Autobiography
I grew up in the shadow of many of Carnegie’s legacies – every time I travel to downtown Pittsburgh, I cross the bridges that define the city both in urban landscape as well as in historic industry. Carnegie’s autobiography describes his humble start from Dunfermline, Scotland, moving to the New World, working as a telegraph boy, getting his start in Pennsylvania Railroad, and then to managing his own business first in iron and then steel. Carnegie’s personality, from what I can tell in the stories he tell, is practical and diligent, owing so much to his having to scrape by during his childhood. I thoroughly enjoyed the stories he told of his youth, of his roots and of his early business and work adventures; though, the last quarter of the work is somewhat dry since it deals with his work as an influential society man and his later life friends, and it was more reminiscing than educating.
The idea of wages has been contentious in capitalism – Marx would contend that the gap between a laborer’s wage and value, which the capitalists take to be operating profit, is theft. Because wage is heavily determined by the lowest price a laborer is willing to put up for the job (equivalently the lowest cost of replacing said laborer), capital has incentive to keep wage low, hence the ubiquitous war between capital and labor. Carnegie had a clever system to make labor and capital cooperate. He called it the sliding scale wage, and it functions somewhat similarly to stock equity: when the steel prices were doing well, the laborers would get paid proportionately more on top of some minimum set wage, but if the company struggles, the workers get paid proportionately less. It offers the motivation of stock equity without giving up decision-making power nor causing dilution, and its secret is in not fully reinvesting all profit, but instead giving some back in the form of a proportional dividend to workers. I’m not very sure why this sliding scale wage idea isn’t more prevalent today; if it unites workers and management and is set up fairly, this should be a smarter and fairer wage system than hourly wage which incentivizes slacking off during work hours.
% grep -i "autobiography" quotes.txt14 matches
on peacemaking
“If you wish to play peace-maker, seat adversaries next each other where they must begin by playing civil”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on serendipity
“Upon trifles the best gifts of the gods often hang”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on trifles
“Men of action should learn to laugh at and enjoy small annoyances, or they themselves may become ‘small’”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on speaking
“Make yourself perfectly at home before your audience, and simply talk to them”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on recognition
“I believe the best preventive to quarrels to be the recognition of, and sincere interest in, the men, satisfying them that you really care for them and that you rejoice in their success”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on punishment
“Only experience teaches the supreme force of gentleness. Light but certain punishment, when necessary, is most effective. Severe punishments are not needed and a judicious pardon, for the first offense at least, is often best of all”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on others
“My success is not to be attributed to what I have known or done myself, but to the faculty of knowing and choosing others who did know better than myself”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on focus
“Nothing tells in the long run like good judgment, and no sound judgment can remain with the man whose mind is disturbed by the mercurial changes of the Stock Exchange”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on reputation
“It is essential to permanent success that a house should obtain a reputation for being governed by what is fair rather than what is legal”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on negotiation
“When one party to a bargain becomes excited, the other should keep cool and patient”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on hubris
“The losses men encounter during a business life which seriously embarrass them are rarely in their own business, but in enterprises of which the investor is not master”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on individual liability
“You may give money freely when you have a surplus, but your name never – neither as an endorser nor as a member of a corporation with individual liability”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on endorsement backings
“The businessman has no rock more dangerous to encounter in his career than this very one of endorsing commercial paper. It can easily be avoided if he asks himself 2 questions: Have I surplus means for all possible requirements which will enable me to pay without inconvenience the utmost sum for which I am liable under this endorsement? Secondly: Am I willing to lose this sum for the friend for whom I endorse?”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography
on damnation
“Eternal punishment, because of a few years’ shortcomings here on earth, would be the reverse of Godlike. Satan himself would recoil from it”
— Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography