Items19The creator’s order
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Freddy HeinekenBorn 4 Nov 1923Freddy Heineken was the founder's grandson, not the founder, and he bought back family control in the 1950s after spending time in New York learning American advertising. He treated the beer as an export brand first: the green bottle, red star and smiling lowercase e were designed to travel, and…0i - 2
Hans RiegelBorn 10 Mar 1923His father created the gummy bear in Bonn; Hans Riegel took over Haribo after returning from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1946 and ran it for more than sixty years. He grew it from a German sweet maker into an international one by buying local confectioners and building factories close to new markets…0i - 3
Michele FerreroBorn 26 Apr 1925Pietro Ferrero founded the business in a pastry shop in Alba; his son Michele made it international. He opened a factory in Germany in 1956, launched Nutella in 1964 and went on to create Kinder, Tic Tac and Ferrero Rocher, each designed to be sold in many countries with little change. Making…0i - 4
Lorenzo ServitjeServitje co-founded Bimbo in Mexico City in 1945, selling wrapped sliced bread off a fleet of delivery vans when most bread was bought loose. That direct store delivery network was the core skill, and Bimbo exported it by buying established bakers abroad, most heavily in the United States, where…0 - 5
Stefan Persson (magnate)Erling Persson opened the first Hennes women's clothing shop in Västerås in 1947; his son Stefan, chief executive from 1982 and later chairman until 2020, turned H&M into a chain across Europe and then the United States from 2000. The adaptations were about scale and speed: buying from many…0i - 6
Kjeld Kirk KristiansenBorn 27 Dec 1947The founder's grandson ran Lego from 1979 to 2004 and is the reason a toymaker from Billund became truly global, with themed ranges like Castle and Space, the Legoland parks and production abroad. He also presided over the overreach that followed, when too many new products and businesses nearly…0i - 7
Lee Kun-heeBorn 9 Jan 1942Samsung was founded by his father, Lee Byung-chul, as a trading company. Lee Kun-hee took over in 1987 and, in a 1993 speech in Frankfurt, told managers to change everything except their wives and children, demanding quality fit for global buyers rather than cheap volume for Korea. Staff famously…0i - 8
Lorenzo ZambranoBorn 27 Mar 1944Zambrano, grandson of a founder of Cemex in Monterrey, ran it from 1985 until his death in 2014 and turned a regional Mexican cement maker into one of the world's largest. He bought two big Spanish producers in 1992, then plants across Latin America, the US and Britain, and used satellite tracking…0i - 9
Ratan TataBorn 28 Dec 1937Jamsetji Tata founded the group in the nineteenth century; Ratan Tata, chairman from 1991 to 2012, took it abroad through acquisition. Tetley in 2000, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus in 2007 and Jaguar Land Rover from Ford in 2008 made an Indian conglomerate a big employer in Britain. The results…0i - 10
N. R. Narayana MurthyBorn 20 Aug 1946Murthy and six colleagues founded Infosys in Pune in 1981 with borrowed money, and its international growth rested on a specific adaptation: the global delivery model, in which a small team works at the client's site in America or Europe while most of the software is written in India, round the…0i
