Greatness through Ingenuity
Old money can be unbearable. Picture the college freshman wearing designer clothes and leaning against his Range Rover while telling tales of his grandfather’s accomplishments as if they were his.
Fortunes are often lost within a few generations because the work ethic and attitude don’t get handed down with the dollars. Discipline, hard work, a dash of calculated risk, humility, and ingenuity are the marks of self-made money. Entitlement, complacency, flash, and laziness are the marks of a hefty trust fund.
Making money and having money are two different things. If you made it, you’re better equipped to know how to preserve it. If you came into it, you don’t know anything else. You’ll assume it will always be there.
Companies aren’t much different.
“If a business is wealthy and strong,” wrote Rich Cohen in The Fish That Ate the Whale, “the executives who come to power in later generations will be characterized by the worst kind of self-confidence: they think the money will always be there because it always has been.”
Cohen was contrasting United Fruit - the biggest fruit company in the Western Hemisphere in the early 1900s - with Sam Zemurray’s Cuyamel - a much smaller, albeit threatening, player in the banana industry.
Cuyamel and United Fruit fought like step siblings competing for the divided attention of their parents. But where United Fruit was large, established, and run by second and third generation executives, Cuyamel was young, scrappy, and run by their founder - the Jewish-Russian immigrant who made his name by slinging bananas from boxcars, hobbling across Honduras on a mule, and raising rebel armies to overthrow governments.
Cuyamel succeeded where United Fruit failed due to the ingenuity often lacking in second-generation leadership.
Perhaps the best example took place in 1917. The conflict centered around the Utila River, a northward-flowing natural boundary snaking its way from the central highlands of Honduras to the Atlantic coast. The Utila was the historic dividing line between the two companies. United Fruit farmed the land to the north and Cuyamel to the south. The buffer in between kept the companies at bay.
Zemurray broke the buffer when he redeemed a favor from years past - 24,000 acres of his choosing from the Honduran government. Not one to keep the peace, Zemurray began claiming land north of the Utila. His actions broke any semblance of a truce between the two companies, and they each started acquiring all the land they could, setting off a banana war.
The nail in the coffin of the banana war was a 5,000 acre tract of land bordering the river to the north. Both companies wanted it. Come to find out, the land was contested - two different people claimed to own it.
In the typical big company fashion, United Fruit set their lawyers to work, combing deeds and sending letters to determine the true owner. Knowing they had far more legal resources than Zemurray, United Fruit was confident they would find the true owner first and buy the land from him.
Zemurray had a different plan. He employed his scrappiness and ingenuity to create a better solution. While the United Fruit lawyers were pushing paper, Zemurray was pounding pavement. He found each of the supposed owners, met with them, and bought the land twice. He bought the land twice before United Fruit could buy it once. Cuyamel became the undisputed owner of the land, and Zemurray was the victor - accomplishing with grit and ingenuity a feat no big company could.
Now that Cuyamel was operating on both sides of the river, Zemurray needed a bridge to ship his bananas to port. At one time, Zemurray had the Honduran government in his back pocket, but administration changes brought changes in allegiance. When Cuyamel requested a permit to bridge the Utila, they were denied.
Zemurray - always brimming with imagination - didn’t let the lack of a permit stop him. Instead of a bridge, he built extra long docks on both the north and south shores of the river. Then he had his engineers build a floating barge that could be secured between the two docks, effectively acting as a temporary bridge across which trains could travel, loaded with bananas headed to port. The whole thing could be installed or removed within three hours.
When United Fruit appealed to the Honduran government that Cuyamel built a bridge without a permit, Zemurray replied, “Why, that’s no bridge. It’s just a couple of little old wharfs.”
The greatest businessmen, athletes, authors, and investors don’t get discouraged by setbacks. They employ the ingenuity of an immigrant clawing his way to the American Dream. They move with the speed of parents earning paychecks before their children go hungry. They buy the land twice, and they build the fake bridge. They’re characterized by creativity and cleverness, and they’re driven by hunger.
The greatest entrepreneurs maintain the immigrant mindset. They hustle and hoard rather than loaf and live lavishly. They embrace the discomfort they worked so hard to escape. Keeping that feeling at the doorstep keeps the memory fresh and prevents decisions that permit its return. The greatest work with ingenuity. They move with speed. They don’t allow windfalls to make them too comfortable. The greatest among us keep this in mind.
Will you?
