Items15The creator’s order
  1. 1Charles Rudolph WalgreenCharles Rudolph WalgreenBorn 9 Oct 1873Walgreen 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…0i
  2. 2William SchollWilliam SchollBorn 22 Jun 1882Scholl 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…0i
  3. 3Arthur E. AndersenArthur E. AndersenBorn 30 May 1885Andersen 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…0i
  4. 4James O. McKinseyJames O. McKinseyBorn 4 Jun 1889McKinsey 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…0i
  5. 5Jack LaLanneJack LaLanneBorn 26 Sept 1914LaLanne 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…0i
  6. 6Earl BakkenEarl BakkenBorn 10 Jan 1924Bakken 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…0i
  7. 7Toru KumonToru KumonKumon 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…0
  8. 8Herb KelleherHerb KelleherKelleher 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…0i
  9. 9Govindappa VenkataswamyGovindappa VenkataswamyBorn 1 Oct 1918Venkataswamy 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…0i
  10. 10Judi Sheppard MissettJudi Sheppard MissettMissett 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…0