Prosperous Leader: How Smart People Achieve Success - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jacob Engel began working for his family’s business straight out of high school and as it grew to become a major industry leader, he grew with it. Eventually serving in all capacities including COO, he semi-retired before working with a group of fifteen business owners and developing his own curriculum for cultivating individual strengths, leadership abilities, and reinvention of the self. Engel then founded his own training and seminar institute that has successfully trained several hundred businessmen to date. Hired by a local newspaper to write articles describing the process, The Prosperous Leader is the culmination of all of those articles.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

My father was a true role model----not only for our family, but also for our community and beyond. He made it out of the horrors of the Holocaust and went on the create and (re)build a legacy that not only was a legend in his lifetime, but that even now, almost 20 years later, still remains! I recently read a great book “Give or Take” by Adam Grant. He divides people into 2 categories, Givers and Takers. In reading his description of a Giver, he portrayed my father perfectly!

Barry Engel was born in 1928 in Tokay, Hungary---a pastoral town known for its wonderful vineyards and excellent wine. His boyhood was no different than that of any other boy growing up in Eastern Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s. His family enjoyed a life of relative wealth and prominence. That is, until Hitler came to power in Germany and conquered country after country, eventually threatening even the world powers. By the time England and the United States intervened, 6 million Jews and millions of others had been murdered in the infamous death camps. Barry’s own father, Jeno (Jacob) Engel, had been rounded up in Budapest and sent to the Auschwitz Death Camp, from which he never returned.

After the Allies brought the Third Reich to its knees and liberated the camps, the survivors tried returning to their homes to start new lives. For most of them, this hope could not be realized, as they discovered they were not really welcome in their own countries either.

After attempting to settle in several countries, my father came to New York, with no money, language or family. (His mother and siblings would come later.) Years later, he would jokingly reminisce that even the clothes on his back, which he’d bought right before leaving Hungary, he had to throw out, because it made him look like a “Greenhorn”, which was a label that immigrants tried very hard to avoid.

My father was able to find a job on the Lower East Side, working for a spice-importing company called “Schoenfeld & Sons”. The owner of the company, Mr. Schoenfeld, encouraged him to go out on his own, so my father opened a spice shop in Brooklyn with his mother and eventually his younger brother. He told Mr. Schoenfeld that one day, he would bring in a million dollars a year in sales.