(This is the only book ever written by this great industri...)
This is the only book ever written by this great industrialist, considered one of the greatest entrepreneurs in US history. It is a candid description of his life and his work methods, that gives a light into the life of this brilliant steel titan, and his thinking on business and on personal management. The greatest critic to this book: that it doesn't say more! It is so interesting, that it leaves people with the desire for more. Sadly, this is all there is. His career was brilliantly portrayed in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.
https://www.amazon.com/Succeeding-What-Have-Charles-Schwab/dp/1984005855?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1984005855
(Originally published in 1919? In English, this volume is ...)
Originally published in 1919? In English, this volume is an exact black and white scan of the original text. This digital version was made possible through the generosity of Yale University and a project funded by the Microsoft Corporation. It is part of a growing collection of digital texts and images created and curated by the Yale University Library. Now available and preserved for the learning, research, and reading enjoyment of future generations, these collections represent a rich cultural heritage of scholarly material on a variety of topics across disciplines.
https://www.amazon.com/Andrew-Carnegie-his-methods-men/dp/1454666714?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1454666714
Charles was born on February 18, 1862 in Williamsburg, Pennsylvania, United States, the oldest of five children of John A. and Pauline (Farabaugh) Schwab and the grandson of turn-of-the-century German immigrants. In 1867 his father, a woolen worker who had turned petty blanket contractor for the Union Army during the Civil War, bought the livery stable at Loretto, Pennsylvania, and moved there with his family.
In the village school and at St. Francis College, then an institution of high-school level, Charles Schwab received his only formal education. He was graduated in 1880.
Schwab became a grocery clerk at Braddock, Pennsylvania, a larger town and site of the Carnegie-owned Edgar Thomson Steel Works. Acquaintance with an early morning customer, Capitan William R. Jones, the plant superintendent, led to a dollar-a-day job as an engineer's helper, the first step in a meteoric career in America's burgeoning steel industry.
Assistant engineer within six months, he was chief engineer and assistant manager at the age of nineteen. In 1883 he set up a chemistry laboratory in his home and worked well into the night on the still young science of the chemistry and metallurgy of steel.
In 1887, on Jones's recommendation, he was made superintendent of the Homestead Works, at Homestead, Pennsylvania, recently acquired by the Carnegie interests. Two years later Jones was killed in a plant accident, and Schwab returned to the Thomson Works to succeed him as general superintendent.
During his tenure at the Thomson mills the Homestead plant was hit by the great strike of 1892. One of the most bitter in American labor history, it was crushed by Henry C. Frick at a cost of bloodshed, outraged worker feelings, and a bad press. A much disturbed Andrew Carnegie ordered Schwab to Homestead to restore normal labor, community, and public relations. Schwab's genius for dealing with people worked as successfully as it had done in earlier encounters with the rancors of labor unrest at the same plant.
Managing both the Homestead and Thomson works until 1897, in that year he became president of Carnegie Steel Company, Ltd. With bonuses that eventually reached six per cent of profits, he earned a million or more dollars a year, most of which he invested in the company.
The next phase of Schwab's career fell in the world of high finance. No one could have been as well qualified to serve as ambassador between Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan in the sale of the Carnegie properties to the Morgan interests and the formation of the United States Steel Corporation in 1901. Schwab had sparked Morgan's interest in the profit-making potential of a huge steel combine at a famous dinner at New York in December of the previous year. He drew up the basic list of companies to be integrated and proposed the financing by which the combination was to be accomplished. He persuaded Carnegie to sell. At Morgan's stipulation, he became the corporation's first president, at the age of thirty-nine.
In August 1903 he resigned this post which, with bonuses figured at two per cent of profits above a $70, 000, 000 first year gross, had brought him more than $2, 000, 000 a year. Difficulties with his board of directors, many of them giants in their own right, criticism of extended travel and other recreational activities, and Morgan's disapproval of Schwab's side-issue investments seem to have been mainly responsible for his resignation.
In August 1901 Schwab had bought control of Bethlehem Steel Company, a small but strategically located steel and ordnance concern, only to have to put it aside when Morgan expressed concern over a dissipation of his business energies. At Schwab's suggestion, the company was fused into the recently formed U. S. Shipbuilding Company, with the steel magnate receiving the latter's bonds in payment. When the new company collapsed in the midst of a financial scandal its assets went to Schwab as the largest bondholder. Buying out other investors, he made the defunct U. S. Shipbuilding Company and Bethlehem Steel Company into a great enterprise of his own, Bethlehem Steel Corporation, incorporated in 1904. Into it Schwab poured everything he owned and everything he could borrow.
He set up his version of the Carnegie executive profit-sharing system and put essentially all wages on an incentive basis. He promoted from within and, with prescient awareness of the outlines of the "managerial revolution, " gave his executives, particularly Eugene G. Grace, his president, a free hand. He broadened and integrated raw materials supplies and production and distribution processes.
In World War I, largely at Schwab's initiative, Bethlehem Steel became a major arsenal for the Allied powers. His trips to Europe brought him acquaintance with such top-level figures as Kitchener and Fisher, Churchill and Lloyd George, Joffre and Foch, and fat war contracts. The best known was an early order for twenty submarines, filled by assembly of the parts in Canada after the State Department objected to their construction here as a violation of neutrality. Other orders came in such numbers that Germany offered $100, 000, 000, according to Schwab, to get Bethlehem to cut off its flow of war material to her enemies. By the end of the conflict the company had handled orders totaling more than $500, 000, 000.
From April to December 1918 Schwab served as director general of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, "drafted" by President Wilson to cure a sadly lagging shipbuilding program. He brought production to impressive heights, most dramatically in the launching of 100 ships on July 4, 1918. Back at Bethlehem, Schwab came increasingly to function as the elder statesman of the company which he and the war had made into a major rival of United States Steel.
In his later years his salary of $250, 000 a year for what appeared to be nominal functions for Bethlehem was challenged, unsuccessfully, by minority stockholders. He supported a Catholic church at Braddock, a Carmelite monastery and a church at Loretto, a convent at Cresson, Pennsylvania, schools at Homestead and Weatherly, Pennsylvania, an auditorium at Pennsylvania State College, the Bethlehem Bach Choir, and the St. Francis College.
Stricken with a coronary thrombosis in London, he died, insolvent, in New York City.
Under Charles Michael Schwab's ruling Bethlehem Steel became one of the most important heavy manufacturers in the world. His biggest change to the shipbuilding effort was to abandon the cost plus profit contracting system that had been in place up to that time and begin issuing fixed-price contracts. During the World War I, Bethlehem Steel had a virtual monopoly in contracts to supply the Allies with certain kinds of munitions. Thus, his influence was so great, that Schwab became Director General of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, a board granted by Congress with master authority over all shipbuilding in the United States. He became the senior spokesman for the steel industry, serving as president of the American Iron and Steel Institute and then and thereafter issuing pronouncements on business and national topics. In 1928, Schwab was awarded the Bessemer Gold Medal for "outstanding services to the steel industry". In 1932 he was awarded the Melchett Medal by the British Institute of Fuel. In 1982, Schwab was inducted into the Junior Achievement U. S. Business Hall of Fame. In 2011 Schwab was inducted into the inaugural class of the American Metal Market Steel Hall of Fame.
(This is the only book ever written by this great industri...)
(Originally published in 1919? In English, this volume is ...)
His engaging personality, a mighty curiosity, a photographic memory, hard work, and good luck were the key ingredients in a swift advancement.
Schwab brought vision, daring, energy, and the skills of a great salesman.
Schwab had the satisfactions of a private life which was that of the great American tycoon of his day, replete with a granite house on Riverside Drive, New York City, and homes at Loretto and Bethlehem, a magnificent organ, a collection of fine books and paintings, and a record of philanthropies.
A lifelong and undauntable exponent of the private enterprise system, Schwab exemplified its strengths and its weaknesses. There was high courage and the willingness to take great risks; there was also sharp business practice and a sense of social responsibility extending little beyond personal charities and philanthropy. Except for a basic ingenuousness and a warmth and grace of personality as conspicuous in his later as in his early years, he stands as an almost perfect case specimen of the great entrepreneur in the heyday of American capitalism.
Schwab married Emma Eurana Dinkey of Loretto in 1883. They had no children.
