Greatest American business leaders and entrepreneurs

Nitin Nohria, the current dean of Harvard Business School (HBS)in his JRD Tata Memorial Lecture, which he delivered in 2010, mentions about the following American leaders who form a part of the "Greatest business leaders" course being taught at HBS.Most of us are aware of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Jack Welch. To know more about the men who built the world's largest economy, read on. For the entire speech, click here



Andrew Carnegie, who at the turn of the 20th century built the steel mills that provided the raw material for the railroads and transportation infrastructure that connected America and made it the world’s largest integrated domestic economy.

CW Post, who during the 1910s and 1920s introduced Post Cereal and launched the consumer packaged goods industry in America

Walt Disney, who during the 1930s built one of the great media and entertainment companies, even though he started during the depths of the Great Depression

Henry Kaiser, who helped build the Hoover Dam and many other extraordinary infrastructure projects including a shipyard that, during the height of World War II, was completing three Liberty Ships every day.


William Levitt, who created Levittown, the first mass-produced postwar American suburb, in the 1950s and built houses that redefined the American real estate landscape;

Sam Walton, who started building one of the biggest discount retailing companies in the 1970s;

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, who ushered in the personal computer revolution in the 1980s;

Jack Welch, who transformed GE during the 1990s so that it remained an iconic company, and the only company that was on the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the entire 20th century.