TOP DRAWER BOOK REVIEW
by
HL Carpenter

 

The Change Makers
by Maury Klein
318 pages; hardcover; $26.00
Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2003

What’s the difference between a wish and a purpose?

No one asks that question in The Change Makers. Yet the twenty-six entrepreneurs featured in the book knew the answer instinctively, whether they gave it any conscious thought or not.

The Change Makers is not a biography of any or all of its subjects. Instead of tracking each entrepreneur from birth to death, University of Rhode Island professor and author Maury Klein examines them collectively from eight angles. He seeks a universal theme, a recurring connection (besides the glaring fact that they are all men). What did they have in common, for example, in their early years? What work ethics did they share? How were their family lives similar?

Since the individuals range from Frank Woolworth to Warren Buffet, the conclusion seems to be ‘very little’. They all emerge from the narrative as possessors of vision and talent; they’re all creative and persistent. They’re also maddeningly obtuse and supremely self-assured. In short, they’re as human as everyone else.

Yet these ‘change makers’ rose above the average person to transform ideas into industries, as the book’s subtitle states, and reading about them is an enlightening tour through the history of business, American-style. The problem is that no one, including the entrepreneurs themselves, can tell you how they achieved their successes. A blueprint for others to follow simply does not exist.

Perhaps that’s because there’s no need for one. Maybe the solution lies less in the details than in persistent effort – what entrepreneurs intuitively recognize as the difference between a wish and a purpose.

 

Review originally published December 2003.