Episode Details
Back to Episodes#283 Andrew Carnegie
Description
What I learned from rereading The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie.
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(1:01) 3 part series on Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick:
Meet You In Hell: Andrew Carnegie Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Transformed America by Les Standiford. (Founders #73)
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie by Andrew Carnegie (Founders #74)
Henry Clay Frick: The Life of the Perfect Capitalist by Quentin Skrabec Jr. (Founders #75)
(2:00) What these guys all had in common is they were hell bent on knowing their business down to the last cent. They were obsessed with having the lowest cost structure in their industry.
(2:00) Highlights from Meet You in Hell: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and the Bitter Partnership That Changed America:
—Cut the prices, scoop the market, watch the costs, and the profits will take care of themselves.
—Frick knows his business down to the ground.
—Frick’s rise from humble beginnings was obviously intriguing to him. It signaled to Carnegie that Frick was another of the fellow “fittest,” and those were the individuals with whom Carnegie sought to align himself.
—Carnegie would repeat the mantra time and again: profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in Carnegie’s view, any savings achieved in the costs of goods were permanent.
—On this issue the two men were of one mind. Frick had made his way in coke by the same reckoning that Carnegie had in rail and steel: if you knew your costs down to the penny, you were always on firm ground.
(6:00) Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson. (Founders #115)
(7:00) A sunny disposition is worth more than a fortune. Young people should know that it can be cultivated; that the mind like the body can be moved from the shade into sunshine.
(7:00) The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. (Founders #100)
(8:00) The most important judge of your life story is yourself.
(9:00) You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son. —Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life by Michael Schumacher. (Founders #242)
(10:00) Invest in technology, the savings compound, it gives you an advantage over slower moving competitors, and can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
(17:00) He is working from sunrise to sunset for $1.20 a week and he is ecstatic about being able to help his family avoid poverty.
(18:00) Andrew Carnegie had manic levels of optimism.
(20:00) Do not delay. Do it now. It is a great mistake not to seize the opportunity. Having got myself in, I proposed to stay there if I could.
(21:00) I felt that my foot was upon the ladder and that I was about to climb.
(21:00) Lesson from Andrew Carnegie’s early life: Focus on whatever job is in front of you at this very moment and do the best you can. You can never know what opportunities that will unlock in the future.
(24:00) On the miracle of reading and having free access to a 400 volume personal library: In this way the windows were opened in the walls of my dungeon through which the