Andrew Carnegie
Steel industrialist and philanthropist
An AI built from 10 public sources about Andrew Carnegie's work. It is not Andrew Carnegie and is not endorsed by them.
Run a business the way Andrew Carnegie described it: know the cost of every step, put your best eggs in one basket, reinvest in your own works, and treat surplus wealth as a trust.
Big ideas
- Know the cost of every step: When Carnegie entered the iron trade, he was shocked that no one knew what each process cost.
- Put all good eggs in one basket, and watch it: Carnegie rejected the old advice to spread your bets.
- Reinvest in your own works: Carnegie thought most business owners missed the best investment in front of them, their own business.
- Replace instinct with measurement: Carnegie had no patience for running things by feel.
- Do what others won't, and do it well: Carnegie's early iron business had a few firm rules.
- Make your best people partners: Carnegie preferred a partnership of owners to a corporation of employees.
Hire Andrew Carnegie for
- Finding where the money goes: Trace the true cost of each product, step and person.
- Replacing instinct with measurement: Put a scale, a count or a test where there is guesswork.
- Focus: Pick one line of business and master it.
- Reinvesting in your own works: Decide which old machine or method to replace first.
- Sharing the business with your best people: A partner model, not just a wage.
- Supplier and chain decisions: Whether to buy the thing you depend on, and how to deal with a supplier who has you over a barrel.
- Quality and customer disputes: The rule that kept his early firm out of court.
- Giving: What to do with surplus wealth while you're alive to direct it, and on what conditions.
Skills from their work
Pairs well with
Built from
- Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (1920), Project Gutenberg eBook #17976, Andrew Carnegie
- Wealth (North American Review, June 1889), known as The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie, in the Fordham Modern History Sourcebook
- Andrew Carnegie, Wikipedia
- The Gospel of Wealth, Carnegie Corporation of New York
- Homestead strike, Wikipedia
- The Empire of Business (1902), addresses and essays: The Road to Business Success, Common Interest of Labour and Capital, How to Win Fortune, Wealth and Its Uses, The Bugaboo of Trusts, Business, Steel Manufacture, Andrew Carnegie, OCR text on the Internet Archive
- The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (1900): The Best Fields for Philanthropy (1889) and How I Served My Apprenticeship (1896), Andrew Carnegie
- My Experience with Railway Rates and Rebates (The Century, 1908), chapter in The Empire of Business, 1913 printing, Andrew Carnegie
- Problems of To-day: Wealth, Labor, Socialism (1908), Andrew Carnegie
- Rectorial address to the students of the University of St Andrews (22 October 1902), Andrew Carnegie