Business Practices
The messages in this area focus on the way business practices have evolved. We rarely think of these as something that didn’t exist at one time.
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Two-Part Pricing: A Modern Scam from the 19th Century
King C. Gillette was a utopian socialist with kooky ideas, but inadvertently his development of the safety razor stimulated a business practice growing in popularity today. He didn’t invent the idea, but his actions gave rise to what could be considered a scam....
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The Building of a Funding Base
Born in 1986, David Karp grew up in New York City. At the age of 11, he taught himself HTML and started designing websites for businesses. He never finished high school. At the age of 14, Karp started working with a number of entrepreneurs designing software. He...
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Efficiency Practices
Lillian Moller was one of nine children born to a prosperous family. She was a very good student, but her father didn’t think his daughters needed college degrees. She was able to persuade her father into letting her try college. She excelled and graduated with a...
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Fast Food Restaurants
Walter Anderson was born to immigrant parents from Sweden in Kansas in 1880. Walter was a college dropout who spent much of his young adult years in dead-end jobs. He was an aspiring entrepreneur but failed at both a restaurant and a traveling stage show. He finally...
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Public Relations
David Finkelstein was born to a father who was a writer and a mother who created children’s dresses. He adopted his father’s pen name and went by the last name of Finn. He graduated from the City College of New York and served in the military during World War II....
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Grocery Stores
Clarence Saunders had less than two years of formal education, but his innovation changed the way we shop for groceries. Growing up as the son of a sharecropper in the late 1800s, he was largely self-taught. During his teens, Saunders worked at a number of blue-collar...
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Brainstorming
Alex Osborn was born in 1888 and had a career in advertising. He promoted war bonds during World War I where he met two other professionals who would become partners in an advertising business. While the business survived the Great Depression, it began to struggle in...
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Athletes vs Owners
Jacob Daubert was born in coal country in Pennsylvania and went to work in the mines when he was 11. Growing up, he became a talented baseball player. He was good enough of a player to sign with minor league teams. While he was originally a pitcher, he converted to...
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Accounting Practices
Imagine children operating a lemonade stand. At the end of the day, they had made $22.30. Was that a profit? How much did the sugar and lemons cost? What were their labor costs? We can’t really know whether they made money until we have an accounting system. ...
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