Word: william
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...people, is by definition subjective, especially since we sought to recognize leadership in several different industries. If, as I believe, the automobile is the product of the century, we could easily have filled the list with the names of famous automakers, including Alfred P. Sloan, Charles Kettering and William Durant (all from General Motors), Walter Chrysler, Ferdinand Porsche (Porsche and Volkswagen), Ransom Olds, Clement Studebaker and the Dodge brothers. Henry J. Kaiser not only built cars but also played a key role in shipbuilding, construction, housing and hospitals. In the end, however, we settled on Henry Ford because his individual...
...strong-willed management style gave him the label of not always being "talent-friendly," although he was close to great musicians like Arturo Toscanini. Sarnoff managed to survive a major raid orchestrated by CBS boss William S. Paley, who lured several major NBC stars. But if Sarnoff lost a battle, you could always bet on his winning the war. Under his leadership NBC had the first videotape telecast and the first made-for-television movie...
Suburbia required cars, highways and government-guaranteed mortgages. It also required William Levitt, who first applied a full panoply of assembly-line techniques to housing construction. That insight enabled him, and the many builders who copied him, to put up houses fast and cheap. Levitt's houses were so cheap (but still reasonably sturdy) that bus drivers, music teachers and boilermakers could afford them. And the first place he offered them was Levittown, N.Y., a town that is as much an achievement of its cultural moment as Venice or Jerusalem...
...William Levitt, a man who just about never read a novel, turned out to be the author of an entire world...
...adman's adman. He wasn't a hipster like William Bernbach, who tapped into youthcult with the "Think Small" campaign for Volkswagen. He wasn't an elegant rationalist like David Ogilvy, whose ads famously advised the rich that a Rolls-Royce was the sensible car to buy. He didn't even work on Madison Avenue, but in Chicago's Loop instead. But Leo Burnett, the jowly genius of the heartland subconscious, is the man most responsible for the blizzard of visual imagery that assaults us today...