Episode Details
Back to Episodes#284 Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick
Description
What I learned from rereading Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America by Les Standiford.
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[0:01] Frick had been the man Carnegie trusted above all others to manage the affairs of Carnegie Steel.
[2:00] Carnegie had delegated the job of holding the line on wages and other demands to Frick—a Patton to Carnegie's FDR.
[3:00] The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie. (Founders #283)
[5:00] Here's a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making. —Jeff Bezos’s Shareholder Letters (Founders #282)
[7:00] In less than half a century the United States had been transformed―from a largely agrarian and underdeveloped federation of competing interests, to a relatively cohesive economic juggernaut. The age of the Founding Fathers was over. The Age of the Titans had begun.
[12:00] By 1863 Carnegie was earning more than $45,000 a year from this and all his other investments, compared with a mere $2,400 from his railroad salary. Yet he understood that it was the contacts he made and the information he derived from his association with the railroad that made everything else possible.
[13:00] More control. Less costs. More profit.
[15:00] Technology is just a better way to do something: As a result of the process for transforming iron to steel that bore his name (Bessemer), a quantity of steel that might formerly have taken as long as two weeks to produce could now be made in fifteen minutes.
[17:00] Carnegie starts his company during a financial panic. The best time to expand is when no one else dares to take the risk.
[20:00] Already the best but still wants to do better: Even his key employees were not spared Carnegie's heavy-handed management style. To almost every positive report Carnegie's response was "Good, but let us do better."
[21:00] Cut the prices, scoop the market, watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves.
[21:00] Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace and Jim Erickson (Founders #140)
[22:00] He could make steel more efficiently than any of them.
[24:00] Henry Clay Frick: The Life of the Perfect Capitalist by Quentin Skrabec Jr. (Founders #75)
[24:00] Like Rockefeller, Henry Clay Frick used a lot of borrowed money to get his start in the coke business. There was a line in one of Rockefeller’s biographies where it said “he was the greatest borrower I’ve ever seen.”
[26:00] Frick knew his business down to the ground.
[26:00] LIke Carnegie, Frick expands his business during an economic panic. Frick, who would later recall this as one of the most grueling times in his life, proved as undaunted in the face of adversity as Carnegie had been.
[34:00] Carneige was accustomed to obedience from his subordinates, but if he expected unquestioned subservience from Henry Frick, he had gravely miscalculated.
[36:00] Frick was no puppet, but rather a man willing to take considerable risks in defense of his principles.
[37:00] Frick had ambition, a singleness of purpose, and a lack of self—doubt that even Carneige envied.
[38:00] Carnegie would rep