
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47. Paul Volcker (1927- ) AND Alan Greenspan (1926- )
Inflation Tamers
As successive chairmen of the Federal Reserve System, Volcker and Greenspan helped lay the financial groundwork for the nation’s longest peacetime economic expansion. Volcker (Fed chairman 1979-87) was appointed by President Carter at a time when inflation was climbing 13% a year. To combat inflation, Volcker let interest rates rise, which triggered a recession in 1982-83, but it slowed inflation and the economy began to rebound. When Volcker turned down a third term, President Reagan appointed Greenspan as Fed chairman (1987 to present). Greenspan was lauded for his handling of the October 1987 stock market crash by ensuring that banks would have sufficient cash on hand. Throughout this decade Greenspan has managed to keep a check on inflation and keep interest rates low, which have helped fuel the ongoing surge in the nation’s economy and stock market.
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48. Ronald Reagan (1911- )
Reaganomics
During Reagan’s presidency (1981-89), the U.S. economy rebounded, inflation slowed, employment rose and the Dow Jones industrial average more than doubled. The nation’s confidence also rebounded after years of rising inflation and a laggard economy. Reagan entered politics after a long acting career, and he served two terms as California’s governor. Reagan won the Republican nomination for president in 1980, on his third try, and he defeated Jimmy Carter in the fall election. Reagan believed in supply-side economics. So after taking office, he pushed through a record tax cut, reduced non-defense spending and dramatically increased military expenditures, saying the plan would trigger economic growth and balance the federal budget. The results were mixed: While Reagan was in the White House, the nation’s budget deficit soared to record levels, but inflation dropped from 13% to 4% and the economy began a lengthy recovery. Reagan also launched a major overhaul of the federal tax code in 1986.
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49. Howard F. Ahmanson (1906-1968)
Mortgage Lending Force
H.F. Ahmanson & Co.’s Home Savings of America provided more mortgage loans to the masses than any other S&L; during the home-building boom of the 1940s to 1960s. Ahmanson set up a casualty insurance firm in 1927 and his wealth grew during the Depression because he also dealt in foreclosures. As he quipped, “The worse it got, the better it was for me.” But in 1947 Ahmanson took his first step toward becoming a key mortgage lender when he bought Home Savings of America for $162,000. At the time, Home Savings was a modest S&L; with less than $1 million in assets. But Ahmanson bought up 18 other institutions to create the nation’s biggest savings and loan. By 1961 Home Savings became the first S&L; with more than $1 billion in assets. Ahmanson’s growth was fueled in part by the enormous population surge in California. Ahmanson died of a heart attack in 1968. Last year H.F. Ahmanson & Co. was purchased by Washington Mutual.
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50. William H. Gates III (1955- )
Software Magnate
As a co-founder of Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates created the globally dominant computer software business--and that made him the world’s wealthiest man, now worth an estimated $85 billion. Gates built the empire pursuing one oft-repeated goal: “To have a computer on every desk and in every home, all running Microsoft software.” An archetypal nerd, Gates once designed a scheduling program for his Seattle high school so he could share classes with the prettiest girls. He dropped out of Harvard as a sophomore in 1975 to start Microsoft with Paul Allen. In 1980, they were hired to supply the operating system for IBM’s first personal computer. As the PC became the computing standard, Microsoft became a juggernaut. Although Microsoft didn’t invent the graphical user interface, spreadsheet program, word processor or Internet browser, it managed to seize control of those markets. Today, Microsoft software runs 90% of the world’s personal computers, and Gates, who still owns 20% of his company, is both revered and reviled as the symbol of Microsoft’s dominance. He is a man who has indicated he will give most of his fortune to charity, but he also has been portrayed as a monopolist bully by competitors and federal prosecutors in an ongoing antitrust trial against Microsoft. Gates says Microsoft’s new challenge is keeping its software stronghold as “customers start to move beyond the PC.”
