John D. Rockefeller

I was reading up on business titans the other night, which is what I do when I can’t sleep lately. Thank God for the iphone, right? Anyway, I’ve started to see several patterns with many of these stories. If you chart the business decisions of many of these folks throughout their lifetime, you can almost drill down into their thought-processes. You can see what motivates them, and I don’t think it’s always money. It’s pretty damned interesting stuff…maybe I’ll blog about it later.

What I wanted to share was a short quote from the wikipedia article on John D. Rockefeller. Here it is:

Rockefeller was now well-positioned to take advantage of post-war prosperity and the great expansion westward fostered by the growth of railroads and an oil-fueled economy. He borrowed astutely and heavily, reinvested profits, adapted rapidly to changing markets, and fielded observers to keep a watchful eye over the quickly expanding industry.

That last sentence captures quite a bit, d0esn’t it?