If we knew what the world’s most successful people have in common, we’d bottle it and sell it. But we don’t. Instead, we write and read endless books and articles about them, desperately trying to get to the bottom of why on earth Jeff Bezos quit his whizzy New York hedge fund job to drive to Seattle and start a little company called Amazon. Or why Howard Schultz thought it would be a really good idea to rejoin a sinking Starbucks.
World Changers: 25 Entrepreneurs Who Changed Business as We Knew It, by John Byrne, looks at the various things that unite the world’s business movers and shakers. He speaks to Herb Kelleher, co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines, who offers his dictum, “The business of business is people. In a lot of companies you have to surrender your personality when you show up for work. If you allow people to be themselves at work, they will enjoy what they are doing.”
The inimitable Steve Jobs is also in there, of course: “Picasso had a saying: ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people who were working on it were musicians, poets, artists, historians, zoologists, who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
So what does unite the entrepreneurs we revere? What do their personality traits say about how to make it big?