The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy
John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage -...
1 Jul 47min
A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price Tag
Shopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfair and...
24 Jun 40min
The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of Disruption
Why have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to...
17 Jun 40min
Ida Tarbell: The "Muckraker" Who Beat John D Rockefeller and Big Oil
At a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how Joh...
10 Jun 46min
"Time is Money": How Ben Franklin's Sayings Created American Capitalism and Grind Culture
Benjamin Franklin had a full life - he was a scientist, statesman, and a Founding Father. But we're looking at the huge impact he had as a writer of best-selling business books. Franklin first picked ...
3 Jun 44min
The Founding Father Who Got Rich in the Revolution
Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago George Washington was fighting the Revolutionary War against the British, but Robert Morris doing something just as vital. He was raising money for the fighting and buy...
27 Mai 47min
The Dumbest Business Ever... Shipping Melting Ice to Calcutta.
Frederic Tudor could get ice any time he wanted. He lived in chilly Boston and his family had a lake that froze over in the winter. Harvesting ice and storing it was a normal thing in New England in t...
20 Mai 47min
The Match Maker Who Nearly Burned Down Wall Street
Swedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger built a fortune selling matches. He used this money to build a world famous financial empire that bankrolled whole countries. France borrowed from Kreuger. Germany bo...
13 Mai 48min
