Let's have a look at three excellent biographies of men who are among the most influential entrepreneurs and industrialists of the 20th and 21st centuries, men who not only established successful industries but had huge influence on the culture around them.
Steven Watts' The People's Tycoon describes the life and career of Henry Ford. Ford, born on a farm, was a mechanical tinkerer whose obsession with the "horseless carriage" (he hated horses) led, after a rocky start to the Ford Motor Company. His first and outstanding success was the Model T Ford, a sturdy, reliable and, most of all, inexpensive automobile.
Ford had recognized the basis of the consumer society: "When you get to making the cars in quantity, you can make them cheaper, and when you make them cheaper, you can get more people with enough money to buy them." He also saw that the industrialist was not just concerned with satisfying needs but creating needs that people didn't even know they had. Steve Jobs' favourite Ford quote was, "If I'd asked them what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse."
Ford's other huge contribution was mass production. Beginning at the Highland Park plant and continuing at River Rouge, Ford put together the modern assembly line, achieving scales of production that were unheard of, and, not incidentally, allowing him to constantly lower the price of the Model T, leading to increased demand.
Neal Gabler's Walt Disney delivers a portrait of an immensely talented and creative individual who, like Ford, was a micromanaging obsessive. Disney's early efforts in animation first culminated in the Mickey Mouse cartoons and, perhaps, peaked with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, a 1938 animated colour movie that was based on extremely thorough studies of motion and facial expression, and for which each individual cell was drawn by hand.
Disney brought the same attention to detail (and sensitivity to the new) to the construction of Disneyland; the unprecedented amount of automation he used had many implications for industries outside of the entertainment world.
Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs was written with the co-operation of the dying Jobs but is not an authorized biography. Like Ford and Disney, Jobs was an obsessive seeker of perfection who created products not because there was a demand for them but because he could sense that a demand could be created.
Jobs' career at Apple culminated in the iMac, iPhone, iPad and iTunes, each of which involved not only a new technology but a new business model (Jobs personally conducted negotiations with many of the musicians who signed onto Itunes). Certainly he was the central force in the rapidly expanding model of mobile internet usage and communications.
All three of these entrepreneurs shared certain unpleasant personal characteristics - all of them micro-managers, all of them capable of bullying and treachery - but all of them shaped the age they lived in and all of them had a part in a cultural transformation.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday. Martin Boughner works at Port Moody Public Library.
