In a world that has become increasingly complex, complicated and impersonal, it is easy to feel that each of our individual lives is relatively insignificant. But nothing could be further from the truth. Every life is unique! Each of us is created with the potential to make this world a better place because of our presence in it! The life of H. J. Heinz can inspire each of us to live a life that makes a difference. What makes his life so inspiring to me is his love for the common—the common place, the common man, today’s common tasks and work. H. J. Heinz built an empire by doing common things uncommonly well! In the process, he left his mark in this world and left a legacy—a fortune—for generations to come. But his focus was never on his fortune. It never was about the ketchup!
In a world that has become increasingly complex, complicated and impersonal, it is easy to feel that each of our individual lives is relatively insignificant. But nothing could be further from the truth. Every life is unique! Each of us is created with the potential to make this world a better place because of our presence in it! The life of H. J. Heinz can inspire each of us to live a life that makes a difference. What makes his life so inspiring to me is his love for the common—the common place, the common man, today’s common tasks and work. H. J. Heinz built an empire by doing common things uncommonly well! In the process, he left his mark in this world and left a legacy—a fortune—for generations to come. But his focus was never on his fortune. It never was about the ketchup!
It Was Never About the Ketchup!: The Life and Leadership Secrets of H. J. Heinz
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It Was Never About the Ketchup!: The Life and Leadership Secrets of H. J. Heinz
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Overview
In a world that has become increasingly complex, complicated and impersonal, it is easy to feel that each of our individual lives is relatively insignificant. But nothing could be further from the truth. Every life is unique! Each of us is created with the potential to make this world a better place because of our presence in it! The life of H. J. Heinz can inspire each of us to live a life that makes a difference. What makes his life so inspiring to me is his love for the common—the common place, the common man, today’s common tasks and work. H. J. Heinz built an empire by doing common things uncommonly well! In the process, he left his mark in this world and left a legacy—a fortune—for generations to come. But his focus was never on his fortune. It never was about the ketchup!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781600370540 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 125 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The America of His Boyhood
Proverbs 12.11: A hard worker has plenty of food, but a person who chases fantasies has no sense.
Today we live in a world of "entitlement". Everything around us reinforces the notion that the world owes us something. Whether it is our welfare system or the employee benefits that we have become accustomed to receiving as our "just rights and privileges", the prevailing sentiment that permeates our society today is "what is in this for me?" The understanding that hard work in itself is a noble pursuit is foreign to us today. And yet, many of the happiest people on earth, the most successful, indeed, the most influential people we have ever known, have discovered this secret – that the pursuit of pleasure is not what brings peace. It is hard work that satisfies the soul!
H.J. Heinz began work at the age of eight. And yet, never in his illustrious career, did he ever indicate that work was drudgery. It was noble – and his respect and appreciation for the responsibilities of daily life lifted all around him to heights never thought possible in his time.
In 1844, when Henry J. Heinz was born in Birmingham (now the South Side of Pittsburgh), there was little or nothing to prophesy of the region as it is now. The population was meager and lived frugally, with agriculture as the basic occupation. No man dreamed of the Pittsburgh of today. No visions of fortune were dangled before the young generation. The only road to prosperity known by the people was the slow, steady one of earning and saving. The conditions of life laid upon all men the necessity for thrift, industry and patience. Self-reliance was bred for himself countless little and large things that an elaborate social and industrial machinery does for him today. But there was one fact common to life in that time as it is to this. Work was drudgery or the reverse, according to the spirit with which it was accepted and done.
Young Heinz was one of those who did not make drudgery of it. Although he had to begin at the age of eight years to do a share of the family's labors, and though each year brought increasing duties, he never indicated in his reminiscent moods that his boyhood was anything but happy. He worked daily in his mother's kitchen garden. When it expanded, he sold its spare produce by going through the village with a basket. When he was ten years old his industrial progress was marked by a wheelbarrow to displace the basket. Two years later his business had assumed the dignity of a horse and wagon. Thus, by the time he was twelve years old, circumstances already had set his foot on the path that was to lead him to a great success, though neither he nor his parents had such dreams.
They had a creed for him better than dreams. It was a creed of willingness ... of willing self-denial, or willing sacrifice for others, of willing integrity. They did not have to preach it to their children in many words, for they lived it every day through all their lives. To the day of his death, Henry J. Heinz never ceased to honor them. He was fifty five years old when his mother died, and his words about her were: "In living for the Master and serving Him, some things have been incalculably helpful, and I turn, especially at this time, with grateful heart to the teachings of my mother, whom only a week ago the Lord soothed to sleep. Many of her sayings ever stand guard around my thoughts or influence my actions." Again in the opening paragraph of his will, after declaring his faith in Christ and testifying how God had sustained him through a long life, he added: "This legacy was left by my consecrated mother, who was a woman of strong faith, and to it I attribute any success I may have attained during my life."
Both his parents were born in Germany. His father was twenty-nine years old when he left Europe in 1840, for America, settling in Birmingham. Henry J. Heinz' mother, Anna Margaretta Schmidt, was born in Kruspis, a village near Hersfeld, Germany. She accompanied relatives to America in 1843, and they, also settled in Birmingham.
On December 4, 1843, they were married, and on October 11, 1844, their first child, Henry J. Heinz, was born. In 1849, when he was five years old, the family, enlarged by two other children, moved to Sharpsburg, six miles up the Allegheny east of Pittsburgh. It was only a village, and in many respects villages in that region still had the characteristics of frontier settlements.
Even a village like Sharpsburg, so near to Pittsburgh, was isolated and self-dependent to a degree almost incredible to men of this age. Undertakings that in this day are only ordinary, routine acts, often involved heavy labors and, sometimes, risk of life.
The conditions of life made a rough school, and an effective one. It taught men to use not only their hands, but their heads and to do it quickly, for errors of judgment brought swift, and often fatal, punishment. The experiences of that life contributed much to his power of leadership in after years. He was able to direct how things should be done, because he himself knew how to do them. He was willing, too, at any moment to do them. His associates never were surprised when their President failed to appear at his office. They had learned to take it for granted that he was somewhere in the plant or the grounds with his coat off, working among the men to get at a better way of doing some task. He delighted in such incidents; and his personal satisfaction in his own skill and knowledge was much the lesser part of his pleasure. His great satisfaction was that he had succeeded in passing on a new idea, or in promoting a new method, that would make for the greater comfort of men as well as for efficiency.
His teaching sank in and took hold
He was a tireless teacher, and his teaching sank in and took hold because it was wholly free from the sting of criticism. He taught not because he wanted to display superiority, but because he was a giver. When he discovered something useful, he could not rest till he had shared the discovery with others who might benefit. Whatever he knew he wanted to pass on.
His method was such that men hardly realized that he was teaching them. Thus one day when lumber was being lifted to the upper story of a building in the plant, he saw that poor management was causing each man a maximum of hard labor, while with better direction one-half the number could do the work more ease. Instead of ordering the change to be made, he laid aside his hat and coat and climbed to the top of the carload as if for a joke. It amused the men to see "the boss" take hold; and they acceded with immense good will when he suggested after a few minutes: "Do you think we might make it easier by handling the stuff this way?" After a while he suggested a further improvement. Finally he mounted to the factory window, and began to take the lumber in; demonstrating without a word how one man at that post could do more with less exertion than it was then causing two. When he went away, the car was being unloaded as he had intended it should be; but not one of the men had any humiliated sense of having been corrected.
It was help, not correction that inspired his constant and eager instructions. He was always a student himself, and he took it for granted that others were as zealous to learn as he was. He did not want men to recognize that their improvement was due to his guidance. He often chuckled when somebody, whom he had led on, proudly called his attention to a new method, firm in the belief that he had originated it himself. In fact, he went to quite extraordinary trouble to make men believe that they themselves were suggesting or discovering what he wanted them to learn.
It was help, not correction that inspired his instructions
It was this kind of teaching that made the unique human organization which remains vital today, so inspired by his spirit that it is as if he were present in the body. He shared everything that he knew. He shared it with strangers on the street as well as with his own employees, from the farthest nooks of the plant to the board room where he met his fellow directors. They recall him today in terms of what they learned from him. Many times they ask, in face of a new problem: "What would Mr. Heinz do?" They remember his practice of taking somebody with him whenever he had something important to develop, so that the new knowledge would be shared.
It was his faculty of teaching that enabled him to build up his huge organization almost entirely from within. He adhered to that principle from the beginning, and remained unshaken even during the era when nearly all American business men believed that the brilliant results could be gained only by the opposite course of hiring stars. While they were competing hotly for outside talent, Henry J. Heinz stuck to his own men, and promoted his own men. He never hired stars. He developed his own people first because they were his people, and, second, because he believed in what the world called "ordinary men." With the untiring patience, tact and thoughtfulness which are possible only to good will, he proved that ordinary men have it in them to do many common things better than they were done before, and to do many uncommon things too. There are men throughout the world today representing the Company in many ways and with brilliant success who started under him as boys. A man who drove a pair of mules for him when he began business was in charge of the whole huge system of warehousing and shipping that spreads a web over the entire county, before Mr. Heinz died. How his teaching stuck is pointed by an amusing little anecdote. Some years after his death a man in the incinerating department of the plant was instructed to change his methods in some minor detail. He sent back the firm answer: "I do this the way Mr. Heinz told me."
CHAPTER 2Lessons of Home
Philippians 4.9: Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me.
There is no way to underestimate the power and strength that Godly parents can have on their children. As an estate planning attorney, my career often centers on identifying the assets that parents have amassed during their life, protecting the wealth represented by those assets, and ensuring that wealth – THE INHERITANCE – is properly passed to the next generation.
I have seen millions of dollars of worldly wealth transferred from one generation to the next with the intention of this transfer providing happiness – a better life – for the next generation. Sadly, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the transfer of worldly wealth alone has not made the beneficiaries any happier. Nor does it improve the quality of their lives. The transfer fails, in my opinion, because a true inheritance that creates generational wealth begins and ends with the transfer of a Godly heritage – the character traits of honesty, industry, humility, kindness and respect for one's fellow man. This is THE INHERITANCE. Without this transfer of wealth, a fortune will have little lasting impact on the happiness of its recipient.
The greatest lessons of life begin and end in the home. H.J. Heinz attributed the magnetic character traits that propelled him to success in life directly to his experience in the home.
It was the hope of his parents that their first born should enter the ministry. They were of that quietly devout European stock which, without bigotry or intolerance, handed down from generation to generation the conviction that the Bible was the supreme guide for all things, earthly as well as spiritual. It was a simple creed, but not narrow, for high in it stood Charity. Margaretta Heinz taught her son a rule which he never forgot, and which he practiced so constantly that it became one of those traits for which men most loved him. It was: "Always remember to place yourself in the other person's shoes."
Not so much what you say, but how, when and where
Of these parents he said after the lapse of sixty years: "I had an honest father, and a mother with a Christ like spirit, in whom I had wonderful faith. She could handle me because she knew how to inspire me; because she knew what to say, when and how. I live under the spell of her many sayings." There is a card on the walls of the plant today, put up by Mr. Heinz, with the legend: "Not so much what you say, but how, when and where."
They sent him to school under the Pastor of the Lutheran Church. Such a form of education was that of many village-trained boys of that time when schools and school teachers were not abundant. It fell naturally to the minister, as an educated man, to look after secular education in a small community as well as spiritual instruction.
To the father and mother at home, education was sacred, and they implanted in their son another trait that became an integral part of his character ... a literally insatiable desire for knowledge. All through life he wanted to know. His temperament impelled him to seek information from men and from tangible sources rather than from books. He wanted to know first hand. He used books to round out what he had learned.
He applied the method to all his pursuits-to art and science, to business, to public affairs. His associates in his own business and on the many boards and committees, on which he served, often marveled at the extraordinary conditions and other events of the future. He was, it is true, gifted with astonishing foresight. But the basis of his judgment and of his acts was the firm basis of knowledge. He had gone out and learned the facts- and when he went out to gather the facts, he gathered them without letting his own opinions obtrude, and he acted on them without letting his previous opinions sway him. Very few men-amazingly few-possess this fundamental, vital principle of all learning- the principle of recognizing facts whole-heartedly even when they are exceedingly uncomfortable and unwelcome. It requires a mind of absolute integrity. To recognize truths, a man must love truth.
Truth was not just a pretty virtue to be admired
To him, truth was not just a pretty virtue to be admired. He considered truth to be as vital to a man as his vital organs. Tolerant himself, he tried to be tolerant even to liars; but it was quite impossible for him to view a liar as anything but a moral suicide.
One day he accosted a new employee at the weigher's platform weighing apples. The young man, eager to impress his value on his employer, said: "We are getting you good weight today, Mr. Heinz." "Fine!" said Mr. Heinz. "What are you doing for me?" "Why, you know, a quick eye, a quick hand, and you can always slip over a few pounds extra?" Mr. Heinz nodded and after a moment asked him mildly to go with him to the office. When they arrived, he said: "Do you know what office this is? It's the cashier's office. You will be paid off, and you will leave this place at once."
"But, Mr. Heinz!" cried the astonished young man. "I was saving you money!"
He was a builder of organization, principles and of men
"You were robbing a man who was selling to me," said Mr. Heinz, "and you were robbing me of something more precious." Then, laying his hand on the discharged man's shoulder, he added: "There is only one way to weigh, or to do anything else. Be as square to the other fellow as to yourself."
His note-book was a constant companion. He had an excellent memory, far superior to that of most men; but he made sure of everything that he wanted to preserve, by setting it down. Sooner or later there would arrive an occasion when a memorandum, sometimes made many years before, would be brought forth, to bear exactly on the issue.
Another companion was a tape-measure. It became a half-humorous, half-serious habit of his traveling companions to provide themselves similarly, for nobody could tell at what moment it would be required-to measure the height of a door, the dimensions of a panel, the proportions that made some object beautiful. He was a builder ... a builder of organization, a builder of principles, a builder of men ; and in the actual field of building construction; he gave the impulse its direct expression. He studied architecture as he studied everything that he undertook. Every journey was a university course for him.
As a collector of art, he learned as he collected, and he grew with his collections. When he began to collect antique watches, he knew nothing of the field. He began by buying a single watch of a specific period, without any great value either intrinsically or from the collector's point of view. He was paying to learn. He took that watch home and made a study of it. Then he turned to books and learned what specialists had to say about its period. So, piece by piece, he learned as he collected, until in the end he possessed as many envied prizes and ranked as an expert.
He loved beauty with a true reverance
His famous collection of carved ivories was made in the same way. To him it would have been utterly meaningless simply to hire other men's eyes and knowledge to acquire these exquisite things for him. Every piece represented to be an artist, and he did not deceive himself or others by claiming that he had the artist's native ability for spontaneous perception of what was best. But he loved beauty with true reverence; and with the same simple, straightforward spirit with which he set himself to learn other things, he set himself to understand it so that he might impart it to others for their pleasure and inspiration.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "It Was Never About The Ketchup!"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Steve Lentz.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface,
I. The America of His Boyhood,
II. Lessons of Home,
III. The Dignity of Labor,
IV. Early Business Ventures,
V. The First Partnership,
VI. A Period of Trouble,
VII. Building Anew,
VIII. The Business Record,
IX. Elements of His Personality,
X. An Enduring Structure,
XI. Business Policies,
XII. Home and the Family Fireside,
XIII. Travel: A Revealer of Character,
XIV. Collecting Art and Antiques,
XV. Religion and Sunday-school work,
XVI. Citizen,
XVII. Reading the Record,