1.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon–
Jeff Bezos is a pioneer in
world of internet commerce, and was instrumental in defining this space that is
now defining many aspects of the internet world. It is Jeff Bezos who
innovated the concept of “predictive analytics”–recommending products to
customers based on search history and buying habits. Whether you like the concept
or you hate it, the idea has made online commerce more profit rich and
efficient, and is making online shopping a better experience for consumers
throughout the
world.
Bio data:
American entrepreneur Jeff Bezos is
the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com. In 2013, he purchased
The Washington Post.
Synopsis
Entrepreneur and
e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New
Mexico. Bezos had an early love of computers and studied computer science and
electrical engineering at Princeton University. After graduation, he worked on
Wall Street, and in 1990 became the youngest senior vice president at the
investment firm D.E. Shaw. Four years later, he quit his lucrative job to open
Amazon.com, a virtual bookstore that became one of the internet's biggest
success stories. In 2013, Bezos made headlines when he purchased The
Washington Post in a $250 million deal.
Early
Life and Career
Jeff Bezos was
born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to a teenage mother,
Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen, and his biological father, Ted Jorgensen. Bezos's
parents were married less than a year, and when Bezos was four years old his
mother married his step-father Mike Bezos, a Cuban immigrant.
As a child, Jeff
Bezos showed an early interest in how things work, turning his parents' garage
into a laboratory and rigging electrical contraptions around his house. As a
teenager, his family moved to Miami where he developed a love for computers and
excelled in school, becoming the valedictorian of his class. In high school, he
also started his first business, the Dream Institute, an educational summer
camp for fourth, fifth and sixth graders.
Bezos pursued his
interest in computers at Princeton University, where he graduated summa cum
laude in 1986 with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.
After graduation, he found work at several firms on Wall Street including
Fitel, Bankers Trust, and the investment firm D.E. Shaw where he met his wife
Mackenzie and was named the youngest vice president in 1990. While his career
in finance was extremely lucrative, Bezos chose to make a risky move into the
nascent world of e-commerce. He quit his job in 1994, moved to Seattle and
targeted the untapped potential of the internet market by opening an online
bookstore.
Pioneering E-Commerce
Bezos set up the
office for his fledgling company in his garage where, along with a few
employees, he began developing software. They expanded operations into a
two-bedroom house, equipped with three Sun Microstations, and eventually
developed a test site. After inviting 300 friends to beta test the site, Bezos
opened Amazon.com, named after the meandering South American River, on July 16,
1995.The initial success of the company was meteoric. With no press promotion,
Amazon.com sold books across the United States and in 45 foreign countries
within 30 days. In two months, sales reached $20,000 a week, growing faster
than Bezos and his start-up team had envisioned.
Amazon.com went
public in 1997 and many market analysts questioned whether the company could
hold its own when traditional retailers launched their own e-commerce sites. Two
years later, the start-up not only kept up, but also outpaced competitors,
becoming an e-commerce leader.Bezos continued to diversify Amazon’s offerings
with the sale of CDs and videos in 1998, and later clothes, electronics, toys
and more through major retail partnerships. While many dot.coms of the early
'90s went bust, Amazon flourished with yearly sales that jumped from $510,000
in 1995 to over $17 billion in 2011.
In 2007,
Amazon.com released the Kindle, a handheld digital book reader that allows users
to buy, download, read and store their book selections. That same year, Bezos
also set his sights far, far, away, announcing his investment in Blue Origin, a
Seattle-based aerospace company that is developing technologies to offer space
travel to paying customers.
Bezos then moved
Amazon into the tablet marketplace with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire in
2011. The following September, he announced the new Kindle Fire HD, the
company's next generation tablet designed to give Apple's iPad a run for its money.
"We haven't built the best tablet at a certain price. We have built the
best tablet at any price," Bezos said, according to ABC News.
Buying
'The Washington Post'
Bezos made
headlines worldwide on August 5, 2013, when he purchased The Washington Post
and other publications affiliated with The Washington Post Co., which owns the
paper and other entities, for $250 million cash. The deal marks the end of the
four-generation reign over The Post Co. by the Graham family, including Donald
E. Graham, the company's chairman and chief executive, and his niece, Post
publisher Katharine Weymouth.
"The Post
could have survived under the company's ownership and been profitable for the
foreseeable future," Graham stated, in an effort to explain the
transaction. "But we wanted to do more than survive. I'm not saying this
guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success."
In a statement to Post
employees on August 5, Bezos wrote: "The values of The Post do
not need changing. ...There will, of course, be change at The Post over
the coming years. That's essential and would have happened with or without new
ownership. The internet is transforming almost every element of the news
business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and
enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no
news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be
easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment. Our
touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government,
local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities,
governors, sports—and working backwards from there. I'm excited and optimistic
about the opportunity for invention."
Recent Projects
In early December
2013, Bezos made headlines when he revealed a new, experimental initiative by
Amazon, called "Amazon Prime Air," using drones—remote-controlled
machines that can perform an array of human tasks—to provide delivery services
to customers. According to Bezos, these drones are able to carry items weighing
up to 5 pounds, and are capable of traveling within a 10-mile distance of the
company's distribution center. He also stated that Prime Air could become a
reality within as little as four or five years.
2.
Anne Mulcahy, Xerox
– Anne turned things around when her company faced a financial crisis. Yes, I
can directly relate. You can read about some of my adventures at Fishbowl here. Anne never aspired to the role of CEO,
but neither did she shy away from the opportunity to lead when elected by the
board of Xerox XRX +0.75%
in 2001. During her tenure she was required to reduce the company’s workforce
by 30% and later eliminated the entire desktop portion of Xerox. For her
courageous execution in the face of adversity Chief Executive Magazine
named her CEO of the Year in 2008 and U.S. News & World Report named
her one of America’s Best Leaders. Forbes acknowledged Anne as one
of the world’s most influential women in 2005 and 2009.
Having pulled Xerox out of a near-fatal
slump in 2002, Mulcahy, 52, is now looking to get her company back to the top
of the tech world. Her ideas: color printing and lucrative consulting services.
It's a tough space to exist in, with competitors like HP, Kodak and Dell battling for
pieces of the printing, copying and services businesses. To highlight how Xerox
has changed, Mulcahy, who took over the top job in 2001, has yanked the
company's tagline, "The Document Company," in favor of going solo
with the Xerox name.
A
Xerox veteran, she started as a lowly field-sales rep 30 years ago. Working at
Xerox is all in the family for Mulcahy. Her husband is a retired Xerox exec,
and her older brother now runs the global services group. One of the few elite
women to run a top public company, Mulcahy is a coveted choice on corporate
boards, serving on the boards of Citigroup and Target.
Anne M. Mulcahy is chairman of the board and
chief executive officer of Xerox Corporation, Stamford, Conn. She was named CEO of Xerox on Aug. 1, 2001, and chairman on
Jan. 1, 2002. Mulcahy most recently was
president and chief operating officer of
Xerox from May 2000 through
July 2001. Prior to that, she was president of Xerox's General Markets
Operations, which created and sold
products for reseller, dealer and retail channels. She began her Xerox career as a field sales
representative in 1976
and assumed increasingly responsible
sales and senior management positions.
From 1992-1995, Mulcahy was vice president
for human resources, responsible for
compensation, benefits, human resource
strategy, labor relations,
management development and employee
training.
Mulcahy became chief staff officer
in 1997 and corporate senior vice president in 1998. Prior to that, she served as vice president and staff officer for Customer Operations, covering South America and Central America,
Europe, Asia, Africa, and China. Mulcahy earned a bachelor of arts degree in
English/Journalism from Marymount College
in Tarrytown, N.Y., in 1974. In addition to the Xerox board, she is a member of
the boards of directors of Catalyst,
Citigroup Inc., Fuji Xerox Co. Ltd. and Target Corporation, and is a member of The Business
Council. Mulcahy was born Oct. 21, 1952,
in Rockville Centre, N.Y.
3. Brad Smith, Intuit –
Intuit is one of the world’s largest and most successful financial
software companies. It is the maker of the QuickBooks accounting software we
have integrated with our Fishbowl Inventory software. Even as a company of
nearly $4B in revenue with a market cap of approximately $16.5B, Intuit
INTU
+0.85% continues to operate like a collection of startups. Brad has
fostered a culture where nearly 8,000 employees are allowed to take risks and
to grow by learning from success and failure.
In honor of Entrepreneur Month,
I’ve been writing here and at Harvard Business Review with my paired leadership
partner Mary Michelle Scott, Fishbowl president, about launching and scaling a
company in a high growth phase. We’ve been hitting some hot buttons,
particularly in our Forbes article “The Case for Hiring ‘Under Qualified’
Employees,” June 14. The responses have been phenomenal. (216 comments and some
144,000 views. Keep them coming, folks—I’m loving the dialogue.)In that same
vein, I’d like to continue discussing the entrepreneurial skills required to
run a great company. We’re talking today with Brad Smith, president and CEO of Intuit, one of the
world’s largest and most successful financial software companies.
Intuit, of course,
is maker of the QuickBooks accounting software we have fully-integrated with
our Fishbowl Inventory software, that we offer to midsize companies as a
complete business management solution through Fishbowl Enterprise (FBE)
software, and that we use to run our own growth company as well.
Intuit is a public
company with nearly $4B in total revenue, currently, and a market cap of
approximately $16.5B. Even more
importantly (in my opinion), Intuit has been consistently ranked one of
Fortune’s “Best 100 Companies to Work For” and one of Fortune’s “Most Admired
Software Companies” over the past several years. Here’s what Brad says about
the importance of entrepreneurialism from the helm of Intuit (which I’ll
compare and contrast to the task of running a 100-person growth company such as
our own).
David: What
entrepreneurial traits of your own and of your company’s have most influenced
your company’s path?
Brad: I’ve always
valued and encouraged teamwork, and that collaborative spirit of “we” versus “I”
is core to Intuit’s success. Innovation has been part of Intuit’s DNA for
nearly 30 years. We pride ourselves on two core capabilities that differentiate
us and allow us to deliver solutions that truly change people’s financial lives. The first is
customer driven innovation, a mindset and methodology that helps us uncover
important, unsolved problems. Customers are at the heart of everything we do.
We conduct nearly 10,000 hours of follow me homes a year where we observe
customers where they live, work and do business – from home offices and coffee
shops to rural farms in India. Customer driven innovation was at the core of
Intuit’s first product, Quicken,
and it continues to guide us as we look to solve new problems in areas like
mobile payments. Products like Intuit GoPayment and the IntuitPayment Network
are helping small businesses
get paid faster, keeping cash flow strong and their business healthy.
The second
process, Design for Delight, enables us to create better ways to deliver what’s
most important for customers. Design for Delight is grounded in deep customer
empathy, going broad with ideas then narrowing with possible solutions and
finally, rapid experimentation with customers. These principles were integral
in a product we recently launched called Snap Payroll, a free, mobile
application that allows small businesses on the go to calculate paychecks in
minutes and determine how much to set aside for taxes.
Collaboration,
customer driven innovation and Design for Delight, allow us to continually reinvent
ourselves to deliver for the future and provide our customers anytime, anywhere
access.
David: How does
being an entrepreneur at the helm of a very large enterprise differ from
entrepreneurial leadership of a small startup or growth company?
Brad: Regardless
of whether you are leading a large enterprise or a small team, you need to
remove barriers to innovation and get out of the way. At Intuit, we operate
like a company of startups. We create and foster a culture where our nearly
8,000 employees worldwide have the courage to take risks and grow by learning
from success and failure. Idea Jams and unstructured time give passionate
employees opportunities to collaborate on new ideas to solve customer problems.
To keep ideas moving and teams nimble, we embrace the “Two-Pizza rule,” making
sure product development teams are no larger than two pizzas can feed.
At the end of the
day, it’s about empowering individuals to contribute ideas and make an impact,
as well as setting goals that challenge employees to step outside their comfort
zone. We realize the importance of recognizing employees for their innovative
work. Recognition comes in the form of Intuit co-founder Scott Cook’s annual
Innovation Awards, patent rewards and the opportunity for employees to showcase
their work at Innovation Gallery Walks held throughout the year. The best
reward for employees is seeing the profound impact of their work on the lives
of our more than 50 million customers.
David: It’s
interesting that at a much smaller scale, the approaches you are taking are
what we’ve been trying to accomplish at Fishbowl as well. As each new hire
begins, as with all employees, we expect them to assume the role of their own
business within our business. I call it “Me, Inc.” That perspective accelerates
everything they do –from the questions they ask to the programs they propose.
The creativity goes through the roof. They are in a position to be creative, to
be more efficient, and to find ways to increase revenue and reduce the bottom
line. We have no managers; we have leaders who are resources and examples of
what we espouse. While I have an open door, I expect individuals to come to me
or any leader with several proposed answers to the questions they have. Nine
out of ten times, they have the answer and my role is to support them.
We train them not
to come and ask me to answer the question, or what I think they should to do.
Our “Me, Inc.” approach flavors their experience from the very beginning – and
quite frankly, without this approach, our company wouldn’t be where it is
today.
It’s very
heartening to hear those same messages resonate within a company as large and
as successful as Intuit.
So—in conclusion—I
would say that a company is never too large or too successful to continue to
behave and think 100% as an entrepreneur. Innovation is as critical as ever.
It’s safe to say that making a company a great place to work is essential for a
successful global company, too.
In March 2013, Schultz made headlines and won wide applause after making a statement in support of the legalization of gay marriage. After a shareholder complained that Starbucks had lost sales due its support for gay marriage (the company had announced its support for a referendum to legalize gay union in the state of Washington), Schultz responded, "Not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38 percent shareholder return over the last year. I don't know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38 percent over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity. Of all kinds." The CEO then added, "If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38 percent you got last year, it's a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much."
7. Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo – Indra Nooyi, another of Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women, has not only led her company to record financial results but is making strides to move PepsiCo in a healthier direction, leading the courageous charge to shed traditional fast food properties and to replace them with initiatives to supply healthier foods. She is deeply caring and committed as a senior executive. She is a fun-loving executive as well—she played lead guitar for an all-woman rock band in college, loved to play cricket, and is known to sing karaoke and perform at corporate gatherings to this day. Yes, I have been known to relate to her fun-loving spirit as a senior executive as well.
8. Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway – He is a deeply conservative trader during the times that everyone around him is moving from one extreme to the other to the tune of huge losses and gains. Warren Buffett is a perfect example of patience, proving that slow and steady generally wins the business race. (Although I continue to press my own desire to spur Fishbowl’s inventory software business to race!)
9. Sir
Richard Branson, Virgin
Group – Anyone who owns more than 400 companies and is worth
billions of dollars is clearly doing many things right. I admire Richard
Branson’s tenacity, and I admire his personal brand—so much so, that when my
paired leadership partner, Mary
Michelle Scott, and I recently traveled to Australia with several of our
team in our launch of Fishbowl Australia, we made the effort and kept the
commitment to fly with Virgin Airlines every step of the way.
4. Howard Schultz, Starbucks – From his upbringing in a poor
family in the Bronx to an athletic scholarship and eventually the head of Starbucks SBUX +0.9%, Howard
Schultz is a consummate example of courage, hard work, and the ability to
achieve the American dream. Even in the glow of his own successes, Howard is
also interested in investing in others’ success and continues to invest
actively in other business ventures, such as eBay.
Howard Schultz
Activist
(1953–)
Early Life and Career
Howard D. Schultz
was born in Brooklyn, New York,
on July 19, 1953, and moved with his family to the Bayview Housing projects in
Canarsie, a neighborhood in southeastern Brooklyn, when he was 3 years old.
Schultz was a natural athlete, leading the basketball courts around his home
and the football field at school. He made his escape from Canarsie with a
football scholarship to Northern Michigan University in 1970.
After graduating
from the university with a Bachelor of Science degree in communication in 1975,
Schultz found work as an appliance salesman for Hammarplast, a company that
sold European coffee makers in the United States. Rising through the ranks to
become director of sales, in the early 1980s, Schultz noticed that he was
selling more coffee makers to a small operation in Seattle, Washington, known
then as the Starbucks Coffee Tea and Spice Company, than to Macy's. "Every
month, every quarter, these numbers were going up, even though Starbucks just
had a few stores," Schultz later remembered. "And I said, 'I gotta go
up to Seattle.'"
Howard Schultz
still distinctly remembers the first time he walked into the original Starbucks
in 1981. At that time, Starbucks had only been around for 10 years and didn't
exist outside Seattle. The company's original owners, old college buddies Jerry
Baldwin and Gordon Bowker and their neighbor, Zev Siegl, had founded Starbucks
in 1971. The three friends also came up with the coffee company's ubiquitous
mermaid logo.
"When I
walked in this store for the first time—I know this sounds really hokey—I knew
I was home," Schultz later remembered. "I can't explain it. But I
knew I was in a special place, and the product kind of spoke to me." At
that time, he added, "I had never had a good cup of coffee. I met the
founders of the company, and really heard for the first time the story of great
coffee ... I just said, 'God, this is something I've been looking for my whole
professional life.'" Little did Schultz know then how fortuitous his
introduction to the company would truly be, or that he would have an integral
part in creating the modern Starbucks.
Birth of the Modern Starbucks
A year after
meeting with Starbucks' founders, in 1982, Howard Schultz was hired as director
of retail operations and marketing for the growing coffee company, which, at
the time, only sold coffee beans, not coffee drinks. "My impression of
Howard at that time was that he was a fabulous communicator," co-founder
Zev Siegl later remembered. "One to one, he still is."
Early on, Schultz
set about making his mark on the company while making Starbucks' mission his
own. In 1983, while traveling in Milan, Italy, he was struck by the number of
coffee bars he encountered. An idea then occurred to him: Starbucks should sell
not just coffee beans, but coffee drinks. "I saw
something. Not only the romance of coffee, but ... a sense of community. And
the connection that people had to coffee—the place and one another,"
Schultz recalled. "And after a week in Italy, I was so convinced with such
unbridled enthusiasm that I couldn't wait to get back to Seattle to talk about
the fact that I had seen the future."
Schultz's
enthusiasm for opening coffee bars in Starbucks stores, however, wasn't shared
by the company's creators. "We said, 'Oh no, that's not for us,'"
Siegl remembered. "Throughout the '70s, we served coffee in our store. We
even, at one point, had a nice, big espresso machine behind the counter. But were
in the bean business." Nevertheless, Schultz was persistent until,
finally, the owners let him establish a coffee bar in a new store that was
opening in Seattle. It was an instant success, bringing in hundreds of people
per day and introducing a whole new language: the "cafe latte"—both
the beverage and the word—was introduced to Seattle in 1985.
But the success of
the coffee bar demonstrated to the original founders that they didn't want to
go in the direction Schultz wanted to take them. They didn't want to get big.
Disappointed, Schultz left Starbucks in 1985 to open a coffee bar chain of his
own, Il Giornale, which quickly garnered success.
Two years later,
with the help of investors, Schultz purchased Starbucks, merging Il Giornale
with the Seattle company. Subsequently, he became CEO and chairman of the
Starbucks (known thereafter as the Starbucks Coffee Company). Schultz had to
convince investors that Americans would actually shell out high prices for a
beverage that they were used to getting for 50 cents. At the time, most
Americans didn't know a high-grade coffee bean from a teaspoon of Nescafé
instant coffee. In fact, coffee consumption in the United States had been going
down since 1962.
In 2000, Schultz
publicly announced that he was resigning as Starbucks' CEO. Eight years later,
however, he returned to head the company. In a 2009 interview with CBS, Schultz
said of Starbucks' mission, "We're not in the business of filling bellies,
we're in the business of filling souls."
Continued Success
In 2006, Howard
Schultz was ranked No. 359 on Forbes magazine's "Forbes 400"
list, which presents the 400 richest individuals in the United States. In 2013,
he was ranked No. 311 on the same list, as well as No. 931 on Forbes's
list of billionaires around the globe.
Today, no one
company sells more coffee drinks to more people in more places than Starbucks.
By 2012, Starbucks had grown to encompass more than 17,600 stores in 39
countries around the world, and its market capitalization was valued at $35.6
billion. The incredibly popular coffee company reportedly opens a new store
every 12 hours and attracts close to 44 million customers per week. According
to the company's website,
Starbucks has been "committed to ethically sourcing and roasting the
highest-quality arabica coffee in the world" since 1971.
Support for Gay Marriage
In March 2013, Schultz made headlines and won wide applause after making a statement in support of the legalization of gay marriage. After a shareholder complained that Starbucks had lost sales due its support for gay marriage (the company had announced its support for a referendum to legalize gay union in the state of Washington), Schultz responded, "Not every decision is an economic decision. Despite the fact that you recite statistics that are narrow in time, we did provide a 38 percent shareholder return over the last year. I don't know how many things you invest in, but I would suspect not many things, companies, products, investments have returned 38 percent over the last 12 months. Having said that, it is not an economic decision to me. The lens in which we are making that decision is through the lens of our people. We employ over 200,000 people in this company, and we want to embrace diversity. Of all kinds." The CEO then added, "If you feel, respectfully, that you can get a higher return than the 38 percent you got last year, it's a free country. You can sell your shares in Starbucks and buy shares in another company. Thank you very much."
Howard Schultz
currently resides in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, Sheri (Kersch)
Schultz, and two children, Jordan and Addison.
5. Larry
Page, Google – Larry Page is
another example of a businessperson who can persevere any challenge. Larry and
his company have faced much criticism and received ample praise over the years
for his company’s actions. But in the midst of the storm, he has never let what
others think sway him from pursuing the course for his company that he
considers the best.
Larry Page
Inventor, Engineer
(1973–)
Early Life and Career
Larry Page was
born Lawrence Page on March 26, 1973, in East Lansing, Michigan. His father,
Carl Page, was a pioneer in computer science
and artificial intelligence, and his mother taught computer programming. After
earning a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering from the University of
Michigan, Page decided to concentrate on computer engineering at Stanford
University, where he met Sergey Brin.
Google Begins
As a research project at
Stanford University, Page and Brin created a search engine that listed results according to the
popularity of the pages, after concluding that the most popular result would
often be the most useful. They called the search engine "Google"
after the mathematical term "googol," which refers to the No. 1
followed by 100 zeros, to reflect their mission to organize the immense amount
of information available on the web.
After raising $1
million from family, friends and other investors, the pair launched the company
in 1998. Google has since become the world's most popular search engine,
receiving an average of 5.9 billion searches per day in 2013. Headquartered in
the heart of California's Silicon Valley, Google held its initial public
offering in August 2004, making Page and Brin billionaires.
Recent Years
In 2006, Google
purchased the most popular website for user-submitted streaming videos,
YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock.
In September 2013,
Page was ranked No. 13 on the "Forbes 400" list of the richest people
in America. That October, he was ranked No. 17 on Forbes' 2013
"Most Powerful People" list. Now serving as Google's CEO, Page
continues to share responsibility for the company's day-to-day operations with
Brin, who now serves as director of special projects for Google, and Eric
Schmidt, the company's executive chairman.
6. Tim Cook, Apple – Steve Jobs is a hard act to
follow, but thus far, Tim Cook is doing a tremendous job. Rather than attempt
to match the consumer-facing innovations Steve Jobs had been known for, Tim
Cook is forging into the future with his own new advances, such as Apple’s
newest innovative
inventory management techniques.
Tim Cook Biography
Business Leader (1960–)
Born
in Alabama on November 1, 1960, Tim Cook graduated from Auburn University with
a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering in 1982, and went on to earn an
M.B.A. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in the late '80s.
Following a 12-year career at IBM, in 1994, Cook became a chief operating
officer (Reseller Division) at Intelligent Electronics. He then worked for
Compaq as vice president of corporate materials, procuring and managing product
inventory. After six months at Compaq, Cook left his position and took a job at
Apple. In August 2011, Cook was named Apple's new CEO, taking over the position
for former CEO and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011 after
a years-long battle with cancer.
Tim
Cook was born Timothy D. Cook in the small town of Robertsdale, Alabama, on
November 1, 1960. The middle of three sons born to father Donald, a shipyard
worker, and mother Geraldine, a homemaker, Cook attended Robertsdale High
School, and graduated second in his class in 1978. He then enrolled at Auburn
University in Alabama, where he graduated in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in
industrial engineering, and went on to earn a Master of Business Administration
degree from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1988. There, Cook
earned the title of Fuqua Scholar—an honor given only to students at the the
business school who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class.
Fresh
out of graduate school, Cook embarked on a career in the field of compter
technology: He was hired by IBM, where he moved up the ranks to become the
computer corporation's North American Fulfillment director, managing
manufacturing and distribution functions for IBM's Personal Computer Company in
both North and Latin America.
Following
a 12-year career at IBM, in 1994, Cook became a chief operating officer
(Reseller Division) at Intelligent Electronics. Afte three years there, he was
ready for another move: The Compaq Computer Corporation hired Cook as vice
president of corporate materials, entrusting him with procuring and managing
the company's product inventory. His time there was short-lived, however: After
a six-month stint at Compaq, Cook left for a position at Apple.
"My
most significant discovery so far in my life was the result of one single
decision: My decision to join Apple," Cook stated nearly 15 years after
joining the corporation, while speaking at Auburn University's commencement
ceremony in 2010.
But
Cook's decision to join Apple wasn't an easy one: He began working for Apple in
early 1998, before the company had developed the likes of the iMac, iPod,
iPhone or iPad, and when it was seeing declining profits instead of profit
growth. According to Cook, prior to accepting his job at Apple, he was actually
dissuaded from taking the job, and was told that the company's future looked
very bleak: "While Apple did make Macs, the company had been losing sales
for years and was commonly considered to be on the verge of extinction. Only a
few months before I'd accepted the job at Apple, Michael Dell, the founder and
CEO of Dell Computer, was publicly asked what he would do to fix Apple, and he
responded, 'I'd shut it down and give the money back to the
shareholders,'" Cook explained to Auburn graduates in 2010.
Soon
after Cook came on board, however, things began to look a little brighter at
Apple. As the corporation's chief operating officer, Cook was responsible for
managing all sales and operations worldwide, including sales activities, and
service and support. He was also a leader of the company's Macintosh division
and in developing reseller/supplier relationship strategies. Less than a year
after Cook his Apple debut, the corporation was reporting profits (fiscal year
1998)—an extraordinary shift from it's fiscal 1997 report showed a net loss of
$1 billion from the prior fiscal year.
In
August 2011, Cook was named Apple's new CEO, taking over the position for
former CEO and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October 2011 after a
years-long battle with cancer. In addition to serving as CEO, Cook sits on the
corporation's board of directors.
In
May 2014, Apple announced its biggest acquisition to date when it bought Beats
Music and Beats Electronics for $3 billion. As part of the deal, Beats
co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine would join Apple in executive roles. In a
letter to Apple employees, Cook said, “This afternoon we announced that Apple
is acquiring Beats Music and Beats Electronics, two fast-growing businesses
which complement our product line and will help extend the Apple ecosystem in
the future. Bringing our companies together paves the way for amazing
developments which our customers will love.”
Following
this in June 2014, at the Worldwide Developers Conference, Cook announced the
latest version of the Apple operating system for desktop and mobile, OSX
Yosemite.
World Impact and Salary
In November 2011,
Cook was named one of Forbes magazine's "World's Most Powerful
People." According to an April 2012 article in The New York Times,
Cook was the highest-paid CEO among large publicly traded companies in 2012.
While his salary at Apple amounts to around $900,000, Cook reportedly brings in
several millions of dollars annually due to other forms of compensation,
including stock awards and bonuses. In 2011, Cook reportedly made $378 million
in total compensation.
7. Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo – Indra Nooyi, another of Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women, has not only led her company to record financial results but is making strides to move PepsiCo in a healthier direction, leading the courageous charge to shed traditional fast food properties and to replace them with initiatives to supply healthier foods. She is deeply caring and committed as a senior executive. She is a fun-loving executive as well—she played lead guitar for an all-woman rock band in college, loved to play cricket, and is known to sing karaoke and perform at corporate gatherings to this day. Yes, I have been known to relate to her fun-loving spirit as a senior executive as well.
Indra K. Nooyi is
the president and chief financial officer of PepsiCo. Best known for its Pepsi
soft drinks, the international powerhouse that Nooyi oversees is actually one
of the world's largest snack-food companies. It makes and sells dozens of other
products, including Doritos-brand chips, the Tropicana juice line, and Quaker Oats cereals.
Nooyi is one of the top female executives in the United States, and is also
believed to be the highest-ranking woman of Indian heritage in corporate
America.
Nooyi
was born in Madras, India, in 1955, and was a bit of a rule breaker in her
conservative, middle-class world as she grew up. In an era in India where it
was considered unseemly for young women to exert themselves, she joined an
all-girls' cricket team. She even played guitar in an all-female rock band
while studying at Madras Christian College. After earning her undergraduate
degree in chemistry, physics, and math, she went on to enroll in the Indian
Institute of Management in Calcutta. At the time, it was one of just two
schools in the country that offered a master's in business administration
degree, or M.B.A.
Nooyi's
first job after earning her degree was with Tootal, a British textile company. It had
had been founded in Manchester, England, in 1799, but had extensive holdings in
India. After that, Nooyi was hired as a brand manager at the Bombay offices of
Johnson & Johnson, the personal-care products maker. She was given the
Stayfree account, which might have proved a major challenge for even an
experienced marketing executive. The line had just been introduced on the
market in India, and struggled to create an identity with its target customers.
"It was a fascinating experience because you couldn't advertise personal
protection in India," she recalled in an interview with the Financial
Times 's Sarah Murray.
Nooyi
began to feel that perhaps she was underprepared for the business world.
Determined to study in the United States, she applied to and was accepted by
Yale University's Graduate School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. Much
to her surprise, her parents agreed to let her move to America. The year was
1978. "It was unheard of for a good, conservative, south Indian Brahmin
girl to do this," she explained to Murray in the Financial Times. "It
would make her an absolutely unmarriageable commodity after that."
"Behind
my cool logic lies a very emotional person."
Could Not Afford Suit
Nooyi
quickly settled into her new life, but struggled to make ends meet over the
next two years. Though she received financial aid from Yale, she also had to
work as an overnight receptionist to make ends meet. "My whole summer job
was done in a sari because I had no money
to buy clothes," she told Murray. Even when she went for an interview at
the prestigious business-consulting firms that hired business-school students,
she wore her sari, since she could not afford a business suit. Recalling that
the Graduate School of Management required all first-year students to take—and
pass—a course in effective communications, she said in the Financial Times interview
that what she learned in it "was invaluable for someone who came from a
culture where communication wasn't perhaps the most important aspect of
business at least in my time."
Pepsi v. Coke
The
rivalry between Pepsi, the flagship product of Indra Nooyi's company, and its
Atlanta, Georgia-based competitor, Coca-Cola, is one of corporate America's
longest-running marketing battles. In the United States alone, the soft-drink
industry is a $60 billion one, with the average American consuming a staggering
fifty-three gallons of carbonated soft drinks every year.
The
battle between Coke and Pepsi dates back almost as long as each company's
history. Both emerged as key players in early decades of the twentieth century,
when soft drinks first came on the market in the United States. In the 1920s,
Coca-Cola began moving aggressively into overseas markets, and even opened
bottling plants near to places where U.S. service personnel were stationed
during World War II. Pepsi only moved into international territory in the
1950s, but scored a major coup in 1972 when it inked a deal with the Soviet Union. With this
deal, Pepsi became the first Western product ever sold to Soviet consumers.
The
battle for market share heated up after 1975, when both companies stepped up
their already lavishly financed marketing campaigns to win new customers.
Pepsi's standard cola products had a slightly sweeter taste, which prompted one
of the biggest corporate-strategy blunders in U.S. business history: in 1985,
Coca-Cola launched "New Coke," which had a slightly sweeter
formulation. Coke consumers were outraged. The old formula was still available
under the name "Coca-Cola Classic," but the New Coke idea was quickly
shelved. This incident is often studied by business-school curriculums in the
United States and elsewhere, along with many other aspects of what is known as
"the cola wars."
Coke
is the leader in market share for carbonated colas, but soft drinks remain its
core business. Pepsi, on the other hand, began acquiring other businesses in
1965 when it bought the Texas-based Frito-Lay company, and has a larger stake
in the food industry.
Nooyi
did not earn a second M.B.A. from Yale. Instead, her degree was a master of
public and private management, which she finished in 1980. After commencement,
she went to work at the Boston Consulting Group, a prestigious consulting firm.
For the next six years she worked on a variety of international
corporate-strategy projects, and went over to Motorola in 1986 as a
senior executive. She remained there for four years, leaving in 1990 to join
Asea Brown Boveri Inc. as its head of strategy. ABB, as the company was known,
was a $6 billion Swiss-Swedish conglomerate that made industrial equipment and
constructed power plants around the world.
Nooyi's
skill in helping ABB find its direction in North America came to the attention
of Jack Welch, the head of General Electric. He offered her a job in 1994, but
so did PepsiCo chief executive officer Wayne Calloway. As she told a writer for
Business Week, the two men knew one another, but Calloway made an
appealing pitch for Nooyi's talent. He told her, she recalled, that
"'Welch is the best CEO I know.... But I have a need for someone like you,
and I would make PepsiCo a special place for you.'"
Nooyi
chose the soft-drink maker, and became its chief strategist. Soon, she was
urging PepsiCo to reshape its brand identity and assets, and became influential
in a number of important decisions. She was also a lead negotiator on the
high-level deals that followed. The company decided to spin off its restaurant
division in 1997, for example, which made its KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell
holdings into a separate company. She also looked at the successful plan by
Pepsi rival Coca-Cola, which had sold of its bottling operations a decade
earlier, and had been rewarded with impressive profit margins on its stock
performance. Pepsi followed suit, and the 1999 initial public offering of the
Pepsi bottling operations was valued at $2.3 billion. The company kept a large
share of stock in it, however.
Pointed Pepsi in the Right Direction
At
PepsiCo, Nooyi has been the chief dealmaker for two of its most important
acquisitions: she put together the $3.3 billion-dollar-deal for the purchase of
the Tropicana orange-juice brand in 1998, and two years later was part of the
team that secured Quaker Oats for $14 billion. That became one of the biggest
food deals in corporate history, and added a huge range of cereals and
snack-food products to the PepsiCo empire. She also helped acquire the edgy
beverage maker SoBe for $337 million, and her deal beat the one submitted by
Coca-Cola.
Indra
Nooyi (left) and other Pepsi-Co and Quaker Oats executives pose with products
from both companies. PepsiCo purchased Quaker Oaks in 2001.
AP/Wide World Photo. Reproduced by
permission.
For
her impressive dealmaking talents, Nooyi was promoted to the job of chief
financial officer at PepsiCo in February of 2000. It made her the
highest-ranking Indian-born woman among the ranks of corporate America. A year
later, she was given the title of president as well, when her longtime
colleague, Steven S. Reinemund, advanced to the position of board chair and
chief executive officer. Reinemund had said he would only take the job only if
Nooyi came onboard as his second in command. "'I can't do it unless I have
you with me,'" she recalled him telling her, according to Business
Week.
Upon
taking over as president and chief financial officer in May of 2001, Nooyi
worked to keep the company on track with her vision: "For any part of the
day we will have a little snack for you," she told Business Week in
2001. The company sold a dazzling range of snack foods and beverages, from
Mountain Dew to Rice-a-Roni, from Captain Crunch cereal to Gatorade-brand
sports drinks. It also owned the makers of Doritos-brand snacks and Aquafina
bottled water.
One of Corporate America's Top Visionaries
Nooyi's
success in the business world landed her on Time magazine's list of
"Contenders" for its Global Business Influentials rankings in 2003.
Many watchers predict that she will someday head one of the company's
divisions, such as Frito-Lay, or its core brand, PepsiCo Beverages North
America. In early 2004, there were mentions in the press that Nooyi, who still
wears the occasional sari to work, was being considered for the top job at the
Gucci Group, but she denied rumors that she had been talking with the Italian
luxury-goods giant.
Nooyi
serves on the board of trustees at the Yale Corporation, the governing board of
Yale University. She lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, not far from PepsiCo's
headquarters across the state line in Purchase, New York. At home, she
maintains a puja, or traditional Hindu shrine, and once she flew to
Pittsburgh after a tough session with Quaker Oats executives to pray at a
shrine there to her family's deity. Her predictions that her American graduate
education would hamper her marriage prospects proved untrue, for she married an
Indian man, Raj, who works as a management consultant. They have two daughters
who are nearly a decade apart in ages, and Nooyi occasionally brings her
younger child to work. The former rock guitarist is still known to take the
stage at company functions to sing. Her job, however, remains a top priority.
She watches championship-game replays of the Chicago Bulls to
study teamwork concepts, for example, and admitted to Forbes journalist Melanie Wells that
she strategizes 24-7 sometimes. "I wake up in the middle of the
night," she told the magazine, "and write different versions of
PepsiCo on a sheet of paper."
8. Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway – He is a deeply conservative trader during the times that everyone around him is moving from one extreme to the other to the tune of huge losses and gains. Warren Buffett is a perfect example of patience, proving that slow and steady generally wins the business race. (Although I continue to press my own desire to spur Fishbowl’s inventory software business to race!)
Warren Buffett Biography
(1930–)
Synopsis
Businessman
and investor Warren Buffett was born on August 30,1930, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Investing by age 11, Buffett was running a small business at 13. Buffett later
started the firm Buffett Partnership in Omaha, with huge success. In 2006,
Buffett announced that he would give his entire fortune away to charity (est.
$62 bil.), the largest act of charitable giving in United States history.
Businessman
and investor. Born Warren Edward Buffett on August 30,1930, in Omaha, Nebraska.
Buffett's father Howard worked as stockbroker and served as U.S. Congressman.
His mother, Leila Stahl Buffett, was a homemaker. Buffett was the second of
three children and the only boy.
Buffett
demonstrated a knack for financial and business matters early on in his
childhood. Friends and acquaintances have said the young boy was a mathematical
prodigy, and was able to add large columns of numbers in his head-a talent he
still occasionally shows off to friends and business associates.
Warren
often visited his father's stockbrokerage shop as a child, and chalked in the
stock prices on the blackboard in the office. At 11 years old he made his first
investment; he bought three shares of Cities Service Preferred at $38 per
share. The stock quickly dropped to only $27, but Buffett held on tenaciously
until they reached $40. He sold his shares at a small profit, but regretted the
decision when Cities Service shot up to nearly $200 a share. He later cited
this experience as an early lesson in patience in investing.
By
the age of 13, Buffett was running his own businesses as a paperboy and selling
his own horseracing tip sheet. That same year, he filed his first tax return,
claiming his bike as a $35 tax deduction.
In
1942, Buffett's father was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and
his family moved to Fredricksburg, Virginia, to be closer to the congressman's
new post. Buffett attended Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., where
he continued plotting new ways to make money. During his high school tenure, he
and a friend purchased a used pinball machine for $25. They installed it in a
Washington, D.C. barbershop and, within a few months, the profits of the
machine allowed Buffett and his friend to buy other machines. Buffett owned
three machines in three different locations before he sold the business to a
War Veteran for $1,200.
Buffett
enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania at the age of 16 to study business.
He stayed two years, moved to the University of Nebraska to finish up his
degree, and emerged from college at age 20 with nearly $10,000 from his
childhood businesses.
Buffett attended
Columbia University for his advanced degree and in 1956, shortly after
graduation, he formed the firm Buffett Partnership in his hometown of Omaha.
His investment successes, particularly in buying undervalued companies whose
stocks shortly began to rise, made him extremely rich and gained him the
sobriquet, "Oracle of Omaha." Other notable career succeses include
helping rescue Salomon Brothers from raiders (1987) and taking charge of the
New York City house (1992) in the wake of an insider trading scandal.
Record-Breaking
Donation
In June 2006,
Buffett made an announcement that he would be giving his entire fortune away to
charity, committing 85 percent of it to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
This donation became the largest act of charitable giving in United States
history.
The majority of
Buffett's considerable fortune was amassed through Berkshire Hathaway, a
company for which he is the largest shareholder and CEO. Once ranked as Forbes'
wealthiest man in 2008, his net worth was estimated at roughly $44 billion in
2012.
Now in his
eighties, Buffett recently announced that he is battling prostate cancer. He
will begin treatment in July 2012 and expects to be able to fulfill his usual
responsibilities at Berkshire Hathaway. "I feel great ... and my energy
level is 100 percent," Buffett said in a statement.
In
Recent Years
In February 2013,
Buffett purchased HJ Heinz with private equity group 3G Capital for $28
billion. 3G, a U.S.-Brazilian company, also owns Burger King and a portion of
Anheuser-Busch InBev. According to TIME magazine, Buffett has praised
Heinz for making "great-tasting products" and for good management
over the past several years.
Richard Branson Biography
(1950–)
Synopsis
Born
on July 18, 1950, in Surrey, England, Richard Branson struggled in school and
dropped out at age 16—a decision that ultimately lead to the creation of Virgin
Records. His entrepreneurial projects started in the music industry and
expanded into other sectors making Branson a billionaire. His Virgin Group
holds more than 200 companies, including the recent Virgin Galactic, a
space-tourism company. Branson is also known for his adventurous spirit and
sporting achievements, including crossing oceans in a hot air balloon.
Early Life
Richard
Charles Nicholas Branson was born on July 18, 1950, in Surrey, England. His
father, Edward James Branson, worked as a barrister. His mother, Eve Branson,
was employed as a flight attendant. Richard, who struggled with dyslexia, had a
hard time with educational institutions. He nearly failed out of the all-boys
Scaitcliffe School, which he attended until the age of 13. He then transferred
to Stowe School, a boarding school in Stowe, Buckinghamshire, England.
Still
struggling, Branson dropped out at the age of 16 to start a youth-culture
magazine called Student. The publication, run by students, for students,
sold $8,000 worth of advertising in its first edition, which was launched in
1966. The first run of 50,000 copies was disseminated for free, after Branson
covered the costs with advertising.
By
1969, Branson was living in a London commune, surrounded by the British music
and drug scene. It was during this time that Branson had the idea to begin a
mail-order record company called Virgin to help fund his magazine efforts. The
company performed modestly, but made Branson enough that he was able to expand
his business venture, adding a record shop in Oxford Street, London. With the
success of the record shop, the high school drop-out was able to build a
recording studio in 1972 in Oxfordshire, England.
His
first artist on the Virgin Records label, Mike Oldfield, recorded his single
"Tubular Bells" in 1973 with the help of Branson's team. The song was
an instant smash, staying on the UK charts for 247 weeks. Using the momentum of
Oldfield's success, Branson then signed other aspiring musical groups to label,
including the Sex Pistols. Artists such as the Culture Club, the Rolling
Stones, and Genesis would follow, helping to make Virgin Music one of the top
six record companies in the world.
Branson
expanded his entrepreneurial efforts yet again, this time to include the travel
company the Voyager Group in 1980, the airline Virgin Atlantic in 1984, and a
series of Virgin Megastores. But Branson's success was not always predictable.
By 1992, Virgin was suddenly struggling to stay financially afloat. The company
was sold later that year to THORN EMI for $1 billion.
Branson
was crushed by the loss, reportedly crying after the contract was signed, but
remained determined to stay in the music business. In 1993, he founded the
station Virgin Radio, and several years later he started a second record company,
V2. Founded in 1996, V2 now includes artists such as Powder Finger and Tom
Jones.
Branson's
Virgin Group now holds more than 200 companies in more than 30 countries,
including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, Asia,
Europe and South Africa. He has expanded his businesses to include a train
company, a luxury game preserve, a mobile phone company and a space-tourism
company, Virgin Galactic.
Branson is also
known for his sporting achievements, notably the record-breaking Atlantic crossing
in Virgin Atlantic Challenger II in 1986, and the crossing by hot-air balloon
of the Atlantic (1987) and Pacific (1991). He was knighted in 1999 for his
contribution to entrepreneurship, and in 2009, he landed at No. 261 on Forbes'
"World Billionaires" list with his $2.5 billion in self-made fortune,
which includes two private islands.
Virgin
Galactic
In recent years,
the ever-adventurous Branson has focused much of his attention on his space
tourism venture. He partnered with Scaled Composites to form The Spaceship
Company, which is currently developing a suborbital spaceplane, and, in April
2013, the project made an impressive leap forward with the test launch of SpaceShipTwo.
Branson was
delighted by the success of his spaceship's first test, telling NBC News that
"We're absolutely delighted that it broke the sound barrier on its very
first flight, and that everything went so smoothly." He expects to be
finishing testing the craft by the end of 2013. By April 2013, more than 500
people had bought their tickets for Virgin Galactic's voyages.
Personal
Life
Branson is married
to his second wife, Joan Templeman, with whom he has two children: Holly and
Sam. He currently lives in London, England.
10. Rupert Murdoch,
News Corporation –
Rupert Murdoch is a self-made and hard driven Australia-born head of an
American publishing dynasty, as the founder, chairman and CEO of News
Corporation. He continues to work unbelievably hard at an age when most would
have retired long ago. In the midst of accusation and scandal he’s needed to
find new strength to face the accusation of bribery, corruption and hacking by
subsidiary firms. This news is still breaking, as Rupert resigns from the
boards of several of the subsidiary companies involved. Regardless of the
outcome, the work ethic and sheer tenacity Rupert Murdoch has shown in the face
of adversity continues to serve as an example to all.
Rupert Murdoch Biography
Publisher (1931–)
Synopsis
Rupert
Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931, in Melbourne, Australia. His father was a famous
war correspondent and newspaper publisher. Murdoch inherited his father's
papers, the Sunday Mail and the News, and continued to purchase
other media outlets over the years. In the 1970s, he started buying American
newspapers. Murdoch branched out into entertainment with the purchase of 20th
Century FOX Film Corp. in 1985. He later launched his own cable news channel,
FOX News.
Keith
Rupert Murdoch was born on March 11, 1931, on a small farm about 30 miles south
of Melbourne, Australia. Since birth, Murdoch has gone by his middle name,
Rupert, the name of his maternal grandfather. His father, Keith Murdoch, was a
well-known Australian journalist who owned a number of local and regional
newspapers: the Herald in Melbourne, the Courier-Mail in
Brisbane, and the News and Sunday Mail.
The
family farm was named Cruden Farm, after the Scottish village from which both
of Murdoch's parents had emigrated. The house at Cruden Farm was a stone
building with colonial pillars, adorned with original paintings, a grand piano
and a library of books, situated amongst green expanses of farmland and
bordered by Ghost Gum trees. Murdoch's favorite childhood pastime was horseback
riding. His mother later described her son's childhood: "I think it was a
very normal childhood, not in any way elaborate or an overindulged one. I
suppose he was lucky to be brought up in attractive—you could say
aesthetic—surroundings."
The
son of a well-respected journalist, Murdoch was groomed to enter the world of
publishing from a very young age. He remembers, "I was brought up in a
publishing home, a newspaper man's home, and was excited by that, I suppose. I
saw that life at close range, and after the age of ten or twelve never really
considered any other." Murdoch graduated from Geelong Grammar, a
prestigious Australian boarding school, in 1949 before crossing the ocean to
attend Worcester College at Oxford University in England. According to one of
his early biographers, Murdoch was a "a normal, red-blooded college student
who had many friends, chased girls, went on the usual drinking binges, engaged
in slapdash horseplay, tried at sports and never had enough money, no doubt due
to his gambling." Murdoch's fun-loving youthful ways came to an abrupt end
when his father suddenly passed away in 1952, leaving his son the owner of his
Adelaide newspapers, the News and the Sunday Mail. After
preparing himself with a brief apprenticeship under Lord Beaverbrook at the Daily
Express in London, in 1953, a 22-year-old Murdoch returned to Australia to
take up the reins of his father's papers.
Immediately
upon assuming control of the Sunday Mail and the News, Murdoch
immersed himself in all aspects of the papers' daily operations. He wrote
headlines, redesigned page layouts and labored in the typesetting and printing
rooms. He quickly converted the News into a chronicle of crime, sex and
scandal, and while these changes were controversial, the paper's circulation
soared. Only three years later, in 1956, Murdoch expanded his operations by
purchasing the Perth-based Sunday Times, and revamped it in the
sensationalist style of the News. Then, in 1960, Murdoch broke into the
lucrative Sydney market by purchasing the struggling afternoon daily, the Mirror,
and slowly transforming it into Sydney's best-selling afternoon paper.
Encouraged by his success and harboring ambitions of political influence, in
1965 Murdoch founded Australia's first national daily paper, the Australian,
which helped to rebuild Murdoch's image as a respectable news publisher.
In
the fall of 1968, 37 years old and owner of an Australian news empire valued at
$50 million, Murdoch moved to London and purchased the enormously popular
Sunday tabloid, The News of the World. One year later, he purchased a
struggling daily tabloid, the Sun, once again transformed the paper into
a wild success with his formula of reporting heavily on sex, sports and crime.
The Sun also attracted readers by including pictures of topless women in its
infamous "Page 3" feature.
Murdoch
next expanded his news empire to the United States, with the 1973 acquisition
of a Texas-based tabloid, the San Antonio News. As he had done in
Australia and England, Murdoch quickly set out to expand across the country,
founding a national tabloid, the Star, in 1974 and purchasing the New
York Post in 1976. In 1979, Murdoch founded News Corporation, commonly
referred to as News Corp., as a holding company for his various media
properties.
Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, Murdoch acquired news outlets around the globe at a
dizzying pace. In the United States, he bought up the Chicago Sun-Times,
the Village Voice and New York magazine. In England, he acquired
the eminently respectable Times and Sunday Times of London.
It
was also during these years that Murdoch began expanding his media empire into
television and entertainment. In 1985, he purchased 20th Century FOX Film
Corporation as well as several independent television stations and consolidated
these companies into FOX, Inc.—which has since become a major American
television network. In 1990, he founded STAR TV, a Hong Kong-based television
broadcasting company that broadcasts to over 320 million viewers across Asia.
Throughout the late 1980s, he purchased several prestigious American and
British academic and literary publishing companies and consolidated them into
HarperCollins in 1990. Murdoch has also invested in sports; he is a part owner
of the Los Angeles Kings NHL franchise, the Los Angeles Lakers NBA franchise
and the Staples Center, as well as FOX Sports Radio and FOXSports.com.
With
the dawn of the new century, Murdoch continued to expand News Corp's holdings
to control more and more of the media people view on a daily basis. In 2005, he
purchased Intermix Media, the owner of the popular social networking site
MySpace.com. Two years later, in 2007, the longtime newspaper mogul made
headlines himself with the purchase of Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall
Street Journal.
Murdoch
has drawn wide criticism for monopolizing control over international media
outlets as well as for his conservative political views, which are often
reflected in the reporting of Murdoch-controlled outlets such as FOX News
Channel. In the 2010 American midterm elections, News Corp donated $1 million
each to the Republican Governors Association and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
a group supporting Republican candidates. Critics argued that the owner of
major news sources covering the election should not contribute directly to the
political campaigns involved.
His
empire, however, was dealt a significant blow in 2011. His London tabloid, The
News of the World, was caught up in a phone hacking scandal. Several
editors and journalists were brought up on charges for illegally accessing the
voicemails of some of Britain's leading figures. Rupert himself was called to
testify that same year, and he shut down The News of the World. News
Corp later paid damages to some of individuals who were hacked.
Despite
this scandal, News Corp retains a significant share of virtually all forms of
media across the globe. Murdoch owns many of the books and newspapers people
read, the television shows and films they watch, the radio stations they listen
to, the websites they visit, and the blogs and social networks they create. In
2013, he announced a significant restructuring of his empire. Murdoch has
decided to divide his business into two companies—21st Century FOX Inc. and
News Corp. This move separates his entertainment holdings from his publishing
interests. According to the Los Angeles Times, Murdoch explained that
"Both companies will be uniquely positioned to execute on their respective
strategic objectives and to lead their industries forward."
Although
he could never have imagined the power he would one day yield, this kind of
influence was exactly what Murdoch sought as a young publisher building his
empire. "I sensed the excitement and the power," he recalls.
"Not raw power, but the ability to influence at least the agenda of what
was going on." And after six decades working in the media, Murdoch has
said that he could not imagine his life any other way. "If you're in the
media, particularly newspapers, you are in the thick of all the interesting
things that are going on in a community, and I can't imagine any other life
that one would want to dedicate oneself to," he said.
Personal
Life
Rupert
Murdoch married Patricia Booker in 1956. They had a daughter, Prudence, before
divorcing in 1965. He married Anna Torv in 1967, and they had four children
before eventually divorcing in 1999. Only 17 days after his second divorce,
Murdoch married his third wife, Wendi Deng. They have two children.
Murdoch
filed for divorce from Deng in June 2013, citing that the "relationship
between husband and wife had broken down irretrievably" in court papers.
The news of the split came as a surprise to some, but there had some rumors of
trouble in the marriage in recent years. The couple has a prenuptial agreement,
but many have speculated that there may still be a battle for his billions.