ABSTRACT
All the great business builders we know of – from the Medici of Renaissance Florence and the founders of the Bank of England in the late seventeenth century down to IBM’s Thomas Watson in our day – had a clear theory of the business which informed all their actions and decisions. Not intuition, but a clear, simple and penetrating theory of the business characterizes the truly successful entrepreneur, the person who not just amasses a large fortune but builds an organization that can endure and grow.
