John Pierpont "J. P." Morgan

J.P. Morgan - ENLARGE

John Pierpont "J. P." Morgan (April 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913) was an American financier, banker, philanthropist and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time. In 1892 Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company, he merged in 1901 with the Carnegie Steel Company and several other steel and iron businesses, including Consolidated Steel and Wire Company owned by William Edenborn, to form the United States Steel Corporation.

Morgan died in Rome, Italy, in his sleep in 1913 at the age of 75, leaving his fortune and business to his son, John Pierpont "Jack" Morgan, Jr., and bequeathing his mansion and large book collections to The Morgan Library & Museum in New York.

At the height of Morgan's career during the early 1900s, he and his partners had financial investments in many large corporations and were accused by critics of controlling the nation's high finance. He directed the banking coalition that stopped the Panic of 1907. He was the leading financier of the Progressive Era, and his dedication to efficiency and modernization helped transform American business. Read more »»»

Business term of the day - Term for June 26, 2013: «Business Rule»

A business rule is a rule of a business, company, or corporation. It is a rule that defines or constrains some aspect of business and always resolves to either true or false. Business rules are intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business. Business rules describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization. Business rules can apply to people, processes, corporate behavior and computing systems in an organization, and are put in place to help the organization achieve its goals.
For example a business rule might state that no credit check is to be performed on return customers. Other examples of business rules include requiring a rental agent to disallow a rental tenant if their credit rating is too low, or requiring company agents to use a list of preferred suppliers and supply schedules.
While a business rule may be informal or even unwritten, writing the rules down clearly and making sure that they don't conflict is a valuable activity. When carefully managed, rules can be used to help the organization to better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty.
Source: Wikipedia

Raymond Albert "Ray" Kroc

Ray Kroc - ENLARGE

Raymond Albert "Ray" Kroc (October 5, 1902 – January 14, 1984) was an American businessman. He joined McDonald's in 1954 and built it into the most successful fast food operation in the world. Kroc was included in Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century, and amassed a fortune during his lifetime. He owned the San Diego Padres baseball team from 1974 until his death in 1984. Similar to another fast-food giant, KFC founder Harland Sanders, Kroc's success came late in life when he was past his 50th birthday.
Kroc was born to parents of Austria-Hungarian origin in Oak Park, near Chicago, on October 5, 1902. His father originated from the village Břasy near Plzeň, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). He grew up and spent most of his life in Oak Park, Illinois. During the First World War he lied about his age and became a Red Cross ambulance driver at 15, though the war ended and unlike Walt Disney, who served a year in France, he was NOT shipped overseas. During the war, Kroc served in the same regiment as Walt Disney. Between the end of the war and the early 1950s he tried his hand at a number of trades including paper cup salesman, pianist, jazz musician, band member and radio DJ at Oak Park radio station WGES. At one time, Ray worked for room and board at one of Ray Dambaugh's restaurants in the midwest to learn the restaurant business.
He eventually became a multi-mixer milkshake machine salesman, traveling across the country. Read more »»»

Business term of the day - Term for June 25, 2013: «Business Reference Model»

Business Reference Mode - ENLARGE

Business reference model is a reference model, concentrating on the functional and organizational aspects of the core business of an enterprise, service organization or government agency.
In enterprise engineering a business reference model is part of an Enterprise Architecture Framework or Architecture Framework. An Enterprise Architecture Framework defines in a series of reference models, how to organize the structure and views associated with an Enterprise Architecture.
Source: Wikipedia

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr.

Howard Hughes - ENLARGE PHOTO

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905[3] – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, film maker and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world. As a maverick film producer, Hughes gained prominence in Hollywood from the late 1920s, making big-budget and often controversial films like The Racket (1928), Hell's Angels (1930), Scarface (1932) and The Outlaw (1943). Hughes was one of the most influential aviators in history: he set multiple world air speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 "Hercules" (better known to history as the "Spruce Goose" aircraft), and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines, which later merged with American Airlines. Hughes is also remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive–compulsive disorder and chronic pain. His legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Read more »»»

Business term of the day - Term for June 24, 2013: «Business Process Modeling»

Business process modeling - ENLARGE PHOTO

Business Process Modeling (BPM) in systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require information technology involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process, by creating a process master. Business process modeling results in the improvement of the way tasks performed by the business. They can pick up errors or cons about the way processes are currently being performed and model an improved way of carrying out these processes.

Change management programs are typically involved to put the improved business processes into practice. With advances in technology from large platform vendors, the vision of BPM models becoming fully executable (and capable of simulations and round-trip engineering) is coming closer to reality.
Source: Wikipedia

Jean Paul Getty

Not to be confused with John Paul Getty, Jr. or John Paul Getty III.

Jean Paul Getty - ENLARGE

Jean Paul Getty (December 15, 1892 – June 6, 1976) was an Anglo-American industrialist. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American, whilst the 1966 Guinness Book of Records named him as the world's richest private citizen, worth an estimated $1.2 billion (approximately $8.5 billion in 2012). At his death, he was worth more than $2 billion (approximately $8.1 billion in 2012). A book published in 1996 ranked him as the 67th richest American who ever lived, based on his wealth as a percentage of the gross national product. Despite his wealth, Getty was known for being a miser.

Getty was an avid collector of art and antiquities; his collection formed the basis of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California, and over $661 million (approximately $2.7 billion in 2012) of his estate was left to the museum after his death. He established the J. Paul Getty Trust in 1953. The trust is the world's wealthiest art institution, and operates the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Foundation, the Getty Research Institute, and the Getty Conservation Institute.
Born into George Getty's family in the petroleum business in Minneapolis, Minnesota, he was one of the first people in the world with a fortune estimated at over one billion U.S. dollars.

He enrolled at the University of Southern California, then at University of California, Berkeley, before graduating in 1914 from Magdalen College, Oxford, with degrees in economics and political science. He spent his summers between studies working on his father's oil fields in Oklahoma. Running his own oil company in Tulsa, he made his first million by June 1916. The Nancy Taylor No. 1 Oil Well Site near Haskell, Oklahoma, was crucial to his early financial success. This oil well was the first to be drilled by JP Getty. However, in 1917, he announced that he was retiring to become a Los Angeles-based playboy. Although he eventually returned to business, Getty had lost his father's respect. Just before George Franklin Getty died in 1930, he believed that Jean Paul would destroy the family company, and told him so.

After taking a few years off from the money-making grind to enjoy spending his earnings on women, Getty returned to Oklahoma in 1919. During the 1920s, he added about $3 million to his already sizable estate. His succession of marriages and divorces (three during the 1920s, five throughout his life) so distressed his father, however, that J. Paul inherited a mere $500,000 of the $10 million the senior Getty left at his death in 1930. Read more »»»