Meet one of the truly great entrepreneurs of all time. Julius Rosenwald.
Julius who?
Julius Rosenwald began his business life as a vendor to the young Sears Mail Order Business in the late 1800s, eventually becoming its CEO. Sears was a fast-growing company with a lot of problems when Rosenwald took the helm, especially regarding quality and service. He made it into the nation’s premier mail order retailer.
It was truly the original Amazon and brought affordable, quality merchandise for the first time to millions of farm families in what was then still a primarily agricultural America. He also groomed his successor, General Robert Wood, to make Sears a success in the brick-and-mortar arena. He pioneered or was an early advocate of many of the management innovations commonplace today such as profit sharing. Equally important, he shared the immense fortune he made during his lifetime instead of putting it in a charitable foundation where only the interest and dividends would be put to philanthropic use.
Alas, no company is granted immortality. Sears, in the decades after Rosenwald’s passing, failed to meet the needs of a changing retail environment and is a shell of its former self. But the company that Julius Rosenwald led and helped to build had a tremendous impact on the quality of life of millions of Americans for decades, and generated wealth that benefited thousands during his lifetime through his philanthropic work.
Julius Rosenwald’s was a life well lived. An article on Rosenwald from the American Business History Center is a little longer than what I normally offer here, but you will find it well spent. It portrays a man who appears to have used every minute of every day in worthy pursuits. I hope you’ll take the time to learn from, and by inspired by, the remarkable life of a Magnanimous Merchant.
