An overview of the Seventh Annual Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, including profiles of the judges.
Our Seventh Annual Entrepreneur of the Year Awards
The trouble with the ever-swelling applause directed toward entrepreneurship -- whether reflected in overseas economic initiatives, election-year encomiums, or awards programs like this one -- is that it can make you overlook the actual entrepreneurs. It can make you forget, if you let it, that company building happens only one company at a time, and that every time is different -- and that while every attempt to grow a business is worth admiring, some attempts are worth admiring more. The trouble is that when speech makers call all company builders heroic and astonishing, it can make you forget that some actually are.
You'll meet nine such people in the pages that follow -- which constitute our coverage of this year's Entrepreneur of the Year Awards, sponsored by Ernst & Young, Merrill Lynch, and Inc. Six are winners in special categories, from Turnaround Entrepreneur of the Year (Joanna Lau) to Supporter of Entrepreneurship (Alvin Rohrs). The remaining three -- Allen Breed of Breed Technologies, Jim Koch of Boston Beer, and Jirka Rysavy of Corporate Express -- are the finalists for the top award, overall Entrepreneur of the Year. Breed, the man more responsible than anyone for putting air bags into automobiles, is the winner.
Why? Because over the course of two decades he fought to establish a product that his only potential customers -- the big automakers in Detroit -- fought just as hard to sabotage. (And he won.) Because when air bags finally were accepted, he had to outdesign, outproduce, and outsell multibillion-dollar competitors. (And he did.) Because he invented an industry. Because he earned a 25% net profit. Because the judges said so. (Though it was not a unanimous vote.)
The seven judges, each a highly regarded company builder, venture financier, or academic leader in his or her own right (see "The Judges," below), would tell you that their decision wasn't easy. By the time the finalists in all the categories reached them, the candidates had survived a winnowing from a national field of more than 3,600 rigorously selected nominees. About 400 of those 3,600 won awards -- and consideration as national semifinalists -- in 44 local markets around the country. Those 400 were cut to 17. And those 17 were cut to the few profiled here.
This year we've chosen, untraditionally, to pay special attention to the three overall finalists. There are two reasons. One, it would be almost impossible to find three enterprises less alike -- from the market challenges they faced, to their strategies, to their founders' backgrounds. Two, that very dissimilarity, set against the uncanny similarity in the magnitude of their respective achievements, amounts to an object lesson in just how varied the paths to entrepreneurial success are.
How different are these men? Breed is an industrialist, a vertical integrator, in a just-minted market with a handful of customers. Rysavy entered an old, fragmented business-to-business market and consolidated it through acquisition, leveraging state-of-the-art technology every step of the way. Koch competes with giant companies in one of the world's most ancient industries, sells to millions of consumers, and operates a manufacturing operation as virtual as Breed's is vertical.
Breed is 68, Koch 45, and Rysavy 41. Breed is an inventor who taught himself how to manage; Koch has three Harvard degrees; Rysavy is a Czech immigrant who 10 years ago didn't even understand capitalism.
Koch could wear his gray chalk-striped suit in any corporate boardroom in America. You'll find Rysavy with whiskers, wearing track shoes and living in a Rocky Mountain cabin with no running water. And Breed's at home in a lab -- or at a factory or in a customer's hallway or a legislator's lobby, making a pitch -- at home anywhere, really, because by now there's nowhere he hasn't already been.
In the end what's hardest to fathom, and as a result most remarkable, is why these three founders figured out -- and acted on -- what no one else in their industries could. Why didn't others among Breed's countless timing-device-engineer colleagues understand the business that air bags would bring? Why couldn't anyone else with a beer recipe and a business head capitalize on the market opportunity Koch seized? Why did it take Rysavy, who hardly spoke English for goodness' sake, to see what thousands of independent office-products suppliers had stared at blankly since the second World War?
Side by side (by side), their histories beg the question, Why them? And demonstrate that even the most notable company building follows no formula and requires only ingenuity, boldness, and steel.
The moral, then, is both clear and heartening: There are -- the examples of these three creators appear to proclaim -- no limits to the kinds of routes that lead to success. There is -- they seem to be telling us -- no one true way. So make your own. As they did.
In this issue are their stories. -- The Editors
THE JUDGES
Teresa Amabile
Harvard Business School professor and author
On Turnaround Entrepreneur Joanna Lau of Lau Technologies:
"Her story isn't as big as Turnaround runners-up Microchip's or Celestial Seasonings', but in many ways I think it's more impressive. Defense contracting is a pitiful -- and male-dominated -- industry. And here comes a young woman willing to remortgage her house and cash in her pension to have a shot in it.
