The ability to scale up business is a defining quality of successful innovators. Early in his 40-year tenure leading Suzuki Motor, Osamu Suzuki established the company’s stake in India’s car market—which eventually grew to 40 percent. Profits generated from that market remain an integral part of Suzuki’s global annual revenues.
Cablevision founder Charles Dolan expanded his company’s customer base by creating Home Box Office. This paid-programming alternative with myriad entertainment options offered something that viewers in areas with good, free TV reception couldn’t get elsewhere at the time.
Surgeon Albert Starr teamed up with hydraulics engineer Lowell Edwards to apply the same mechanism used in fuel pumps to the human heart. The duo’s ability to replicate that functionality produced the first successful artificial heart valve. Today, roughly 800,000 Starr-Edwards valves have been implanted worldwide, preserving lives and hope.
Osamu Suzuki
Suzuki Motor chief seized a big opportunity in India
Bigger rivals were preoccupied with other parts of the world in the early 1980s when Osamu Suzuki spotted a chance for his Japan-based company to grab a large part of India’s fast-growing car market. The joint venture he set up with India’s Maruti Udyog launched the Maruti 800, a huge success known as the “people’s car.” In recent years, Suzuki Motor has garnered more than 40 percent of the Indian market. Osamu Suzuki led the company for more than four decades and often flew economy class as part of his focus on cost control. Suzuki Motor remains known globally for small cars and motorcycles. “Being small is a really good thing,” the company’s longtime leader said. “A diamond sparkles even if it is small.”
Wall Street JournalNew York TimesCharles Dolan
Cable TV pioneer multiplied home entertainment options
In the early 1960s, most Americans got their TV signals for free, through rooftop antennas. Cable TV was for rural areas. Dolan saw big potential where others had missed it. He wired up lower Manhattan for cable in the mid-1960s and went on to create Cablevision Systems, Home Box Office, and AMC Networks. Those businesses eventually spawned such hit shows as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Sex and the City. Dolan also owned professional sports teams, Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, and the Long Island newspaper Newsday. He donated to educational causes and supported pancreatic cancer research. He was not wedded to any form of delivering entertainment. Cable is “a wonderful technology,” he said in 1988. “But as soon as it’s obsolete, junk it; let’s go on to the next one.”
Wall Street JournalWashington PostPehr Gyllenhammar
Volvo chief executive placed emphasis on safety
Other automakers aimed to produce the most stylish cars. Gyllenhammar managed to make Volvo famous for safety, which had a strong appeal to many buyers of station wagons. The Swedish executive also nurtured better relations with workers. He reorganized car production lines so that workers could see what they were making rather than being confined to a single repetitive task. He drove himself to work rather than hiring a chauffeur and argued that many CEOs were overpaid. For nine years in a row, he was voted Sweden’s most admired man. After running Volvo for more than 20 years, he headed the British insurer Aviva and saved the London Philharmonic Orchestra from bankruptcy. He wrote seven books, including I Believe in Sweden and Character Is Destiny.
Times of LondonGlobe and MailÁngela Álvarez
At 95, she won a Latin Grammy Award for best new artist
At family gatherings, she always sang. The Cuban-born Álvarez, who resettled in the United States, had given up her childhood dreams of becoming a star. She raised four children and, to make ends meet, picked tomatoes and cleaned houses. Then, in 2009, one of her grandsons offered to record her singing some of the many songs she wrote, more or less as a diary of her life. Those songs became an album, released in 2021. The next year she was astounded to learn she had won a Grammy. “Although life is difficult, there is always a way out, and with faith and love you can achieve it, I promise you,” Álvarez said. “It’s never too late.”
New York TimesWashington PostAlbert Starr
Surgeon co-invented an artificial heart valve and saved hundreds of thousands of lives
In the late 1950s, there was little doctors could do for heart patients with mitral valve disease. Starr was determined to save them. Since the heart is a pump, he collaborated with a retired hydraulic engineer, Lowell Edwards. In 1960, they introduced and implanted their artificial heart valve. Since then, the valve has been implanted in more than 800,000 people across the globe. Some people have lived more than 40 years with the device. Starr was a jazz pianist and a US Army surgeon in the Korean War before making his name as an inventor. In 1985, he performed Oregon’s first heart transplant. He was honored with a Lasker Award and a Grand Prix Scientifique.
Oregon Health & Science UniversityOregonianCarole Wilbourn
Therapist put confounding house cats on the couch
Why do cats shred sofa covers, gnaw on electrical wires, sulk, or refuse to eat? Wilbourn wanted to know, so she became a self-taught cat therapist in Manhattan, charging $400 for house calls—a career that lasted 50 years. For some cats, she prescribed catnip or Valium, and for others, soothing classical music or a second cat, for company. Wilbourn wrote six books, including Cats on the Couch and The Inner Cat. “When cats act up, they are trying to tell us about their distress,” she said. Wilbourn also diagnosed the humans’ neuroses, noting that they could be destabilizing the cat.
New York TimesWall Street Journal‘When cats act up, they are trying to tell us about their distress,’ she said.
Abigail McGrath
Aspiring actor cofounded the cherished Off Center Theater
Her CV was all over the map. A poet’s daughter, she wrote advertising copy, ran a coat check concession at New York’s Village Vanguard, sold box lunches in Central Park, and submerged herself in a sudsy Andy Warhol film, Tub Girls. McGrath’s most lasting contribution to New York, however, was the Off Center Theater, which she cofounded with Anthony McGrath, whom she would eventually marry. The theater had no fixed address and sometimes performed outdoors for children. It made a mark with such productions as Cinderella, in which finding a prince failed to leave a young woman happy ever after. “Just as children need sunshine and parks and schools and libraries,” McGrath said, “so they need the theater.” She later opened Renaissance House, a refuge for artists on Martha’s Vineyard.
New York TimesPlaybillWilliam Labov
Linguist mapped the profusion of American accents and dialects
The best places to study linguistics, he found, included taverns, street corners, and front porches. Labov, acclaimed as one of the most important linguists of the 20th century, roamed the nation with his tape recorder, searching for quirks of speech. He applied statistical analysis to the way people talk—and how and why that varies over time and from one neighborhood to the next. People speaking nonstandard English were following logical rules of their own, he found, and those were no more arbitrary than the ones taught in schools. As a witness in a lawsuit against schools, Labov defended students who had been declared mentally challenged because of their Black vernacular dialect. He wanted the schools to adapt their teaching methods to these students’ needs. His many honors included the Benjamin Franklin Medal from the Franklin Institute.
New York TimesPhiladelphia InquirerCharles Person
Civil rights campaigner joined Freedom Riders to desegregate buses
He was 18 years old, mild mannered, and weighed just 126 pounds. Person was the youngest of the 13 original Freedom Riders, Black and White protesters who traveled into the Deep South in 1961 to protest segregation on interstate bus lines. White mobs firebombed their bus and attacked the protesters with bats and pipes. Person suffered back and neck injuries that tormented him for decades. The Riders’ courage sparked more protests, leading to a federal crackdown on segregation. Person later served in the Marine Corps and became an electronics technician. In 2020, he cofounded the Freedom Riders Training Academy to “teach people how to protest legally, effectively, peacefully,” as he put it. Lauded as a hero, Person said he had been too young to be scared. “The movement was bigger than I was,” he said. “It was not about me.”
Washington PostUSA TodayLouis Schittly
French physician saved lives in war zones and cofounded Doctors Without Borders
His homeland, the Alsace region of France, had been ravaged by war; Schittly remembered that when he traveled to Nigeria, Vietnam, and other places where fighting left far too many wounds for local doctors to treat. He and Bernard Kouchner were among the French doctors who volunteered in southeastern Nigeria during a civil war in the late 1960s. They later joined others in forming Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, an aid group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for its work in more than 80 countries. After retiring from international missions, Schittly practiced medicine and raised rabbits in Alsace. He wrote books about his rural boyhood in Alsace and his experiences in war zones.
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