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Our “True Stories” are divided into two categories ones involving celebrities and the other where ‘ordinary’ yet fascinating people were involved. Click on the relevant titles below on the left to read the various stories.
If you have an interesting story that you feel would help provide an interesting and beneficial lessons to aspiring entrepreneurs please email us.**
Below you will find a Compendium of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs. This will be added to weekly.
In 1453 the Ottomans (Saracens) seized control of Constantinople capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) blocking western trade routes to eastern markets. By 1492 the last of the Muslim princes of Spain (moors) were removed leaving the Christians in control of the Iberian Peninsula. New trade routes were needed to circumvent the trade route blockage. The Jews are fleeced by Isabella inflating the Spanish nobles resources and the mercenary Italian Columbus, following constant previous refusals, gets the cash he needs to embark on a finding the new trade route to the east for Spain.
Christopher was the son of an entrepreneur and therefore may well have had a leaning towards entrepreneurship as a result of observing and receiving instruction from his father. He studied geometry, astronomy, grammar, geography, Latin language and navigation at University of Pavia.
At the impressionable age fourteen he was at sea as a professional seaman and at twenty-five he experienced being a victim of piracy. He actually had to abandon ship and swim ashore.
He required his crew to swear that the sighting of Cuba was not an island but “the mainland of the commencement of the Indies.” If they refused, 10,000 maravedis and the cutting out of the tongue” was the penalty. Even today people of the ‘Caribbean’ call themselves “*West Indians,”* despite west-India being halfway across the world from America, not to mention Native American being referred to and often referring to themselves as Indians.
Like all great entrepreneurs Columbus the gift of improvisation. Whilst stranded in the Caribbean, he once threatened local natives that he’d take the moon out of the sky if they did not assist him with food and provisions. The natives laughed. The following day the moon disappeared and the aboriginals begged him to give it back. Columbus did so and the frightened natives brought food and supplies. Of course it was simply an eclipse of the moon on February 29th 1504. Columbus had with him a copy of *Regionmontanus’ Ephemerides astronomicae. *It predicted the event.
Columbus strikes gold in the Caribbean mountains in 1499 (during his third voyage), this stimulates the development of capital and foreign exchange markets and the use of bills of exchange in Europe and the Near East reducing trade risk associated with trading with traders in faraway destinations. It led to the development of new experimental forms of banking and investment from which the joint-stock companies would evolve. France participates in Europe’s “Age of Discovery” establishing American colonies after excursions by Verrazzano and Cartier in the early 1500s.
In 1545 Spaniard Diego Gualpa falls down a hill Potosí (modern Bolivia) snatching at grass as he falls. He grabs at clump of earth and on inspection it is discovered to have silver ore attached at its base. The Spanish waste no time mining silver from the region sending it primarily to Europe in vast quantities. The combination of a surfeit of silver and improved transportation and navigation triggers the onset of a world economy which now includes the Americas.
Europeans now turned on each other vying for prominence as empire builders and colonisers in far away America – an expensive business. Mismanagement of the French economy results in economic meltdown. A gambler with some big ideas on a banking based on securitising the nation’s debt and selling it to investors is engaged (sound familiar). John Law is given he the job of salvaging the wrecked French economy using this entrepreneurial and securitisation ethos. Law, a private individual, is given effective personal control of the French economy including the management of the economies of many of its colonies.
He was born in Edinburgh, the son of an entrepreneur during the Scottish Enlightenment. This was period characterised by a torrent of Scottish intellectual and scientific achievements.
Two of Law’s characteristics that stood out were his gift for mathematics and an unconstrained character. His super ego allowed him to leave the security of home at eighteen for London. There he established himself as a dandy inheriting the name Beau Law (and Jessamy John to his envious detractors).
He ended up in jail after becoming entangled in a three way love affair and killing a man in a gentleman’s dual. After being sentenced to hang he escapes to Amsterdam. Europe and Amsterdam at that time was the place to be for a visionary of financial leveraging.
Law became a banker and salvaged the French economy. Unfortunately he created an economic bubble which led to economic meltdown. In his message to Richard Cantillon he said “If we were in England, we would have to negotiate with one another and come to some arrangement; in France, however, as you know, I can say to you that you will spend the night in the Bastille if you don’t give me your word that you will have left the Kingdom within twice twenty-four hours.” Cantillon is the man who coined the phrase “entrepreneur”. He was became an investor and depositor in Law’s bank. Cantillon decided to withdraw his cash which exacerbated the run on the bank.
At his heights John Law was the richest man in the world.
In 1236 the Holy Roman Emperor declared Jews ‘servi nostri et servi camerae nostri.’ This meant they were now protected from local pogroms. If interpreted literally the decree states they are the property of the Emperor and he and he alone can ‘hunt’ them. Earlier royals such as Duke Otto I of Wittelsbach, allow Jews who advanced him money the privilege of asylum. Jews are viewed throughout medieval Europe as indispensable because of their financial resources and connections. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia ‘Not only were the Jews forced to receive interest (they were excluded from many other businesses) but they were compelled to do so by the authorities, as the Christians were forbidden by the Church up to the sixteenth century to engage in money-lending’.
The French Revolution (1789 – 1799 and arguably ‘tipped’ by the antics of John Law) destabilizes a competing collection of kingdoms, princedoms and empires. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821) begins rampaging through Europe. Jews, who were exempt from ecclesiastical law, are able to establish banks coalescing disparate capital making it available in lumps to desperate European nations. Mayer Rothschild, a banker to royalty, is able to organize the funding of the warring European nations as well as winning contracts relating to the supply of provisions and gold needed for the wars and expansion into the Americas.
He died the richest man in Europe. He famously quoted as saying “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws”.
European colonial powers fight one another and the occupants of their colonies throughout the 19th century. The USA also begins warring with its unwanted natives and neighbours. The American Civil War then ensues. The USA‘s war with Mexico is a show case for guns such as Colt’s .44 calibre, “Six-shot Walker” pistol. The USA grabs half of Mexico, including Arizona, New Mexico and California signalling the rise of the United States as the preeminent military power in the Americas. Native Americans are removed to make way for European settlers by way of the gun. From 1831-1838 (during Colt’s life time) the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and other South-eastern native nations were removed to the so-called Indian Territory of Oklahoma, on the Trail of Tears. An estimated 100,000 people are moved west with a colt revolver pointed at their backs. The Seminole Wars take place, the first from 1817 to 1818; the Second 1835 to 1842 and the third from 1855 to 1858 took place in Florida. The various wars were a shot in the arm for gun sellers.
Sir Hiram Maxim inventor of the machine gun advised Colt “If you wanted to make a lot of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.”
Sam Colt was exposed to his father’s textile mill machines at an early age. He would observe how and why they worked. Colt began working in his father’s factory at the age of ten. As a boy he was surrounded by tools, materials, and factory workers. A passion for technical knowledge was acquired after being introduced to the Compendium of Knowledge whilst very young at school.
His father was bankrupted in and his mother died shortly afterward. Colt was between 7 and 14 years old at the time. Young Colt had to work on a farm as an indentured servant separated from surviving family members (at one point they were dropping like flies).
Sam’s adventurous spirit put him in good stead. He became professional seaman at the age of fifteen travelling to India employed as a sailor. It was during his trip to India he observed the ‘turning and locking’ action of the ship’s capstan. This gave him the idea of applying the same principle to a gun.
Sam was mercenary. He once wrote to his half-brother William saying “It is better to be at the head of a louse than at the tail of a lyon!... If I can’t be first I won’t be second in anything.”[Sic]
In 1856 William Hamersley said “The name Samuel Colt is now more widely known throughout the world than that of any other living American inventor. The entrepreneur was worth $15 million ($270 million in today’s money) at the time of his death.
European discovery of America saw immigrants land on the eastern seaboard. The East becomes settled. The West however was accessible via a long arduous journey via Lake Erie (with portage and/or the Lake Erie’s man-made canal) or around Cape Horn. The Homestead Act of 1862 (the great land give-away) relieved eastern cities of their overpopulation and attracts millions of impoverished European peasants from away from eastern cities, with dreams of being landowners and farmers.
Franzosenbusch Heritage Project published online an article on the times.[1]“The annexing of Texas was a symptom of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a nineteenth-century version of “Lotto Fever”. The United States Magazine and Democratic Review*,* journalistic John L. O’Sullivan wrote of the ‘fulfillment [sic] of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.’
O’Sullivan’s phrase [fulfillment [sic] of our manifest destiny], quickly adopted by other publications and politicians, neatly expressed a vision that sounded almost [sic] a religious mission. The rapid westward movement of large group of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first travelled [sic] in 1847, first took the religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City And In the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.
The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still lay claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control all of it.” [2]
From 1865 (just after the end of the American civil war) to 1901 the country went through break neck and unprecedented economic growth. The era was named the “Gilded Age” and overlapped the Reconstruction (1863-1877). During this era the railroad construction business boomed, with 35,000 miles (56,000 km) of new track laid across the country between 1866 and 1873. There was rapid growth of small industrial units, shops, mines and banks. In addition to this, there was great expansion into the highly fertile western farmlands. Jobs were plentiful on the farms and in the cities. Living standards and the purchasing power of money increased rapidly. This was a period of greed and expansion. During this period you had the 1869 Black Friday panic caused by Jay Gould (probably the most corrupt entrepreneur of all time) and Jim Fisk trying to corner the gold market. There was also the 1873 panic caused by the over-expansion in general.
The so-called “Second Industrial Revolution” began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Crucial to it was the technological advances in steel production such as the Bessemer heath furnace. It was as a result of Andrew Carnegie’s visit to Sheffield and Birmingham and his discovery of the Bessemer art of steel production that moved him from iron to steel production primarily producing steel tracks for railway companies. Ultimately steel made him the richest man in the World.
Steel production got cheaper and transport got quicker. The first industrial revolution was centred on improvement in coal, iron, and steam technologies. The second revolution revolved around technological breakthroughs affecting steel, electricity and chemicals.
The expansionist fervour the 1800s correlates not only with the rise of Andrew Carnegie but also John D Rockefeller. They provided the resources to build by supplying the steel and the oil required by industry. By 1900, settlers had filed 600,000 claims. In 1861 Kansas entered the Union. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas explodes. In 1871, 29,000 claims were made in Kansas under the Homestead Act. By 1885–1886, this number had leaped to 43,000 claims. The population of San Francisco explodes, after the discovery of gold nearby, from a mere 1,000 in 1848 to 20,000 residents by 1850. However, crossing from east to west is a problem.
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s father was an entrepreneur selling farm produce to New York markets across the New York harbour. At eleven years old Cornelius left school and entered his father’s business. Not only was he fortunate enough to have a father who was an entrepreneur but his mother also provided early entrepreneurial guidance. So anxious was she about her adventurous son’s desperate desire to go to sea she offered her young son $100 ($1700 in today’s money) to clear and plant an eight-acre field. Young Vanderbilt invested the money in a small two-mast flat-bottomed boat and ferried freight and passengers between Manhattan and Staten Island.
As a child Vanderbilt exemplified a tremendous ability and desire to work hard. When he wasn’t transporting he was selling. The day he got married he went back to work as soon as the service was over. He was truculent and irreverent pinching the backsides of curvaceous female servants and was known to spit chewing tobacco on his dinning host’s carpet.
Vanderbilt had indomitable spirit, was temperamental and arrogant, loud, outspoken and spoke with unfettered profanity in public, all this bellowing from his imposing six foot two inch frame. He was considered a very good looking man. Additionally, he was considered a hard man.
Vanderbilt had nerves of steel and would use brinkmanship as a means of competing, undercutting all competitors, more often than not, and pricing services way below cost. Such was his reputation he was paid money to stay out of markets (the competitors would club together and pay him a stipend to stay away)
When he died he was reputed to be the richest man in the country.
Hill’s father died when he was fourteen years old and he was required to work to shore up the family’s finances. He lost an eye during a hunting accident earlier at the age of nine but went on to form his own volunteer regiment when rejected by the army during the civil war. At school he was adept at algebra and geometry and had that adventurous spirit. He developed a burning desire to emulate his 14th Century hero, entrepreneur Marco Polo and travel the Orient as a trader.
He was aggressive once threatening acts of violence against obstructive Washington officials. He fought with rivals blowing up his railway lines and dumping rubble on his routes. He personally battled temperatures of forty degrees Celsius as well as sub-zero in search of passes in canyons out in the wilderness.
He was a dreamer with what were deemed ‘crazy’ ideas of building a transport system in remote places and a transcontinental railroad without government subsidy. His ideas became known as “Hill’s Folly” but he did it anyway fulfilling dreams previously scoffed at. The 8,000 men employed to complete the great engineering feat of his transcontinental railroad were banned from celebrating when the golden spike was finally hammered into the ground, Hill wouldn’t rest on his laurels, celebration were brief to avoid hangovers that caused delays.
Both Hill and Vanderbilt were temperamental, aggressive and impassioned individuals. They were frontiers-men. Rough, tough with an iron will, well suited to their environment, time and the opportunities of the American great outdoors presented at the time. Their early years formed their minds in different ways. Vanderbilt was under the close tutelage of his parents whereas Hill was matriculated into manhood through necessity.
Mormon entrepreneur Sam Brannan triggered the 49’er gold rush which was the main cause of the San Francisco population to explode just after 1848. Entrepreneurs such as Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker (known as the four shopkeepers), Vanderbilt, Hill and Gould paved the way for the millions to pour in to California via the railroads. In 1850 the USA Federal Courts passed the Fugitive Slave Law. Similarly slaves could be returned from escaping south to Mexico. Pleasants, a slave fugitive and freer of slaves, was directed her scout to go to the Californian gold-rush country, as place to ‘get lost.’ It was a good place for a fugitive to hide. Opportunities abounded among men short on women, high on liquor, stocked with guns and dreams of avarice. Gold circulated among the good, bad and the ugly. Pleasant arrived in San Francisco on April 7th 1852 a year before Levi Strauss’ (the inventor of jeans) arrival.
Mary Ellen was born a slave and her early guidance came from her owners. She had enchanting good looks and enamoured her owners who treated her well. Her spurning the relative life of a ‘privileged slave’ tells us a lot about her character. She not only wanted to be entirely free she wanted to free all her fellow slaves too. She was very happy to use entrepreneurship and violence as the means to liberation.
Whilst being passed around her precocious mind soaked up each of the new and contrasting philosophies of her owners.
Her business tuition began as a child minding her owner’s store. Her last owners were abolitionist Quakers. They came in to possession of her as a result o the last owner becoming jealous of the doting attention heaped on the slave girl by his wife. Pleasant’s mother was a Voodoo priestess (and descendant of the “voodoo queens” of Santo Domingo).
An important peculiar attribute of Pleasant was her ‘need’ to fight against injustice. In 1868, a century before Rosa Parks refused to give-up a seat for a white passenger, Pleasant fought and won the right for blacks to ride the bus in California in the Supreme Court. She funded paternity cases on behalf of a poor white woman against a wealthy and popular Nevada senator, William Sharon. She would say “I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.”
Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, a 19th Century Prussian soldier, military historian and influential military theorist, once wrote “war is an extension of politics, but by other means.” In fact war is an extension of business by another means! During the late 19th and early 20th Century Britain, Germany and France as well as some other lesser (economic) nations such as Italy competed with one another for colonies and access to scarce resources in foreign lands.
Soon after the Oriental Railway had been constructed (Balkans to Constantinople) in 1888, German bankers received permission from the Ottomans to construct a railway deeper into Turkey. A planned rail link (Berlin to Baghdad) between economic and political allies Germany and Turkey (the latter governed the Middle East) was a threat to French, Russian and British interest. Oil was then discovered in Iran (Persia) at the turn of the last century. Britain was drilling for it by 1911. The British navy had just converted to oil fired ships from coal so it was now the most important mineral resource. The whole thing was driven by entrepreneurs of Germany. World War I ensued.
Germany and Turkey (Ottomans) lost the war. The now crumbling Ottoman Empire was up for grabs. America had a forty-four month boom from the beginning of WWI in 1914 to its end in 1918. The USA fought only for only seven months and it exported goods and armaments to Europe so they could destroy each other. Americans had the money Europeans needed rebuilding. Ivar Kruegerstepped in with American money for those countries trying rebuild. Krueger and America benefitted from the premium of war. An architect and builder by training, he used loans to county’s obtaining matchstick monopolies quid pro quo. It was his stepping stone into banking.
Ivar Kreuger was the eldest son of an industrialist, banker, and Russian consul. He was intellectually gifted, completely fearless, open to new ideas with natural curiosity and a healthy disrespect for rules. His classmates at school called him the The Sneak. As a child he devised an ingenious scheme to cheat on school tests, stealing exam questions and selling answers to fellow students. As a child of six years old he was recognized as prodigious graduating from one of Sweden’s leading universities with two Masters Degrees in mechanical and civil engineering, aged twenty.
His adventurous nature saw embark on a world tour as a young man working on building sites and investing as he went. Whilst working on a construction site building a bridge in Havana, Cuba, he experienced a breakout of Yellow Fever. Everyone on the site died only Krueger and one other labourer was spared. In 1902 the city New Orleans bestowed Krueger a medal for saving a girl from drowning. Ironically, he would try to do the same for Europe after WWI. As a result he became the world’s richest entrepreneur but lost it all after his less than scrupulous methods caught up with him.
In the late 19th century alcohol related illnesses in America was rife. Large employers like Rockefeller and Ford felt it was interfering with production and supported the abolition of alcohol.
Anti German sentiment was wide spread and all of the brewers of beer in America were actually headquartered in Germany. As a result of WWI and the German beer connection, the temperance movement called alcohol “the worst of all our German enemies.” Beer was dubbed “Kaiser Brew.” It was widely viewed that the buying of beer was tantamount to Americans financing the strident war mongering German nation. At midnight, January 16th 1920, the United States of America instigated a nationwide ban on alcohol via the 1919 Volstead Act. George Remus who owned a couple of chemist and now a successful lawyer defending murderers and bootleggers decided to become a bootlegger. Only he bootlegged on an industrial scale.
George Remus was German and Germany is where all the beer in circulation in the USA came from at that time. His maternal grandfather was a successful entrepreneur who owned a mill back in the old country. Remus arrived in America as a five year old. The family chose to settle in Milwaukee a city was known as “German Athens of America” before moving to the gangster ridden city of Chicago.
When Remus was a young teenager his father was struck down with auricular rheumatism and couldn’t work. The fourteen year old son became the family’s breadwinner, working for his uncle, who owned a pharmacy which eventually bought out an opened another.
By age 21 Remus had a licence to practise pharmacology and two pharmacies. By age 24 he had a law degree after completing his studies in half the normal period studying at night. He developed a reputation for himself as a very able lawyer spurning opportunities to take up the post of District Attorney. Remus just loved defending criminals.
When the Volstead Act prohibiting alcohol became law throughout America, teetotal, Remus was well suited to taking advantage of it. He use to defend bootleggers in court and went on to become the most successful bootlegger in the history of illegal alcohol distribution.
After admitting shooting his wife to death, he successfully defended himself in a case that made headline news throughout the country. The trial was filled with his theatrics and he was found not guilty in a matter of minutes.
Being a daring, smart, adventurous, a trained lawyer, pharmacologist, built tough both physically and mentally, George Remus an ideally ‘suited’ to be a successful entrepreneur the new prohibition environment of Chicago and the swinging 1920s. Before going to jail for bootlegging and before his wife (who he gave power of attorney) robbed him of everything he had, he was reputed as one of the richest men in the country – a multi billionaire by today’s standards. He would murder his wife, defend himself, win and get back to the business of entrepreneurship. He never reached his former heights after his stint in prison.
On March 16th 1885 Fukuzawa Yukichi published an article called Leaving Asia. It signalled Japan’s leaning away from the east and towards western culture in markets, commerce, law and government. Japan’s successful war with Russia in 1904-5 war gave rise to the great global ambitions of Imperialist Japan invigorating her economy.
The Japanese invasion of China in 1940 expanded Japanese markets and access to cheap raw materials and labour. The defeat of Japan during WWII left its business sector reeling and rolled back all its imperialist gains.
The war cleared the way for Japan to start again from scratch with a deliberately planned capitalist economy, supported by special treatment from the wealthiest western capitalist nations. They entertained Japanese protectionist policies in order to avoid Japan falling under the influence of the USSR.
The 1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invention of the transistor was seized upon by Japanese entrepreneurs.
Hayakawa and Matsushita were born within a two years of each other. Hayakawa was born into poverty and Matsushita was suddenly plunged into poverty after his father’s disastrous results speculating on commodities. The family had to trade their large house and grounds for the squalor of inner-city tenements. As a toddler Hayakawa had to leave home at nine years old to work as an apprentice in a metal workshop. His parents died whilst he was young and so too did his first foster mother. His young family including his wife and two children were killed during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. He was just into his twenties at the time.
Matsushita was the youngest of eight children and the age of 7 had begun the witnessing of every member of his family dying in quick succession. The unfortunate deaths within his family could have been prevented by access to expensive medicine. Medicines that were very affordable before his father’s investment disasters.
Like many of those already mentioned both boys had an incredible capacity for hard work. The two entrepreneurs’ disadvantaged beginnings imbued them with a sense of great purpose and the need t look after family in the form of the company staff.
The Matsushita’s story is strangest peculiarities of an entrepreneur I have ever seen. Basically if things were going well Matsushita he would get so sick doctors would think he was close to death. Miraculously, when they got bad and he was needed to help save his staff or political friends he naturally would recover. His recovery would be almost overnight. It seemed to correlate with having something purposeful to achieve other than money.
Tokuji demonstrated a similar strength after his business was destroyed by The Great Kanto Earthquake which stuck on September 1st 1923 hit. Everything but his debts had been wiped-out. He was back in business by December with three workers.
Both Hayakawa and Matsushita appeared to perform best when things got really bad. **
The USSR was basically built on the same area as the overthrown Russian Empire. The communist creed was based on a planned economy and not the random self correcting entrepreneurial model popular in Western Europe. The centrally controlled economic planning failed to meet the financial requirements of the State. Additionally it failed to satisfy disparate cultural and geographic needs of various groups and regions of the USSR.
The state was embroiled in a vicious and expensive arms race with nemesis United States. The USSR’s gradual economic decline required significant political and economic reform.
In June 1987 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union presented a thesis for the reform of the Soviet economy. In July the Supreme Soviet passed the Law on State Enterprise. More reforms followed and the program Perestroika meaning ‘restructuring’ was embarked upon. Citizens were now able to indulge in a limited form of entrepreneurship.
In 1990, after, mentor and teacher of both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev (current prime minister and current president respectively) Anatoly Sobchak, was selected as the Chairman of Leningrad Soviet, Anatoly Chubais became his deputy. Chubais tried to implement Sobchak’s idea of creating a Free Economic Zone in Leningrad.
Chubais worked as the president of newly created *Wassily Leontief Centre*for research in economics. In November 1991 Chubais became a minister in the Yeltsin Cabinet handling the portfolio of the Chief of Rosimushchestvo (Committee on the State Properties) charged with the task of the Privatization in Russia. Chubais originally advocated quick privatization for quick money, similar to the model used for privatization in Hungary but that model was rejected by Congress of Soviets. Eventually a compromise in the form of a voucher privatization scheme similar to that used in the Czech Republic was proposed and adopted on 11th June 1991. The program began after President Yeltsin announced the decree on 19th August 1991.
The mineral rich Russian and Soviet regions were to be sold off to private citizens. Millions of vouchers were distributed among ordinary Russians. Few understood their real worth, and many were frivolously traded away for food and vodka. But the vouchers represented the country’s assets and cunning entrepreneurs snapped up the vouchers gaining vast stakes in manufacturing, natural resources and media. Abramovich was one of them.
Roman Abramovich was an orphan by the age of four. He was an average student known back then for his perpetual smile. He seized opportunities breaking under perestroika.
One of the things that stood out about Abramovich was that throughout his career he is continually embroiled in controversial business situations strewn with ‘banana skins’ yet remains free of personal controversy and always come out on top.
He is a Russian Jew and on the face of it that would generally render him an underdog. However, there is clearly a quality or qualities within the Russian Jewish culture that makes someone from that background mega successful in post communist Russia. Of the twelve of the so-called robber barons, (listed by US based twenty-four hour cable news channel MSNBC) eight are Jews. This is astonishing, and testimony to their strength, given the Jewish population represents only about one-half of one per cent of the Russian population. “As happened in certain other societies in the early stages of capitalist development, religious belief and economic circumstance interact in powerful ways to produce a distinctive religious sub-culture conducive to entrepreneurship and enterprise. The Old Believers in Russia performed the role of economic pioneers… served as an incubator of entrepreneurial values in Russia.” James L. West* Merchant Moscow*.
When Abramovich was asked for his advice to anyone starting out in business in Putin’s Russia in an interview replied: “Never think that you won’t go to jail.” **
If you have an interesting story that you feel would help provide an interesting and beneficial lessons to aspiring entrepreneurs please email us.**
Below you will find a Compendium of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs. This will be added to weekly.
Christopher Columbus - Coloniser (1451 - 1506)
In 1453 the Ottomans (Saracens) seized control of Constantinople capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) blocking western trade routes to eastern markets. By 1492 the last of the Muslim princes of Spain (moors) were removed leaving the Christians in control of the Iberian Peninsula. New trade routes were needed to circumvent the trade route blockage. The Jews are fleeced by Isabella inflating the Spanish nobles resources and the mercenary Italian Columbus, following constant previous refusals, gets the cash he needs to embark on a finding the new trade route to the east for Spain.
Christopher was the son of an entrepreneur and therefore may well have had a leaning towards entrepreneurship as a result of observing and receiving instruction from his father. He studied geometry, astronomy, grammar, geography, Latin language and navigation at University of Pavia.
At the impressionable age fourteen he was at sea as a professional seaman and at twenty-five he experienced being a victim of piracy. He actually had to abandon ship and swim ashore.
He required his crew to swear that the sighting of Cuba was not an island but “the mainland of the commencement of the Indies.” If they refused, 10,000 maravedis and the cutting out of the tongue” was the penalty. Even today people of the ‘Caribbean’ call themselves “*West Indians,”* despite west-India being halfway across the world from America, not to mention Native American being referred to and often referring to themselves as Indians.
Like all great entrepreneurs Columbus the gift of improvisation. Whilst stranded in the Caribbean, he once threatened local natives that he’d take the moon out of the sky if they did not assist him with food and provisions. The natives laughed. The following day the moon disappeared and the aboriginals begged him to give it back. Columbus did so and the frightened natives brought food and supplies. Of course it was simply an eclipse of the moon on February 29th 1504. Columbus had with him a copy of *Regionmontanus’ Ephemerides astronomicae. *It predicted the event.
John Law – Banker (1671 – 1729):
Columbus strikes gold in the Caribbean mountains in 1499 (during his third voyage), this stimulates the development of capital and foreign exchange markets and the use of bills of exchange in Europe and the Near East reducing trade risk associated with trading with traders in faraway destinations. It led to the development of new experimental forms of banking and investment from which the joint-stock companies would evolve. France participates in Europe’s “Age of Discovery” establishing American colonies after excursions by Verrazzano and Cartier in the early 1500s.
In 1545 Spaniard Diego Gualpa falls down a hill Potosí (modern Bolivia) snatching at grass as he falls. He grabs at clump of earth and on inspection it is discovered to have silver ore attached at its base. The Spanish waste no time mining silver from the region sending it primarily to Europe in vast quantities. The combination of a surfeit of silver and improved transportation and navigation triggers the onset of a world economy which now includes the Americas.
Europeans now turned on each other vying for prominence as empire builders and colonisers in far away America – an expensive business. Mismanagement of the French economy results in economic meltdown. A gambler with some big ideas on a banking based on securitising the nation’s debt and selling it to investors is engaged (sound familiar). John Law is given he the job of salvaging the wrecked French economy using this entrepreneurial and securitisation ethos. Law, a private individual, is given effective personal control of the French economy including the management of the economies of many of its colonies.
He was born in Edinburgh, the son of an entrepreneur during the Scottish Enlightenment. This was period characterised by a torrent of Scottish intellectual and scientific achievements.
Two of Law’s characteristics that stood out were his gift for mathematics and an unconstrained character. His super ego allowed him to leave the security of home at eighteen for London. There he established himself as a dandy inheriting the name Beau Law (and Jessamy John to his envious detractors).
He ended up in jail after becoming entangled in a three way love affair and killing a man in a gentleman’s dual. After being sentenced to hang he escapes to Amsterdam. Europe and Amsterdam at that time was the place to be for a visionary of financial leveraging.
Law became a banker and salvaged the French economy. Unfortunately he created an economic bubble which led to economic meltdown. In his message to Richard Cantillon he said “If we were in England, we would have to negotiate with one another and come to some arrangement; in France, however, as you know, I can say to you that you will spend the night in the Bastille if you don’t give me your word that you will have left the Kingdom within twice twenty-four hours.” Cantillon is the man who coined the phrase “entrepreneur”. He was became an investor and depositor in Law’s bank. Cantillon decided to withdraw his cash which exacerbated the run on the bank.
At his heights John Law was the richest man in the world.
Mayer Rothschild – Banker (1744 – 1812):
In 1236 the Holy Roman Emperor declared Jews ‘servi nostri et servi camerae nostri.’ This meant they were now protected from local pogroms. If interpreted literally the decree states they are the property of the Emperor and he and he alone can ‘hunt’ them. Earlier royals such as Duke Otto I of Wittelsbach, allow Jews who advanced him money the privilege of asylum. Jews are viewed throughout medieval Europe as indispensable because of their financial resources and connections. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia ‘Not only were the Jews forced to receive interest (they were excluded from many other businesses) but they were compelled to do so by the authorities, as the Christians were forbidden by the Church up to the sixteenth century to engage in money-lending’.
The French Revolution (1789 – 1799 and arguably ‘tipped’ by the antics of John Law) destabilizes a competing collection of kingdoms, princedoms and empires. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821) begins rampaging through Europe. Jews, who were exempt from ecclesiastical law, are able to establish banks coalescing disparate capital making it available in lumps to desperate European nations. Mayer Rothschild, a banker to royalty, is able to organize the funding of the warring European nations as well as winning contracts relating to the supply of provisions and gold needed for the wars and expansion into the Americas.
He died the richest man in Europe. He famously quoted as saying “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws”.
Samuel Colt* gun – Manufacturer (1814 – 1862)*
European colonial powers fight one another and the occupants of their colonies throughout the 19th century. The USA also begins warring with its unwanted natives and neighbours. The American Civil War then ensues. The USA‘s war with Mexico is a show case for guns such as Colt’s .44 calibre, “Six-shot Walker” pistol. The USA grabs half of Mexico, including Arizona, New Mexico and California signalling the rise of the United States as the preeminent military power in the Americas. Native Americans are removed to make way for European settlers by way of the gun. From 1831-1838 (during Colt’s life time) the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and other South-eastern native nations were removed to the so-called Indian Territory of Oklahoma, on the Trail of Tears. An estimated 100,000 people are moved west with a colt revolver pointed at their backs. The Seminole Wars take place, the first from 1817 to 1818; the Second 1835 to 1842 and the third from 1855 to 1858 took place in Florida. The various wars were a shot in the arm for gun sellers.
Sir Hiram Maxim inventor of the machine gun advised Colt “If you wanted to make a lot of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other’s throats with greater facility.”
Sam Colt was exposed to his father’s textile mill machines at an early age. He would observe how and why they worked. Colt began working in his father’s factory at the age of ten. As a boy he was surrounded by tools, materials, and factory workers. A passion for technical knowledge was acquired after being introduced to the Compendium of Knowledge whilst very young at school.
His father was bankrupted in and his mother died shortly afterward. Colt was between 7 and 14 years old at the time. Young Colt had to work on a farm as an indentured servant separated from surviving family members (at one point they were dropping like flies).
Sam’s adventurous spirit put him in good stead. He became professional seaman at the age of fifteen travelling to India employed as a sailor. It was during his trip to India he observed the ‘turning and locking’ action of the ship’s capstan. This gave him the idea of applying the same principle to a gun.
Sam was mercenary. He once wrote to his half-brother William saying “It is better to be at the head of a louse than at the tail of a lyon!... If I can’t be first I won’t be second in anything.”[Sic]
In 1856 William Hamersley said “The name Samuel Colt is now more widely known throughout the world than that of any other living American inventor. The entrepreneur was worth $15 million ($270 million in today’s money) at the time of his death.
Cornelius Vanderbilt* (1794 – 1877) and James J Hill (1838 – 1916) – Transportation
European discovery of America saw immigrants land on the eastern seaboard. The East becomes settled. The West however was accessible via a long arduous journey via Lake Erie (with portage and/or the Lake Erie’s man-made canal) or around Cape Horn. The Homestead Act of 1862 (the great land give-away) relieved eastern cities of their overpopulation and attracts millions of impoverished European peasants from away from eastern cities, with dreams of being landowners and farmers.
Franzosenbusch Heritage Project published online an article on the times.[1]“The annexing of Texas was a symptom of a larger frenzy that was sweeping through America like a nineteenth-century version of “Lotto Fever”. The United States Magazine and Democratic Review*,* journalistic John L. O’Sullivan wrote of the ‘fulfillment [sic] of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.’
O’Sullivan’s phrase [fulfillment [sic] of our manifest destiny], quickly adopted by other publications and politicians, neatly expressed a vision that sounded almost [sic] a religious mission. The rapid westward movement of large group of settlers was spurred by the development of the famous trails to the West. The Santa Fe Trail linked Independence, Missouri with the Old Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The Oregon Trail, mapped by trappers and missionaries, went northwest to the Oregon Territory. The Mormon Trail, first travelled [sic] in 1847, first took the religious group and then other settlers from Illinois to Salt Lake City And In the Southwest, the Oxbow Route, from Missouri west to California, carried mail under a federal contract.
The fact that California, with its great ports, was still part of Mexico, and that England still lay claim to Oregon, only heightened the aggressiveness of the American desire to control all of it.” [2]
From 1865 (just after the end of the American civil war) to 1901 the country went through break neck and unprecedented economic growth. The era was named the “Gilded Age” and overlapped the Reconstruction (1863-1877). During this era the railroad construction business boomed, with 35,000 miles (56,000 km) of new track laid across the country between 1866 and 1873. There was rapid growth of small industrial units, shops, mines and banks. In addition to this, there was great expansion into the highly fertile western farmlands. Jobs were plentiful on the farms and in the cities. Living standards and the purchasing power of money increased rapidly. This was a period of greed and expansion. During this period you had the 1869 Black Friday panic caused by Jay Gould (probably the most corrupt entrepreneur of all time) and Jim Fisk trying to corner the gold market. There was also the 1873 panic caused by the over-expansion in general.
The so-called “Second Industrial Revolution” began in the middle of the nineteenth century. Crucial to it was the technological advances in steel production such as the Bessemer heath furnace. It was as a result of Andrew Carnegie’s visit to Sheffield and Birmingham and his discovery of the Bessemer art of steel production that moved him from iron to steel production primarily producing steel tracks for railway companies. Ultimately steel made him the richest man in the World.
Steel production got cheaper and transport got quicker. The first industrial revolution was centred on improvement in coal, iron, and steam technologies. The second revolution revolved around technological breakthroughs affecting steel, electricity and chemicals.
The expansionist fervour the 1800s correlates not only with the rise of Andrew Carnegie but also John D Rockefeller. They provided the resources to build by supplying the steel and the oil required by industry. By 1900, settlers had filed 600,000 claims. In 1861 Kansas entered the Union. After the Civil War, the population of Kansas explodes. In 1871, 29,000 claims were made in Kansas under the Homestead Act. By 1885–1886, this number had leaped to 43,000 claims. The population of San Francisco explodes, after the discovery of gold nearby, from a mere 1,000 in 1848 to 20,000 residents by 1850. However, crossing from east to west is a problem.
Cornelius Vanderbilt’s father was an entrepreneur selling farm produce to New York markets across the New York harbour. At eleven years old Cornelius left school and entered his father’s business. Not only was he fortunate enough to have a father who was an entrepreneur but his mother also provided early entrepreneurial guidance. So anxious was she about her adventurous son’s desperate desire to go to sea she offered her young son $100 ($1700 in today’s money) to clear and plant an eight-acre field. Young Vanderbilt invested the money in a small two-mast flat-bottomed boat and ferried freight and passengers between Manhattan and Staten Island.
As a child Vanderbilt exemplified a tremendous ability and desire to work hard. When he wasn’t transporting he was selling. The day he got married he went back to work as soon as the service was over. He was truculent and irreverent pinching the backsides of curvaceous female servants and was known to spit chewing tobacco on his dinning host’s carpet.
Vanderbilt had indomitable spirit, was temperamental and arrogant, loud, outspoken and spoke with unfettered profanity in public, all this bellowing from his imposing six foot two inch frame. He was considered a very good looking man. Additionally, he was considered a hard man.
Vanderbilt had nerves of steel and would use brinkmanship as a means of competing, undercutting all competitors, more often than not, and pricing services way below cost. Such was his reputation he was paid money to stay out of markets (the competitors would club together and pay him a stipend to stay away)
When he died he was reputed to be the richest man in the country.
James J Hill
Hill’s father died when he was fourteen years old and he was required to work to shore up the family’s finances. He lost an eye during a hunting accident earlier at the age of nine but went on to form his own volunteer regiment when rejected by the army during the civil war. At school he was adept at algebra and geometry and had that adventurous spirit. He developed a burning desire to emulate his 14th Century hero, entrepreneur Marco Polo and travel the Orient as a trader.
He was aggressive once threatening acts of violence against obstructive Washington officials. He fought with rivals blowing up his railway lines and dumping rubble on his routes. He personally battled temperatures of forty degrees Celsius as well as sub-zero in search of passes in canyons out in the wilderness.
He was a dreamer with what were deemed ‘crazy’ ideas of building a transport system in remote places and a transcontinental railroad without government subsidy. His ideas became known as “Hill’s Folly” but he did it anyway fulfilling dreams previously scoffed at. The 8,000 men employed to complete the great engineering feat of his transcontinental railroad were banned from celebrating when the golden spike was finally hammered into the ground, Hill wouldn’t rest on his laurels, celebration were brief to avoid hangovers that caused delays.
Both Hill and Vanderbilt were temperamental, aggressive and impassioned individuals. They were frontiers-men. Rough, tough with an iron will, well suited to their environment, time and the opportunities of the American great outdoors presented at the time. Their early years formed their minds in different ways. Vanderbilt was under the close tutelage of his parents whereas Hill was matriculated into manhood through necessity.
Mary Ellen Pleasant – Property and Investments **(1814 – 1904)
Mormon entrepreneur Sam Brannan triggered the 49’er gold rush which was the main cause of the San Francisco population to explode just after 1848. Entrepreneurs such as Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker (known as the four shopkeepers), Vanderbilt, Hill and Gould paved the way for the millions to pour in to California via the railroads. In 1850 the USA Federal Courts passed the Fugitive Slave Law. Similarly slaves could be returned from escaping south to Mexico. Pleasants, a slave fugitive and freer of slaves, was directed her scout to go to the Californian gold-rush country, as place to ‘get lost.’ It was a good place for a fugitive to hide. Opportunities abounded among men short on women, high on liquor, stocked with guns and dreams of avarice. Gold circulated among the good, bad and the ugly. Pleasant arrived in San Francisco on April 7th 1852 a year before Levi Strauss’ (the inventor of jeans) arrival.
Mary Ellen was born a slave and her early guidance came from her owners. She had enchanting good looks and enamoured her owners who treated her well. Her spurning the relative life of a ‘privileged slave’ tells us a lot about her character. She not only wanted to be entirely free she wanted to free all her fellow slaves too. She was very happy to use entrepreneurship and violence as the means to liberation.
Whilst being passed around her precocious mind soaked up each of the new and contrasting philosophies of her owners.
Her business tuition began as a child minding her owner’s store. Her last owners were abolitionist Quakers. They came in to possession of her as a result o the last owner becoming jealous of the doting attention heaped on the slave girl by his wife. Pleasant’s mother was a Voodoo priestess (and descendant of the “voodoo queens” of Santo Domingo).
An important peculiar attribute of Pleasant was her ‘need’ to fight against injustice. In 1868, a century before Rosa Parks refused to give-up a seat for a white passenger, Pleasant fought and won the right for blacks to ride the bus in California in the Supreme Court. She funded paternity cases on behalf of a poor white woman against a wealthy and popular Nevada senator, William Sharon. She would say “I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.”
Ivar Krueger* – Banker, Matchstick Manufacturer, Builder (1880 – 1932)*
Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz, a 19th Century Prussian soldier, military historian and influential military theorist, once wrote “war is an extension of politics, but by other means.” In fact war is an extension of business by another means! During the late 19th and early 20th Century Britain, Germany and France as well as some other lesser (economic) nations such as Italy competed with one another for colonies and access to scarce resources in foreign lands.
Soon after the Oriental Railway had been constructed (Balkans to Constantinople) in 1888, German bankers received permission from the Ottomans to construct a railway deeper into Turkey. A planned rail link (Berlin to Baghdad) between economic and political allies Germany and Turkey (the latter governed the Middle East) was a threat to French, Russian and British interest. Oil was then discovered in Iran (Persia) at the turn of the last century. Britain was drilling for it by 1911. The British navy had just converted to oil fired ships from coal so it was now the most important mineral resource. The whole thing was driven by entrepreneurs of Germany. World War I ensued.
Germany and Turkey (Ottomans) lost the war. The now crumbling Ottoman Empire was up for grabs. America had a forty-four month boom from the beginning of WWI in 1914 to its end in 1918. The USA fought only for only seven months and it exported goods and armaments to Europe so they could destroy each other. Americans had the money Europeans needed rebuilding. Ivar Kruegerstepped in with American money for those countries trying rebuild. Krueger and America benefitted from the premium of war. An architect and builder by training, he used loans to county’s obtaining matchstick monopolies quid pro quo. It was his stepping stone into banking.
Ivar Kreuger was the eldest son of an industrialist, banker, and Russian consul. He was intellectually gifted, completely fearless, open to new ideas with natural curiosity and a healthy disrespect for rules. His classmates at school called him the The Sneak. As a child he devised an ingenious scheme to cheat on school tests, stealing exam questions and selling answers to fellow students. As a child of six years old he was recognized as prodigious graduating from one of Sweden’s leading universities with two Masters Degrees in mechanical and civil engineering, aged twenty.
His adventurous nature saw embark on a world tour as a young man working on building sites and investing as he went. Whilst working on a construction site building a bridge in Havana, Cuba, he experienced a breakout of Yellow Fever. Everyone on the site died only Krueger and one other labourer was spared. In 1902 the city New Orleans bestowed Krueger a medal for saving a girl from drowning. Ironically, he would try to do the same for Europe after WWI. As a result he became the world’s richest entrepreneur but lost it all after his less than scrupulous methods caught up with him.
George Remus* – Bootlegger (1876-1952)*
In the late 19th century alcohol related illnesses in America was rife. Large employers like Rockefeller and Ford felt it was interfering with production and supported the abolition of alcohol.
Anti German sentiment was wide spread and all of the brewers of beer in America were actually headquartered in Germany. As a result of WWI and the German beer connection, the temperance movement called alcohol “the worst of all our German enemies.” Beer was dubbed “Kaiser Brew.” It was widely viewed that the buying of beer was tantamount to Americans financing the strident war mongering German nation. At midnight, January 16th 1920, the United States of America instigated a nationwide ban on alcohol via the 1919 Volstead Act. George Remus who owned a couple of chemist and now a successful lawyer defending murderers and bootleggers decided to become a bootlegger. Only he bootlegged on an industrial scale.
George Remus was German and Germany is where all the beer in circulation in the USA came from at that time. His maternal grandfather was a successful entrepreneur who owned a mill back in the old country. Remus arrived in America as a five year old. The family chose to settle in Milwaukee a city was known as “German Athens of America” before moving to the gangster ridden city of Chicago.
When Remus was a young teenager his father was struck down with auricular rheumatism and couldn’t work. The fourteen year old son became the family’s breadwinner, working for his uncle, who owned a pharmacy which eventually bought out an opened another.
By age 21 Remus had a licence to practise pharmacology and two pharmacies. By age 24 he had a law degree after completing his studies in half the normal period studying at night. He developed a reputation for himself as a very able lawyer spurning opportunities to take up the post of District Attorney. Remus just loved defending criminals.
When the Volstead Act prohibiting alcohol became law throughout America, teetotal, Remus was well suited to taking advantage of it. He use to defend bootleggers in court and went on to become the most successful bootlegger in the history of illegal alcohol distribution.
After admitting shooting his wife to death, he successfully defended himself in a case that made headline news throughout the country. The trial was filled with his theatrics and he was found not guilty in a matter of minutes.
Being a daring, smart, adventurous, a trained lawyer, pharmacologist, built tough both physically and mentally, George Remus an ideally ‘suited’ to be a successful entrepreneur the new prohibition environment of Chicago and the swinging 1920s. Before going to jail for bootlegging and before his wife (who he gave power of attorney) robbed him of everything he had, he was reputed as one of the richest men in the country – a multi billionaire by today’s standards. He would murder his wife, defend himself, win and get back to the business of entrepreneurship. He never reached his former heights after his stint in prison.
Tokuji Hayakawa (1892-1980)* and Konosuke Matsushita (1894-1989) Consumer Electronics*
On March 16th 1885 Fukuzawa Yukichi published an article called Leaving Asia. It signalled Japan’s leaning away from the east and towards western culture in markets, commerce, law and government. Japan’s successful war with Russia in 1904-5 war gave rise to the great global ambitions of Imperialist Japan invigorating her economy.
The Japanese invasion of China in 1940 expanded Japanese markets and access to cheap raw materials and labour. The defeat of Japan during WWII left its business sector reeling and rolled back all its imperialist gains.
The war cleared the way for Japan to start again from scratch with a deliberately planned capitalist economy, supported by special treatment from the wealthiest western capitalist nations. They entertained Japanese protectionist policies in order to avoid Japan falling under the influence of the USSR.
The 1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invention of the transistor was seized upon by Japanese entrepreneurs.
Hayakawa and Matsushita were born within a two years of each other. Hayakawa was born into poverty and Matsushita was suddenly plunged into poverty after his father’s disastrous results speculating on commodities. The family had to trade their large house and grounds for the squalor of inner-city tenements. As a toddler Hayakawa had to leave home at nine years old to work as an apprentice in a metal workshop. His parents died whilst he was young and so too did his first foster mother. His young family including his wife and two children were killed during the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. He was just into his twenties at the time.
Matsushita was the youngest of eight children and the age of 7 had begun the witnessing of every member of his family dying in quick succession. The unfortunate deaths within his family could have been prevented by access to expensive medicine. Medicines that were very affordable before his father’s investment disasters.
Like many of those already mentioned both boys had an incredible capacity for hard work. The two entrepreneurs’ disadvantaged beginnings imbued them with a sense of great purpose and the need t look after family in the form of the company staff.
The Matsushita’s story is strangest peculiarities of an entrepreneur I have ever seen. Basically if things were going well Matsushita he would get so sick doctors would think he was close to death. Miraculously, when they got bad and he was needed to help save his staff or political friends he naturally would recover. His recovery would be almost overnight. It seemed to correlate with having something purposeful to achieve other than money.
Tokuji demonstrated a similar strength after his business was destroyed by The Great Kanto Earthquake which stuck on September 1st 1923 hit. Everything but his debts had been wiped-out. He was back in business by December with three workers.
Both Hayakawa and Matsushita appeared to perform best when things got really bad. **
Roman Abramovich industrialist **(1966- )
The USSR was basically built on the same area as the overthrown Russian Empire. The communist creed was based on a planned economy and not the random self correcting entrepreneurial model popular in Western Europe. The centrally controlled economic planning failed to meet the financial requirements of the State. Additionally it failed to satisfy disparate cultural and geographic needs of various groups and regions of the USSR.
The state was embroiled in a vicious and expensive arms race with nemesis United States. The USSR’s gradual economic decline required significant political and economic reform.
In June 1987 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union presented a thesis for the reform of the Soviet economy. In July the Supreme Soviet passed the Law on State Enterprise. More reforms followed and the program Perestroika meaning ‘restructuring’ was embarked upon. Citizens were now able to indulge in a limited form of entrepreneurship.
In 1990, after, mentor and teacher of both Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev (current prime minister and current president respectively) Anatoly Sobchak, was selected as the Chairman of Leningrad Soviet, Anatoly Chubais became his deputy. Chubais tried to implement Sobchak’s idea of creating a Free Economic Zone in Leningrad.
Chubais worked as the president of newly created *Wassily Leontief Centre*for research in economics. In November 1991 Chubais became a minister in the Yeltsin Cabinet handling the portfolio of the Chief of Rosimushchestvo (Committee on the State Properties) charged with the task of the Privatization in Russia. Chubais originally advocated quick privatization for quick money, similar to the model used for privatization in Hungary but that model was rejected by Congress of Soviets. Eventually a compromise in the form of a voucher privatization scheme similar to that used in the Czech Republic was proposed and adopted on 11th June 1991. The program began after President Yeltsin announced the decree on 19th August 1991.
The mineral rich Russian and Soviet regions were to be sold off to private citizens. Millions of vouchers were distributed among ordinary Russians. Few understood their real worth, and many were frivolously traded away for food and vodka. But the vouchers represented the country’s assets and cunning entrepreneurs snapped up the vouchers gaining vast stakes in manufacturing, natural resources and media. Abramovich was one of them.
Roman Abramovich was an orphan by the age of four. He was an average student known back then for his perpetual smile. He seized opportunities breaking under perestroika.
One of the things that stood out about Abramovich was that throughout his career he is continually embroiled in controversial business situations strewn with ‘banana skins’ yet remains free of personal controversy and always come out on top.
He is a Russian Jew and on the face of it that would generally render him an underdog. However, there is clearly a quality or qualities within the Russian Jewish culture that makes someone from that background mega successful in post communist Russia. Of the twelve of the so-called robber barons, (listed by US based twenty-four hour cable news channel MSNBC) eight are Jews. This is astonishing, and testimony to their strength, given the Jewish population represents only about one-half of one per cent of the Russian population. “As happened in certain other societies in the early stages of capitalist development, religious belief and economic circumstance interact in powerful ways to produce a distinctive religious sub-culture conducive to entrepreneurship and enterprise. The Old Believers in Russia performed the role of economic pioneers… served as an incubator of entrepreneurial values in Russia.” James L. West* Merchant Moscow*.
When Abramovich was asked for his advice to anyone starting out in business in Putin’s Russia in an interview replied: “Never think that you won’t go to jail.” **