Money and Power: The History of Business - Hardcover

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HOWARD MEANS is a Senior Editor at Washingtonian magazine and the author/coauthor of several books, including The 500 Year Delta, The Visionary's Handbook, Colin Powell: A Biography, and the novel C.S.A. He has won two William Allen White medals for writing, and his books have been published in over ten countries and appeared on business bestseller lists. DAVID GRUBIN is a producer, director, writer, and cinematographer who has won eight Emmy awards and three prizes from the Writer's Guild. He has produced over 100 films on subjects ranging from art and history to poetry and science, including the renowned five-part PBS series "Healing and the Mind with Bill Moyers" and the documentaries "LBJ," "FDR," "Truman," "TR: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt," and "Napoleon." Grubin is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College.

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From merchant ships to microchips, industry has been defined by the powerful business leaders who have caused seismic shifts in the growth of commerce. These visionaries introduced themselves, their products, and their ideas at just the right moments in time, unwittingly bringing about the defining change of the last millennium-the transfer of money and power from Church and crown to the new secular empire of business.

The companion book to the acclaimed CNBC documentary created by Emmy award-winning producer and director David Grubin, Money and Power takes readers on a gripping journey to the birthplaces of business-from the feudal estates of medieval Europe to the teeming streets of ancient Venice to the serene campuses of Silicon Valley. Written by top-notch journalist, editor, and novelist Howard Means, this sweeping narrative tells a dramatic tale of how pathbreaking moguls and their dynasties paved the way to wealth and prosperity and shaped the modern world.

Tracing the origins of trade, banking, industry, commerce, and power from East to West, this inspiring book transports the reader to the bustling centers of business across time. Inside are revealing, motivational profiles of such legendary figures as:

* St. Godric, the twelfth-century monk whose fierce ambition helped him break free of his confines and create his own wealth-until his faith led him along a different path

* Robert Woodruff, who took advantage of a shrinking globe and a second world war to create the first global brand-Coca-Cola

* James Watt and Matthew Boulton, who launched the rotary steam engine just as industry was bursting forth with new energy demands

* Henry Ford, who not only built automobiles but also the market demand for them-making him richer than even the Carnegies and the Rockefellers

* Bill Gates, whose entrepreneurial instincts and technological brilliance earned him the fame and fortune that embodied the Information Age

Following the march of industry from the oceans and the railroads to the highways and cyberspace, Money and Power is a testament to the drive and innovativeness of these economic pioneers-and to the resulting remarkable global connections that have finally opened the road to riches to all.s

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ST. GODRIC, God and Profit

Everything has a history. Before there was the Internet, there was the Arpanet. Palm Pilots trace back through laptops and desktops to the 30 ton ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer), which has its roots in the programmable computers invented by the nineteenth-century British mathematician, Charles Babbage. Automobiles were preceded by steam-powered tricycles; trains, by wind-propelled land ships. Bankers are the heirs of money changers whose professional ancestors could be found guarding sacred temples used as safe depositories for personal assets.

Great fortunes have histories as well. They are created by visionaries who introduce themselves, their products, and ideas into the proper moment in time, the right crease in history. Henry Luce launched his middle-brow magazine empire just as a huge, and largely homogenous, American middle class was taking shape. Robert Woodruff took advantage of a shrinking globe and a second world war to create the first global brand: Coca-Cola. John D. Rockefeller seized control of the oil refining business just as industry was bursting forth with new energy demands. James Watt and Matthew Boulton launched the rotary steam engine under similar conditions a century earlier. For Spain to grow rich off the mineral wealth of the New World, there had to be slave laborers to dig the gold and silver out of the earth, transportation technology to get the precious metals to the Old World, and a market demand to satisfy. Tulip bulbs could soar to astronomical values in the seventeenth-century Netherlands only because the Dutch had made fortunes in sea trading and had a stock market to condition people to accepting risk for reward.

The transfer of money and power from the cross and crown to the new secular empire of business--the defining change of the last millennium--didn't just happen either. The desire to do business, the impulse to trade for profit, salesmanship born from merchant life--these are instincts nearly as old as the human species. But somewhere around a thousand years ago, a constellation of forces began to pull together in Western Europe.

War, invasion, and conquest, which had ravaged the continent since before the fall of Rome, abated. Until the Hundred Years' War got underway in 1337, Europe was, relatively speaking, at peace. Plague and pestilence subsided, too, and would stay in the background until the Black Death erupted about 1348, eventually killing perhaps one in two people continent-wide. With the coming of political stability, trade began to flourish throughout the Mediterranean and in the north of Europe, around the Rhine River and Baltic Sea. Cities grew and prospered as well, as land-poor lords started to sell off parts of their holdings in the form of town charters. The combination of growing urban populations and growing trade served to concentrate both marketplaces and workforces. Merchant and artisan guilds, which regulated the quality and price of trades, became powerful advocates of self-government.

A hunger for opportunity and personal freedom was awakening at the same time that western Europe began to provide the means for fulfilling individual ambition. The seeds of a business-based economy were being sown. And as that happened a handful of people--pioneers of the rough and tumble economic frontier, bold adventurers in the experiment that would come to be known as democratic capitalism--began to emerge.

One of first of these capitalist pioneers was the remarkable Godric. Born in the year 1065 near Walpole in Norfolk, in the east of England, he was the oldest of three children of Anglo-Saxon parents. His father, Aedlward, was a freeman who worked a small croft or an enclosed field, on which he most likely grew subsistence quantities of leeks, parsley, shallots, and the like. In return for the holding and the right to work the home farm, Aedlward was expected to render agricultural services to the lord of the manor. He was also dependent upon the lord's stores for food during famine and for protection in time of war--both being ever-present threats.

In the normal course of events, Aedlward's life would have become Godric's, but as a young man Godric aspired to something different, and perhaps even then, to something more. While still a teenager, he left his parents, brother, and sister, and set out to find his fortune. For a time he became a peddler, traveling on foot from market town to market town, selling whatever small wares he could lay his hands on at the annual fairs that were the commercial and social meeting place of the times. Working out of a tent or stall, one merchant might sell hair bought cheap at nunneries for women to add to their thinning locks; others might offer wines or furs. Notaries were available to seal contracts. The rich and poor alike gathered to ogle dancing bears, magicians, and stilt walkers. As they traveled from fair to fair, the peddlers would build a network and, if they had high aspirations, would use their new connections to expand their businesses.

Godric's aspirations soon led him to work as a ship's mate as well as a peddler. Traveling up and down the east coast of the British Isles, he would sell for a profit in the English ports what he had bought cheap from the farmers and craftsmen of Scotland. As his maritime skills expanded, so did his trading network. By age 18, Godric had joined the ranks of the roving merchant-adventurers who led a precarious existence on the margins of the medieval economy, trading freely across the English Channel as they sold ornaments and tapestries to noblemen with a taste for luxury. Instead of answering to the laws and strictures of a lord, as his father had done, Godric was now bound only to the law of profit.

Simultaneously, England itself was emerging as perhaps the wealthiest country in northern Europe. In 1066, the year after Godric's birth, William the Conqueror had defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Harold on the plains of Hastings and thrown the island kingdom into disarray...