From Small Beginnings

     Every business started as a small business. Big companies did not suddenly erupt from the primeval rock on some glorious spring morning to the inspirational accompaniment of the Beethoven's ''ode to joy.'' Even John D. Rockefeller started as a peddler with a horse. Eugene Ferkauf of Korvette sold discount luggage out of an obscure one-room second-floor loft. J. Eric Jonsson and Patrick E. Haggerty of Texas Instruments had a little geophysical operation y hay became interested in transistor. Appropriately to the Dllas origins they bet a lot on a little item. Charles Lubin ran an obscure little neighborhood bakery on Chicago's north side, which later achieved fame and fiscal eminence as Sara Lee cakes and pastries.
      Each of these men became a corporate hero, appropriately celebrated for his pioneering wisdom and entrepreneurial energy. Each no doubt deserves both his plaudits and his millions. Standard Oil is huge; Korvette is big and, for reasons not central  to this exposition, now transmuted into the less casually controlled orbit of another enterprise. Texas Instruments is enormous in both size and profits; and Sara Lee, though willingly gobbled up in the great meger movement, is willingly gobbled up by the rest of us in proportions greater than we would like but with resistance less than we can muster.
     The trouble with heroes is that their admirers endow them with such a powerfully brilliant glow that we are blinded to the more significant facts of their achievements. One thing is significantly identical about the heroes we have mentioned : Each made a revolution, and yet each made it in an industry to which he was a stranger and which was occupied by others of greater experience, larger fiscal resources, and more connections. Rockefeller was a vegetable peddler when others had already waxed rich in oil. Ferkauf was, in the accepted parlance of the trade, a more schnook compared with the experienced might of Federated Department Stores and Allied Stores. Compared with RCA, Philco, General Electric, and their heavily capitalized and innovation minded brethren, Texas Instruments was heavily capitalized and innovation minded brethren, Texas Instruments was a phantom outsider. And Mr. Lubin was so far outside the commercial baking industry that he probably could not have qualified as a journeyman baker in the mass production factories of Consolidated or Ward.