What Do Entrepreneurs Have in Common?

What made entrepreneurs like Henry Ford, James J. Hill, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry J. Kaiser so successful? Thoreau, of course, is a special case as he only dabbled at being an entrepreneur, so the Antiplanner’s answer to this question will focus more on the other three.

Ford, Hill, and Kaiser had three characteristics in common (most of which Thoreau lacked). First, they were absolute workaholics. All of them worked long hours for at least six days a week for almost their entire adult lives. Hill and Kaiser were working on entrepreneurial projects up to a few days before their deaths; Ford quit only because he was getting senile and his wife made him turn the company over to his grandson, Henry Ford II.

Second, they were all able to manage extremely complex problems. Hill organized the construction of a rail line from Minot, ND, to Great Falls, MT, the most miles of railroad ever built in one season from one end of track. This required extremely precise management of the many steps including grading, bridgework, trackwork, delivery of supplies, and coordination of men and machinery.

Ford employed hundreds of thousands of people and treated them all as if they reported directly to him. One of his eccentricities was a phobia about organizational hierarchies; anyone caught making an organization chart of the company was fired on the spot. Despite this disadvantage, Ford was able to manage the vertically integrated company as one of the most efficient manufacturing enterprises on earth.

Kaiser also was a supreme manager and organizer. Before participating in the coalition that built Hoover Dam, Kaiser built smaller dams in the Sierra Nevada. “At one time we had a thousand men on the job in 57 varieties of work,” said one of his employees. “Kaiser had that job timed to perfection.” Of course, during World War II, he had up to 300,000 employees working for him, though he, unlike Ford, was willing to use organizational charts.

The third characteristic is that they all consciously practiced what has been called “enlightened self interest.” In other words, they realized that, in the long run, it would pay off for them to be altruistic towards their customers, employees, competitors, and stockholders.

Almost as soon as Hill was established in the railroad business, he began giving away prize livestock to farmers in the hope they would use them to improve their herds. He worked very hard to promote better agricultural practices, which he admitted was “purely selfish,” for “if the the farmer was not prosperous, we were poor.” When blizzards swept across the northern prairie, Hill made sure that boxcars full of coal were delivered to each station on his railroad so that none of the farmers would freeze to death.
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Ford, of course, doubled worker pay even as he cut worker hours. He called this “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made” because it ensured he could attract the best workers around. Yet this move led to one of the greatest improvement in living standards in history: the transition of working-class families into the middle class.

Kaiser was the epitome of the altruistic entrepreneur. From his generous treatment of unions to his vision for jobs in the West, from his ideas for increasing homeownership to the Kaiser Permanente medical plan, it sometimes seemed that Kaiser was working more for others than for himself.

Kaiser was altruistic to his competitors as well. When a new General Motors factory for building automatic transmissions burned to the ground, Kaiser called his competitor Charlie Wilson, the president of General Motors, and offered space in his Kaiser automobile factory. “This nation cannot afford to have General Motors shut down,” said Kaiser. “Just ship whatever tools and dies you have been able to salvage. Don’t worry about any terms. We can work that out later. The important thing is for you to get back into production.” When Kaiser shut down production at that factory, GM bought it and continued to produce transmissions there through 1990.

Thoreau might have been altruistic enough, but he was no workaholic and he was uninterested in management — which explains why he never became a multi-millionaire. These qualities — hard work, organizational skills, and enlightened self-interest — don’t guarantee that entrepreneurs will become (as Ford and Kaiser did) billionaires. But lacking them pretty much guarantees that they won’t.

Just what does entrepreneurship have to do with antiplanning? Entrepreneurs have to plan, but the Antiplanner opposes only government plans — specifically, long-term, comprehensive plans and plans that try to control private property. Entrepreneurs succeed where these types of government plans fail precisely because entrepreneurs don’t try to do such plans. Entrepreneurs look ahead a year or three, but not 20 and certainly not 50 years. Entrepreneurs plan the problem at hand, and don’t try to comprehensively take every possible effect, no matter how distantly related, into consideration.

Most important, entrepreneurs plan their own resources, not those belonging to others — at least, not without their consent. Successful entrepreneurs may sell shares of their companies to others, but they retain a large share for themselves and thus have a strong incentive to see their plans succeed. Government planners have little incentive of this sort.

In future posts I plan to look at a different kind of entrepreneur — retailers from James C. Penney through Sam Walton — to see what they have in common with and how they might differ from the industrial entrepreneurs.