Examples of Business Leaders and their Contributions

Lakshmi Narayan Mittal

Lakshmi Narayan Mittal began his career working in the family’s steelmaking business in India, and has over 30 years of experience working in steel and related industries. Mittal founded the company Mittal Steel in 1976 and has been responsible for the development of its businesses ever since. Mittal Steel is a global steel producer with operations in 14 countries.
Mittal pioneered the development of integrated mini-mills and the use of Direct Reduced Iron or “DRI” as a scrap substitute for steelmaking and led the consolidation process of the global steel industry. Mittal Steel is the largest steelmaker in the world, with shipments of 42.1 million tons of steel and profits of over $22 billion in 2004.

Mittal was awarded Fortune magazines “European Businessman of the Year 2004” and also “Steelmaker of the Year” in 1996 by New Steel, and the “Willy Korf Steel Vision Award” in 1998, for outstanding vision, entrepreneurship, leadership and success in global steel development from American Metal Market and PaineWeber’s World Steel Dynamics.

Mittal is an active philanthropist. Mittal is a member of the Foreign Investment Council in Kazakhstan, the International Investment Council in South Africa, the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council and the International Iron and Steel Institute’s Executive Committee. He is a member in the Advisory Board of the Kellogg School of Management.

Mr. Mittal began his career working in the family's steelmaking business in India, and in 1976, when the family founded its own steel business, he set out to establish its international division, beginning with the buying of a run-down plant in Indonesia. Shortly afterwards he married Usha, the daughter of a well-to-do moneylender. In 1994, due to differences with his father, mother and brothers, he branched out on his own, taking over the international operations of the Mittal steel business (representing approximately 22- 23% of the whole group), which was already owned by the family. Mittal's family never spoke publicly about the reasons for the split.

On November 6th, 2009 it was announced that the Mittal Family Trust agreed to purchase Germany’s insolvent fashion group, Escada, including Escada’s main business, brand rights, production facilities and distribution network. Megha Mittal, the 33 year old daughter-in-law of Lakshmi Mittal, was reported by journalists at Bloomberg News to be the main instigator of the deal. The purchase price was not disclosed.

In 2009, Forbes Magazine listed Mittal the world's 8th richest person with personal wealth of US$19.3 billion.In 2008, Mittal was reported to be the 4th wealthiest person in the world, and the wealthiest in Asia by Forbes Magazine (up from 61st richest in 2004) up one place since a year before. The Mittal family owns a controlling majority stake in ArcelorMittal, the world's largest steel company.

Sergey Brin

In 1979, when Brin was six, his family immigrated to the United States. In an interview with Mark Malseed, author of The Google Story, Sergey's father explains how he was "forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn't exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. The Brin family lived in a small, three-room, 350 square foot apartment in central Moscow, which they also shared with Sergey's paternal grandmother. Sergey told Malseed, "I've known for a long time that my father wasn't able to pursue the career he wanted," but Sergey only picked up the details years later after they had settled in America. He learned how, in 1977, after his father returned from a mathematics conference in Warsaw, Poland, he announced that it was time for the family to emigrate.. At the conference, he was able to "mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany, and discovered that his intellectual brethren in the West were 'not monsters.'" He added, "I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave.

Sergey's mother was less willing to leave their home in Moscow, where they had spent their entire lives. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son's, for her, 'it was 80/20' about Sergey." They formally applied for their exit visa in September 1978, and as a result his father "was promptly fired." For related reasons, his mother also had to leave her job. For the next eight months, without any steady income, they were forced to take on temporary jobs as they waited, not knowing whether their application would be granted. During this time his parents shared responsibility for looking after him and his father taught himself computer programming. In May 1979, they were granted their official exit visas and were allowed to leave the country.

During an orientation for new students at Stanford, he met Larry Page. In a recent interview for The Economist, Brin jokingly said "We're both kind of obnoxious." They seemed to disagree on most subjects. But after spending time together, they "became intellectual soul-mates and close friends." Brin's focus was on developing data mining systems while Page's was in extending "the concept of inferring the importance of a research paper from it in other papers." Together, the pair authored what is widely considered their seminal contribution, a paper entitled "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine."

Combining their ideas, they "crammed their dormitory room with cheap computers" and tested their new search engine designs on the web. Their project grew quickly enough "to cause problems for Stanford's computing infrastructure." But they realized they had succeeded in creating a superior engine for searching the web and suspended their PhD studies to work more on their system.

As Larry Malseed wrote, "Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park.

[soon after], Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money."

In 2003, both Brin and Page received an honorary MIA from IE Business School "for embodying the entrepreneurial spirit and lending momentum to the creation of new businesses...". And in 2004, they received the Marconi Foundation Prize, the "Highest Award in Engineering," and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University. "In announcing their selection, John Jay Iselin, the Foundation's president, congratulated the two men for their invention that has fundamentally changed the way information is retrieved today." They joined a "select cadre of 32 of the world's most influential communications technology pioneers..."

Jeff Bezos
Bezos' maternal ancestors were settlers who lived in Texas, and over the generations had acquired a 25,000 acre (101 km² or 39 miles²) ranch in Cotulla. Bezos' maternal grandfather was a regional director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in Albuquerque. He retired early to the ranch, where Bezos spent most summers of his youth, working with his grandfather at the enormously varied tasks essential to the operation. At an early age, he displayed a striking mechanical aptitude. When a toddler, he tried dismantling his crib with a screwdriver.

Bezos was born when his mother, Jackie Bezos, was still in her teens. Her marriage to his father lasted little more than a year. She remarried when Bezos was five. Bezos' stepfather, Miguel Bezos, born in Cuba, emigrated to the United States alone at age 15 and worked his way through the University of Albuquerque. When he married Bezos' mother, the family moved to Houston, Texas, and Miguel Bezos became an engineer for Exxon. Bezos attended River Oaks Elementary in Houston from 4th to 6th grade.

Bezos showed intense and varied scientific interests at an early age. He rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room and maintain his privacy. He converted his parents' garage into a laboratory for his science projects. The family moved to Miami, Florida, where Bezos attended Miami Palmetto Senior High School. While in high school, he attended the Student Science Training Program at the University of Florida; which helped him receive a Silver Knight Award in 1982. He entered Princeton University, planning to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Bezos was awarded an honorary doctorate in Science and Technology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2008.

After graduating from Princeton, Bezos worked on Wall Street in the computer science field. Then he worked on building a network for international trade for a company known as Fitel. Then Bezos worked for Bankers Trust, becoming a vice-president. Later on he also worked in computer science for D. E. Shaw & Co. Bezos founded in 1994 after making a cross country drive from New York to Seattle, writing up the Amazon business plan on the way and setting up the original company in his garage. His work with Amazon eventually led him to become one of the most prominent dot-com entrepreneurs. In 2004, he founded a human spaceflight startup company called Blue Origin.