Charles Ranlett Flint

Flint was a veteran trader and arms dealer known as the father of trusts for organising mergers. In 1911, at sixty-one, he merged a time-clock maker, a scale company and Herman Hollerith's tabulating machine firm into the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. He hired Thomas Watson to run it, and in 1924 it was renamed IBM. His skill was seeing which small firms fitted together, then handing operations to someone else.