The wealthiest Americans donate, on average, 1.3 percent of their income to charity the poorest give about 3.2 percent. As he says in the book, donating money is easy getting involved and making a difference is hard. It doesn’t require a fortune to make a big change to a community. With candour and clear writing, Marcus outlines his belief that the skills needed to build a Fortune 500 company are the same ones that can find a cure for cancer. He went on to establish charitable foundations for children, Jewish charities, war veterans, medical research, and free enterprise. The remarkable success made Bernie Marcus one of the country’s best-known entrepreneurs. Home Depot went public in 1981, and now employs about 500,000 people at 2,300 stores. The first day went so badly that Marcus’s wife wouldn’t let him shave because she didn’t want a razor in his hands.ĭespite the dire beginnings, the three partners grew the company into the world’s largest home improvement retailer - and put DIY into the hands of ordinary Americans. The pair teamed up with Ken Langone to launch a new hardware store: Home Depot. ![]() At the age of 49, Marcus was fired, as was fellow employee Arthur Blank. He couldn’t afford tuition fees, but later, using money he had earned and saved, he went to Rutgers University and qualified as a pharmacist.īut Marcus found himself more interested in the world of retail, and worked for a cosmetics company before becoming CEO of New Jersey home improvement store Handy Dan (now defunct). Bernie, meanwhile, wanted to become a doctor. In 1948, Marcus senior insisted that Bernie labour on a dairy farm he thought the work would be good for him. He even worked as a comedian and hypnotist in the Catskills. By the age of 15, he had chalked up a string of jobs - scrubbing toilets and working at a bowling alley - and joined a street gang. The youngest of four children, Bernie Marcus spent a tough childhood in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a cabinetmaker and his mother a garment worker (who survived the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a dark moment in US industrial history). Marcus’s parents fled the poverty and pogroms of Russia to make a new life in the US, via Ellis Island. Ron Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University, commented: “Bernie is living proof of the power of not only doing it yourself, but also of giving back - and Kick Up Some Dust embodies this ethos.” The Financial Times described it as an extraordinary story that tells his version of the American Dream from tenement to boardroom, “homespun into lessons for readers wanting to make it in business or philanthropy”. Atlanta’s Jewish Times called Marcus’s book a call to think big and change the world. Kick Up Some Dust is particularly relevant in today’s uncertain and self-obsessed world. He carried chin-first chutzpah into every challenge, refusing to accept what life threw at him and creating a lasting legacy through his philanthropic work. ![]() ![]() ![]() With the rear-view mirror of hindsight, Marcus can be seen as an archetypal disrupter - an outlier who took on, and shook up, the old-school hardware retail industry in 1970s America. Like a wild mustang in a corral, Bernie Marcus has certainly kicked up some dust - and the in-your-face title of his autobiography shows his position as a champion of disruption.įor a Jewish immigrant in the Bronx, turning differences into advantages is a pretty impressive achievement. The life and times of entrepreneur Bernie Marcus, and the message that yes, we can all make a difference. Book Review: Kick Up Some Dust by Bernie Marcus
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