In the world of business, there are a handful of CEOs who define their company’s status as world leaders. Here we look at five founders who have borne their organisations from humble start-ups to global behemoths.
A CEO’s job is rarely easy. Running a successful publicly listed business is a complex, time-consuming and stressful task. Spare a thought, then, for that select group of CEOs who have founded a company, grown it, and then run it for several years, possibly decades.
Of course, not all founder-CEOs create corporate giants; for every Apple, or Virgin, and every Steve Jobs or Richard Branson, there are thousands of small and medium-sized businesses run by lone entrepreneurs. Many of these executives fail. The statistics suggest that 80% of new businesses falter within five years.
A few founders, however, succeed and a small number go on to create global brands that shape the world. Henry Ford (president of Ford Motors), Walt Disney (CEO in all but title) and Konosuke Matsushita (president of Panasonic) are names that spring to mind. Successful founder-CEOs are an interesting study for aspirant entrepreneurs, leaders, executive managers and even senior executives, because they often demonstrate a rare combination of talents.
On the one hand, it takes a measure of entrepreneurial flair to marshal the resources necessary to launch a new venture. On the other, it takes supreme managerial and leadership capabilities – in particular an understanding of the strengths of others and of your own weaknesses and limitations – to grow a business sustainably and successfully over many years.
What follows is an analysis of a select group of founder-CEOs who have made their mark upon the world and global society. Three of them represent different generations of hi-tech talent, a fourth has reinvented banking while the fifth is an entertainment pioneer.
Though there is no single secret to their success – these founder CEOs possess many different qualities that have contributed to their accomplishments – they do share an unrelenting drive to succeed, a passion for what they do and a willingness to take calculated risks in order to achieve their vision.
Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, and founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
There is not much that hasn’t been said about William Henry Gates III, 54, good and bad. Of all the founder-CEOs of corporations that began operating in the latter half of the 20th century, it is possibly Gates that has had the most impact on the world. Driven by his vision of "a computer on every desk and in every home," Gates has helped to transform the way we live.
To many, Gates is the epitome of the computer nerd, combining a love of the technical aspects of computers with a slightly awkward presentational manner (much improved over the years).
Already fascinated with computing as a 12-year-old, Gates programmed computers at school, founded Microsoft with fellow computer geek Paul Allen at university in 1975 and dropped out of Harvard in 1977 to focus on the business.
It was MS-DOS, and then Windows, that Gates used to transform Microsoft into a computing behemoth. Gates’ brilliant strategic decision to retain the copyright to the MS-DOS operating software he supplied to IBM allowed him to sell the system to other personal computer manufacturers, even though IBM was the only PC game in town at that point.
Just 30 years later, and Gates has parlayed a rare combination of technical smarts and business ability into a worldbeating company and a multi-billion dollar fortune. Having officially stepped down as CEO in 2000, and from day-to-day Microsoft activities in 2008, Gates devotes his time to tackling society’s big problems through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Larry Page, co-founder and former CEO of Google
Larry Page, 37, engineering and computer sciences graduate, and co-founder and first CEO of Google, was at Stanford University researching internet search methods as part of a dissertation project called BackRub when he had the idea for a new kind of search engine.
Along with fellow Stanford student Sergey Brin, Page launched Google on the Stanford University website in 1996. He soon realised the two were onto something when the fledgling business attracted an investment of $100,000 seed capital before it had even incorporated.
Google Inc launched in 1998. In 2001, having grown the company to over 200 employees in just three years, Page appointed Eric Schmidt as CEO and assumed the role of president of products.
Today, Google is a $20bn-revenue business that bestrides the internet. It has subsumed businesses such as YouTube, Picasa and DoubleClick, and developed many others.
Its business extends far beyond search technology to encompass activities that range from cloud computing to mobile phone software.
As for Page, while he remains closely involved in the business as co-president, he is also engaged in philanthropic activities and is a big investor in alternative energy research. Internet search has made Page very rich; he is ranked among the wealthiest 30 billionaires in the world, despite only taking a salary of $1 a year.
Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder, CEO and president of Facebook
If Google is the new Microsoft, then Facebook must be the new Google, and its co-founder, CEO and president Mark Zuckerberg, 26, the figurehead of the Web 2.0 global social networking phenomenon.
The youngest dollar-billionaire ever, Zuckerberg shares the distinction with Bill Gates of having dropped out of Harvard to help create a billion dollar business. (Microsoft is as an investor in Facebook).
In retrospect, ditching college seemed like a wise move. Zuckerberg is worth an estimated $4bn, courtesy of his 25% holding in the ubiquitous website. Hollywood’s version of the Facebook story, The Social Network may portray the young Zuckerberg as a scheming outsider fuelled by his exclusion from Harvard, but a recent profile of him in the New Yorker sheds light on a more rounded character; cocky and in control, but also reticent.
His $100m philanthropic donation to state schools in Newark is also helping to improve the image. Facebook launched on 4 February 2004 as thefacebook.com. Zuckerberg had intended to build a website to allow a few of his fellow undergraduates to share information about their social lives. Within a month, 10,000 students in the US had signed up. Today, Facebook has 500 million users worldwide and is still growing. It is probably the largest depository of personal information in the world.
The company is said to have turned a modest (compared to its valuation) net profit in 2009. There have been a few broken connections along the way: users criticised Zuckerberg and his team for introducing changes to the look and utility of the site without conducting sufficient consultation, and the CEO has been embroiled in a difficult debate about privacy – "privacy is no longer a social norm." There has also been litigation and some controversy over the founding of Facebook, which was eventually settled out of court. Zuckerberg, meanwhile, continues to drive the business towards a billion active users, and an IPO.
Muhammad Yunus, founder and managing director of Grameen Bank
One bank unlikely to be caught up in any controversy about bankers’ bonuses and exotic financial instruments is Grameen Bank, the microcredit business founded by social entrepreneur and 2006 Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, 70.
In the early 1970s Yunus was teaching economics at the University of Chittagong, in his home country of Bangladesh. "I found it difficult to teach elegant theories of economics in the university classroom, in the backdrop of a terrible famine in Bangladesh," Yunus said in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. "I felt the emptiness of those theories in the face of crushing hunger and poverty. I wanted to do something immediate to help people around me, even if it was just one human being, to get through another day with a little more ease."
Yunus started by making a loan to 42 villagers of $27 from his own pocket. From this beginning has grown a nationwide microcredit system. To date, Grameen Bank, founded in 1983, has distributed around $9.5bn in loans throughout Bangladesh to some 8.29 million people, of whom 97% are women. As one female borrower noted: "My parents gave me birth, but Grameen Bank gave me a life."
Oprah Winfrey, founder and CEO of Harpo Entertainment Group
Oprah Winfrey’s story is one of triumph over adversity. The founder-CEO of Harpo (Oprah spelt backwards) Entertainment Group had a difficult childhood: brought up in poverty on her grandmother’s farm, shunted back and forth between her mother in Milwaukee and father in Nashville, she was raped and sexually abused as a young child.
Her first break came aged 16, when she was offered a spot reading the news after school at a local radio station; the second was landing a reporting job on Nashville radio station WVOL. Soon afterwards, Winfrey joined WTVF-TV in Nashville to become the first Afro- American news anchor on the station.
By 1988 she had her own chat show, the Oprah Winfrey show, and had founded Harpo Productions. The hugely influential show is slated to finish a 25-year run in September 2011.
In terms of Oprah’s management style, her biographer Kitty Kelley has described Oprah has having a "disease to please", and a strong dislike of confrontation or having to be the bearer of bad tidings.
What is evident is that Oprah is generous to her employees, giving them lavish gifts and expensive trips.
Despite her wealth – she is a billionaire and shares the mantle of richest self-made woman in the US with Doris Fisher, co-founder of the Gap – Winfrey has not forgotten her upbringing. She founded the non-profit Angel Network, which has made grants to charities around the world dealing with issues such as poverty, child neglect and homelessness, and she also works with many other not-for-profit organisations.
