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Steve Jobs: the Apple of his eye

We all know the success story that is Apple. In the 1980s Apple was a jumped-up minnow but by 2012 it had become the most valuable company on the New York stock exchange. The biggest success factor was Steve Jobs’ ability to imagine a future that people would like to ha...

Sir Richard Branson: a winning smile

Branson was an entrepreneur from a very early age.  Certainly at school he was making money out of commercial ventures when most people were studying for their exams, publishing a magazine called Student. He comes from a family of lawyers – his father a barrister and his...

Jeff Bezos: stepping out into space

Imagine what it must have been like to be Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, having to persuade his investors that everything would be ok in the end despite making losses for the first six years from 1995 to 2001.  If you have ever been involved in start-ups, you will know that...

Larry Page: what would Google do?

He turned from computer scientist to business mogul when he set up Google with Sergey Brin.  He was the one who developed PageRank, the algorithm that was the foundation of Google’s search facility. His father was one of the first computer scientists.  He went to Montessori...

Howard Schultz: one cup of coffee at a time

From his upbringing in a poor family in the Bronx he won an athletic scholarship to Northern Michigan University (he was the first person in his family to go to college).  He bought Starbucks from the founders in 1987 when it had 11 stores and 100 employees.  The challenge was to...

Anita Roddick: a true believer

It was mainly because her husband Gordon had decided to go trekking across the Americas that Anita decided to open a shop in 1976 as a way of supporting herself and her two daughters. She and Gordon had already opened a restaurant and a hotel together, so she was not new to the...

John Mackey: a whole business concept

John Mackey co-founded Whole Foods Market in 1980. Yet he studied philosophy and religion at University in Austen, Texas – not the normal background for a successful company CEO.  It all started in 1978 with health food store called SaferWay that he opened with his then...

Bill Gates: fortune hunter turned gamekeeper

Bill was born William Henry Gates lll.  This gives us an idea of his background and heritage.  His father was a lawyer, his mother a board director and his maternal grandfather the president of a bank. He set up Microsoft with Paul Allen, a fellow student at Lakeside Pre...

Sir Terence Conran: designer and retailer of better living

Back in 1965, Terence Conran decided he didn’t like the way furniture was sold on the UK high street and knew he could do better.  This led to the first Habitat store opening in the Fulham Road in London and the beginning of a new and successful chain of stores that...

Ben Cohen: ice dream king

He was never an academic and, after school, did a series of menial jobs but was most interested in pottery.  He eventually went on to be a craft teacher for mentally disturbed adolescents.  His other love was ice cream and he began to experiment making his own. In 1978, with his...