“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards” – Steve Jobs
Dear friends,
Thousands of my Hooversworld newsletter readers enjoy my biographical articles on the great and often unknown business leaders of the past. Yet, in my 1,500-plus talks to business leaders, entrepreneurs, and students around the world, I see almost no awareness of business history. Business history is not taught in most business and other schools. We don’t celebrate human ingenuity and entrepreneurship enough and we don’t learn the lessons from the innovators of the past. We make the same mistakes and often “reinvent the wheel.”
My friends Bill Leake, Laurence Siegel, David Stanwick, and I are going to change that! We could use your help. We have created a new 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the American Business History Center and placed substantial business history content on our website.
We are now raising money to expand these efforts by creating more articles, videos, books, courses, and other materials for students of all ages. Click here to help launch the American Business History Center. If you donate by the end of May, you can be listed as one of our founding members!
Donate Today and Become a Founding Member
Learn all about us and our programs here.
I have been studying business history since 1963, when I began subscribing to Fortune magazine at the age of 12. Educating people is what drove my friends and me to found the first chain of giant bookstores and the business information service Hoovers.com. But no education is complete without understanding our history. We cannot know where we are going unless we know where we came from. The important ideas and techniques of business are recycled over and over.
Think about it. How much might Jeff Bezos learn by studying Robert Wood, who converted Sears, Roebuck from a mail-order operation to the most successful bricks-and-mortar retailer in the world? How much might Elon Musk learn by studying the creative, financial, and marketing wizardry of Kodak founder George Eastman? Both stories are already on our website. How much might every entrepreneur learn? How much might young people be inspired by the great public service done by these individuals, even before Bezos, Musk, Jobs, and Gates?
Please check out our website, sign up for our free business history newsletter there, and donate (tax-deductible) what you can if you believe that we should all learn from history. Click here to go directly to our donation page.
You can also support the American Business History Center through the Amazon smile program, which will give us 0.5% of the value of your purchases on Amazon without costing you anything additional.
Please share this email with your friends who also value history.
Thank you for your support in educating the world,
Gary Hoover
Executive Director
American Business History Center
Gary@americanbusinesshistory.org
“The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.” – Winston Churchill
