A village carpenter whose workshop burned down twice and who made toys because nobody was buying houses
Widowed with four sons during the Depression, he turned from building houses to carving wooden ducks and yo-yos in Billund, and named the little firm…
Trained as an architect on a construction site before turning around the company his family founded
After early jobs shovelling limestone and working on the factory floor of family businesses, he took charge of the loosely run Tata Group in 1991 and…
Grew up poor in segregated Baltimore and engineered the biggest leveraged buyout by a Black American
Raised in a working class Black family in segregated Baltimore, he became a Harvard-trained lawyer and financier and, in 1987, led the acquisition of…
Took over his father's failing firm at 21 and let the workers set their own pay and hours
He inherited a struggling Brazilian manufacturing company from his father in his early twenties and rebuilt it around radical workplace democracy,…
A draper’s apprentice who ran a cotton mill on the idea that workers were people, not parts
At New Lanark he cut hours, took young children out of the mill and put them in a school, and proved it could still make money. He then lost most of…
Walked out of Russia with no money, opened a furniture shop at 43 and worked until she was 103
Born near Minsk, she talked her way past a border guard in 1917 and reached Omaha, Nebraska. She opened Nebraska Furniture Mart with 500 dollars, was…
Went blind as a child, then founded Tibet's first school for blind children and trained social entrepreneurs
Blind from the age of twelve, she developed a Tibetan braille script, founded a pioneering school for blind children in Lhasa, and later built…
Built a fair trade fashion label from a home office because no one else would
After working on environmental and development issues in Japan, she founded People Tree in 1991 to prove that clothing made through fair trade with…
Built a resort town on empty Egyptian desert coast that investors thought had no water and no tourists
Against advice that a stretch of barren Red Sea coast could never support a town, he spent years drilling for fresh water and building infrastructure…
Cut the feet off a pair of tights, wrote her own patent and sold fax machines until Spanx took off
After failing the law school entrance exam twice she spent seven years selling fax machines door to door. With 5,000 dollars of savings and a product…
A widow with little business experience who took over a steel empire and made it bigger
When her husband, the founder of the Jindal steel and power group, died suddenly in a helicopter crash in 2005, she stepped in as chairperson at…
A street vendor in Rio who became Brazil's best known media and retail entrepreneur
Born to a poor family of Greek Jewish immigrants, he sold goods on the streets of Rio de Janeiro as a boy before becoming a travelling salesman and…
A blacksmith’s son whose factory was bombed, flattened by an earthquake and sold, and who started again
He failed his first piston-ring contract with Toyota, lost his works to bombs and an earthquake, and in 1946 bolted surplus engines to bicycles in a…
Fought his own government for five years to be allowed to build a mobile network
Refused a licence to launch a mobile phone company in Zimbabwe, he took the state to court and won a landmark ruling that its monopoly was…
Grew his mother's one-room Dubai school into the world's largest private education company
Born to Indian immigrant parents in Dubai, he took over the small school his mother had founded for expatriate children and built it into GEMS…
A Leicester preacher who organised one train trip and invented the package holiday
A cabinet-maker and temperance campaigner, he chartered a train in 1841 to take 500 people eleven miles to a rally, and from that single excursion…
Moved his mills out of the Bradford smoke and built a whole town for his workers
Having made a fortune spinning alpaca wool that others had given up on, he spent much of it building Saltaire, a village with decent houses, a…
A cobbler's son who mechanised shoemaking and built an entire town around his factory
Starting a small family shoe workshop with his siblings and almost no capital, he rebuilt it after early failure using American mass-production…
Bought a struggling Nigerian bank and later pledged to fund ten thousand African entrepreneurs
The son of a civil servant, he built a career in Nigerian banking, led the turnaround and expansion of United Bank for Africa across the continent,…
A slum missionary who built Japan's cooperative movement out of famine relief and factory strikes
Orphaned young and disowned by his family for converting to Christianity, he lived for years in the Kobe slums, organised Japan's early labour unions…
Posted to a dairy job he did not want, he turned India into the world’s largest milk producer
A mechanical engineer who knew nothing about cows was posted to a government creamery in Gujarat to work off a scholarship. He stayed for the rest of…
Grew up in an orphanage and a slum, then built a haircutting method into a global brand
Raised in poverty in London and placed in a Jewish orphanage for years when his family could not support him, he trained as a hairdresser and turned…
Arrived from Delhi with almost nothing and helped start the company that shaped the personal computer
He came to America for graduate study with very little money, co-founded Sun Microsystems in his twenties, and later became one of Silicon Valley's…
Spent decades as his brother's overworked, underpaid assistant before building his own cereal company
After years working long hours for low pay as a broom salesman and then as his physician brother's assistant, he broke away in his forties to found…
