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Charles Rudolph Walgreen
Born
Walgreen was a registered pharmacist who had worked behind other people's counters in Chicago before buying the drugstore he worked in, in 1901, with a loan from his father. From the dispensary he knew which products customers came back for, so he made his own medicines more cheaply and added a soda fountain that kept people in the shop; the malted milkshake became a draw. Scaling to hundreds of stores meant learning finance and real estate, which his managers helped carry.
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William Scholl
Born
Scholl worked as a shoe salesman while studying medicine in Chicago, and qualified as a doctor specialising in feet in 1904. Seeing the same complaints daily, he designed arch supports and corn pads and sold them through shoe shops, training salespeople in foot care so they could recommend his products. Building a distribution network of retailers was the part medicine had not taught him, and he went at it with relentless advertising.
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Arthur E. Andersen
Born
Andersen was an orphan who became a certified public accountant and an accounting professor at Northwestern before co-founding an audit firm in Chicago in 1913. His professional reputation for refusing to sign off flawed accounts, even for important clients, was the brand. The firm grew into one of the world's biggest, and then collapsed in 2002 over its auditing of Enron, a brutal lesson that a professional firm's only real asset is its integrity.
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James O. McKinsey
Born
McKinsey was an accounting professor at the University of Chicago who had written a textbook on budgeting when he founded a firm in 1926 to advise companies on using accounts to manage, not just record. That academic method, applied to real businesses, became management consulting. His successor Marvin Bower, a lawyer, shaped the firm's professional culture after McKinsey's early death in 1937.
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Jack LaLanne
Born
LaLanne trained as a chiropractor and opened one of America's first health clubs in Oakland in 1936, when doctors warned that weightlifting was harmful. His knowledge of exercise and nutrition became a television show that ran for decades, a chain of gyms licensed under his name and later the juicers he sold on television. The selling, not the training, was what he had to learn, and he learned it on camera.
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Earl Bakken
Born
Bakken was an electrical engineer who repaired hospital equipment in Minneapolis with his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie, in a garage business they called Medtronic from 1949. Working among surgeons gave him the brief for his breakthrough: in 1957 the heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei asked for a pacemaker that did not depend on mains power, and Bakken built a battery-powered, wearable one in weeks. Turning repair work into a medical device maker meant learning regulation and finance as they went.
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Toru Kumon
Kumon was a high school maths teacher in Osaka who in 1954 wrote daily worksheets for his son Takeshi, who was struggling at school. The method, short graded exercises done every day until mastered, was pure classroom experience, and in 1958 he set up a company to teach it through local instructors, often mothers working from home. The franchise-style network that took it to dozens of countries was the business skill he built later.
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Herb Kelleher
Kelleher was a lawyer in San Antonio when his client Rollin King sketched a triangle of Texas cities on a napkin in 1966 and proposed a cheap airline. Kelleher's legal training was the first asset: rival carriers spent years trying to stop Southwest in court, and he won. Running an airline was the gap, which he filled by keeping costs low with one aircraft type and quick turnarounds, and by becoming chief executive himself in 1981.
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Govindappa Venkataswamy
Born
Venkataswamy retired as a government eye surgeon at fifty-eight and in 1976 opened an eleven-bed hospital in Madurai with family members who were also doctors. His surgical experience drove the model: standardised cataract operations done in high volume, borrowing ideas from McDonald's assembly lines, with paying patients subsidising free care for the poor. Aravind is a non-profit, but it pays its own way, and it later built a lens factory to cut costs further.
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Judi Sheppard Missett
Missett was a jazz dance teacher in Evanston, Illinois who noticed that her students wanted to work out, not train as dancers, and turned her classes into Jazzercise in 1969. Moving to California, she trained other instructors to teach her routines, using videotapes to reach them, and began franchising in the early 1980s, which spread it to thousands of locations without her running each class. The teaching was hers from the start; franchising was the business she had to learn. She is still executive chair.
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Wolfgang Puck
Puck trained in Austrian and French kitchens and ran the kitchen at Ma Maison in Los Angeles before opening Spago in 1982 with his then wife Barbara Lazaroff, who designed the rooms and handled much of the business. His cooking made the restaurant famous; the business came from extending the name into airport cafés, catering for the Oscars ball, frozen pizzas and canned soups. He is a case of a chef who learned to license himself.
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Bobbi Brown
Born
Brown was a working make-up artist in New York who wanted lipsticks that looked like real lips, and in 1991 launched ten shades with a chemist at Bergdorf Goodman. Her backstage knowledge of skin tones shaped a natural-looking range; selling it to Estée Lauder in 1995 provided the distribution she lacked. She left in 2016, and in 2020 started again with Jones Road Beauty, this time selling direct online.
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Charlotte Tilbury
Born
Tilbury spent more than twenty years as a fashion and celebrity make-up artist, doing faces for magazine shoots and catwalk shows, before launching her own brand in London in 2013. The products, such as the Pillow Talk lipstick, codified looks she had used for years, and tutorial videos sold them. Building a global retail business needed investors, and the Spanish group Puig bought a majority in 2020; she remains in charge of the brand's creative side.
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Devi Shetty
Born
Shetty trained as a cardiac surgeon in India and at Guy's Hospital in London, and operated in Kolkata for years before founding Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore in 2001. His operating-theatre knowledge told him where costs could fall without harming outcomes: surgeons doing many operations a day, shared equipment and cheaper supplies. The result was heart surgery at a fraction of Western prices, and Narayana Health is now a listed hospital chain he still chairs.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong
Born
Soon-Shiong is a South African-born surgeon who performed early pancreas transplants at UCLA, and his clinical work on delivering drugs led to Abraxane, a cancer treatment that binds chemotherapy to albumin. He sold the companies built on it for billions and has since founded ImmunityBio, whose bladder cancer treatment won US approval in 2024. The science came from medicine; the deal-making he learned, and his record also includes ventures that did not live up to their promises.
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