Do not mock the lack of beauty in another mans wife, because, as the saying goes 'Beauty is in the eye of the beholder'.Beauty is both absolute and relative.It is absolute in that men are sexually attracted to women and vice versa.It is relative in that men are sexually attracted to either masculine women or feminine women, depending on their own personal preference.For instance Chopin[LINK] who was rather feminine (he had a feminine digit ratio) was sexually attracted to George Sands[LINK] who was rather masculine.This shows that sexual attraction is both absolute (a man was attracted to a woman) and also relative (a feminine man was attracted to a masculine woman).It is important to remember this so that we do not mock what other men find attractive, because each man is different.Respect is the key here.Just because one man prefers a large-jawed & flat-chested woman to a 'hot' brunette 36DD cheerleader doesn't make him any less of a man.
This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.
Henry Bessemer
Henry Bessemer was born on January 19, 1813 in Charlton, Hertfordshire, England. Bessemer developed the first process for mass-producing steel inexpensively. The dominant steel manufacturing technology of today is an extension and refinement of the one developed by Bessemer.
Bessemer, the son of an engineer and typefounder, demonstrated considerable mechanical skill and inventiveness early in life. He made his first fortune selling "gold" powder made from brass as a paint additive. Bessemer's secret formula was used to adorn much of the gilded decoration of his time, and brought him great wealth.
In October, 1855, Bessemer took out a patent for his process of rendering cast iron malleable by the introduction of air into the fluid metal to remove carbon. Bessemer's industrial process was similar to a Chinese method to refine iron into steel, developed in the second century BCE. They called this process the "hundred refinings method" since they repeated the process 100 times.
The story of Bessemer's steel process is a classic example of the military's impetus to technological development. During the Crimean War Bessemer invented a new type of artillery shell. The Generals reported that the cast-iron cannon of the time were not strong enough to deal with the forces of the more powerful shell. Bessemer then developed an improved iron smelting process that produced large quantities of ingots of superior quality. Modern steel is made using technology based on Bessemer's process. Much of the modern industrial age has built upon steel created for cannon of war.
Among the many honors of Bessemer's life were a Knighthood by the British crown for devising a counterfeit-proof official stamp (seal) for the British government, and the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Bessemer died in London on March 14, 1898.
I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem inasmuch as I had no fixed ideas derived from long- established practice to control and bias my mind, and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.
Manufacturing steel at a reduced cost has allowed the modern world to come into existence. Despite all the high-tech, electronics and biological industries it's still called the 'iron age', because iron (and steel) is one the more important materials that the world is dependent on. Henry Bessemer is just one of the men that allowed this world to develop by allowing the material to become so widely available that it can be purchased for a pittance: the Bessemer Process had allowed steel rails to be manufactured for $32/tonne instead of $170/tonne (Source).
Check out some of the other entries from the 'Men of Yore' series:
This is one in a series of very short posts containing snippets from the Havamal text (which can be found in full here - http://www.beyondweird.com/high-one.html).
Why post snippets of an old pagan text here, in a blog that's supposedly about the Androsphere? I’m posting them because they contain helpful everyday advice that is applicable in the modern world e.g. being aware of your surrounding environment, drinking alcohol responsibly, how to score with women. And for many of us, it is part of our heritage that goes back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) beliefs that stretch back 4000 years or more.
Christianity offers the only dominant philosophical view points in the Androsphere, represented by bloggers like Free Northerner and Simon Grey. Christianity, and indeed the other monotheisms from the region draw, from the mythologies of the PIE culture. For instance Noah s flood is a replication of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of the Angels rebelling against God in the bible is just a copy of the Giants rebelling against the Gods, which is present in both the Greek and Norse religious traditions, as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in the eighteenth century.
The downfall of the Titans, whom Zeus hurls into the underworld, seems to be the same story as the downfall of the angels who rebelled against Jehovah.
The story of Idomeneus, who sacrificed his son ex voto, and that of Jephtha is essentially the same
Can it be that the root of the Gothic and the Greek language lies in Sanskrit, so there is an older mythology from whith the Greek and Jewish mythologies derive? If you cared to give scope to your imangination you could even adduce that the twofold-long long in which Zeus begot Heracles on Alcmene came about because further east Joshua at Jericho told the sun to stand stil. Zeus and Jehovah were thus assisting one another: for the gods of Heaven are, like those of earth, always secretly in alliance. But how innocent ws the pastime of Father Zeus compared with the bloodthirsty activities of Jehovah and his chosen brigands. {page 220}
Source: Schopenhauer A. (2004), 'Essays and Aphorisms' (Hollingdale translation), London, Penguin.
So, instead of offering you snippets of second-hand wisdom from the Bible, I will offer you snippets of first-hand wisdom from the (probably) older and much more concise Havamal text (roughly 5,000 words compared to the 190,000 words of the New Testament).
My own comments are in italics.
Compliments can get you many places with a woman, even if they are untruthful compliments.Possibly because women place higher value on their own status than they do on truth.
[Pre-amble: This is one in a series of posts which includes an alternative set of lyrics to a well known song.Each post will also contain a short introduction to the topic at hand, and a brief explanation of the song itself.A video of the original song will be included so that the reader can listen to the original song while reciting the alternative lyrics at the same time.]
The Song: My Lord of the Chetknik (based on 'Dookie' by Green Day)
I wrote this song after reading articles on the Chetniks and the Voivoides (written by a former eradica.wordpress.com author), so credit to Conchobar (wherever he is) for providing the inspiration for this song.
When the government doesn't care about your welfare then turn to people who you can trust.This applies to first world countries as much as second or third world ones.For instance during the 2011 London Riots some of the citizens grouped together to defend themselvesbecause the police wouldn't help.The police, who have riot gear and water cannons for attacking peaceful white protestors, didn't give a shit about non-whites looting and burning the capital city.While police in small towns or rural environments might behave differently - more just and even handedly, it seems like police from metropolitan areas are more oriented towards poltitical than justice.
Play the song in the video above and sing along using the lyrics below.
# My Lord of the Chetknik #
I am a peasant in a village that is occupied.
We've been occupied for 'bout three years or more.
There is nothing that we can do,
About the verminous invaders who,
Invaded our town and stole our food,
and fucked our women.
Here's my Lord of the Chetnik,
To call on me to help him kick,
These fucking invaders off our land.
And give them shit.
These invaders take liberties with fucking everything,
And yet there is nothing that we can do.
Because we have no firearms.
Guns were banned by the government.
So here we are with no fire-arms,
And unable to fight back.
Here's my Lord of the Chetnik,
To call on me to help him kick,
These fucking invaders off our land.
And give them shit.
Heroes of our mighty nation.
Are the Chetniks no question.
How long till we see the destruction,
Of the invader nation?
I sit around and watch the tube but no ones coming,
to save our village from the invaders.
Our government doesn't give a shit,
About its citizens it should protect.
When we have no-one to protect we should turn to the Chetniks.
Men who are either infatuated with women (like PUAs/Don Juan) or in awe of them (White Knights) will often lie to a woman in order to please them.The reasons may dfifer - the PUA lies to get the woman to sleep with him, while the White Knight lies because he doesn't want to 'upset' the woman, but the two different types of men still prefer lies to truth, even if the woman would benefit from hearing the cold truth (eg "Yes you are overweight", "Yes your bum does look big in that.", "No I don't think you need another pair of shoes.").In a perfect world men would tell women the truth more often than they don't, but unfortunately women quite often like hearing lies, so until women change their minds and begin to accept truths then the lies will continue.
This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.
David Thompson
Thompson was born in London in 1770. His father died when he was two, leaving his mother to raise him. At age seven Thompson entered a London charity school. There he studied mathematics, hoping to enter the British navy. The 1783 Treaty of Paris resolved the conflict among the United States, France and Britain, which resulted in the reduced need for naval recruits; therefore, the school instead apprenticed Thompson to the Hudson's Bay Company as a clerk. He left London in 1784 at the age of 14, bound for Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay. For the next three years Thompson served as a clerk at various posts on Hudson Bay. Then, in 1787 the company sent him inland to Cumberland House in what is now Saskatchewan. Thompson began to map the surrounding area in 1789 and two years later received informal training in astronomy from Phillip Torner, a Hudson's Bay Company surveyor. In 1799 Thompson married Charlotte Small. He was twenty-nine. She was the fourteen year old daughter of an Indian woman and North West Company partner. The two had thirteen children.
From 1793 to 1796, Thompson surveyed northern Saskatchewan. In 1796, the Hudson's Bay Company asked Thompson to stop surveying and dedicate more energy to procuring furs. As his third term of service with the company expired in 1797, Thompson joined the rival North West Company. Over the next two years, he explored present day Manitoba and Saskatchewan, traveling as far south as the source of the Mississippi and the Mandan villages on the Missouri. Over the course of the next twelve years (1799-1811), Thompson explored the Rocky Mountains, establishing a new route to Lake Athabasca and two new routes over the Rocky Mountains. He also surveyed the Columbia River from its source in present day British Columbia to its mouth on the Pacific coast. Thompson had hoped to establish a fur post at the mouth of the river, securing the first navigable route between Lake Athabasca and the Pacific Ocean, but he found that John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company had already established Fort Astoria.
Thompson returned east in 1812, settling near Montreal. In 1814 he delivered a map of western Canada to the North West Company. From 1816 to 1826, Thompson served as a member of the boundary commission surveying the international border south of Ontario. In 1843, he published two additional maps of the Northwest. Between 1846 and 1850, Thompson wrote an account of his travels. He died in 1857 having covered some 80,000 miles on foot, on horseback and by canoe in sixty years of exploring and surveying.
Source: http://www.ohs.org/the-oregon-history-project/biographies/David-Thompson.cfm
Appearance and Personality
In 1820, the Englishgeologist, John Jeremiah Bigsby, attended a dinner party given by The Hon. William McGillivray at his home, Chateau St. Antoine, one of the early estates in Montreal's Golden Square Mile. He describes the party and some of the guests in his entertaining book The Shoe and Canoe, giving an excellent description of David Thompson: I was well placed at table between one of the Miss McGillivray's and a singular-looking person of about fifty. He was plainly dressed, quiet, and observant. His figure was short and compact, and his black hair was worn long all round, and cut square, as if by one stroke of the shears, just above the eyebrows. His complexion was of the gardener's ruddy brown, while the expression of his deeply-furrowed features was friendly and intelligent, but his cut-short nose gave him an odd look. His speech betrayed the Welshman, although he left his native hills when very young. I might have been spared this description of Mr David Thompson by saying he greatly resembled Curran the IrishOrator... I afterwards travelled much with him, and have now only to speak of him with great respect, or, I ought to say, with admiration... No living person possesses a tithe of his information respecting the Hudson's Bay countries... Never mind his Bunyan-like face and cropped hair; he has a very powerful mind, and a singular faculty of picture-making. He can create a wilderness and people it with warring savages, or climb the Rocky Mountains with you in a snow-storm, so clearly and palpably, that only shut your eyes and you hear the crack of the rifle, or feel the snow-flakes melt on your cheeks as he talks.[8]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Thompson_(explorer)
This is the man that mapped Canada, without the aid of modern technology. If you want to travel anywhere, whether in the mental realm (eg music, maths, language etc) or the physical it first needs a man to go out and map it, to record all he see (senses) so that others can then traverse it for themselves. David Thompson is one of those men.
Check out some of the other entries from the 'Men of Yore' series:
This is one in a series of very short posts containing snippets from the Havamal text (which can be found in full here - http://www.beyondweird.com/high-one.html).
Why post snippets of an old pagan text here, in a blog that's supposedly about the Androsphere? I’m posting them because they contain helpful everyday advice that is applicable in the modern world e.g. being aware of your surrounding environment, drinking alcohol responsibly, how to score with women. And for many of us, it is part of our heritage that goes back to Proto-Indo-European (PIE) beliefs that stretch back 4000 years or more.
Christianity offers the only dominant philosophical view points in the Androsphere, represented by bloggers like Free Northerner and Simon Grey. Christianity, and indeed the other monotheisms from the region draw, from the mythologies of the PIE culture. For instance Noah s flood is a replication of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the story of the Angels rebelling against God in the bible is just a copy of the Giants rebelling against the Gods, which is present in both the Greek and Norse religious traditions, as Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out in the eighteenth century.
The downfall of the Titans, whom Zeus hurls into the underworld, seems to be the same story as the downfall of the angels who rebelled against Jehovah.
The story of Idomeneus, who sacrificed his son ex voto, and that of Jephtha is essentially the same
Can it be that the root of the Gothic and the Greek language lies in Sanskrit, so there is an older mythology from whith the Greek and Jewish mythologies derive? If you cared to give scope to your imangination you could even adduce that the twofold-long long in which Zeus begot Heracles on Alcmene came about because further east Joshua at Jericho told the sun to stand stil. Zeus and Jehovah were thus assisting one another: for the gods of Heaven are, like those of earth, always secretly in alliance. But how innocent ws the pastime of Father Zeus compared with the bloodthirsty activities of Jehovah and his chosen brigands. {page 220}
Source: Schopenhauer A. (2004), 'Essays and Aphorisms' (Hollingdale translation), London, Penguin.
So, instead of offering you snippets of second-hand wisdom from the Bible, I will offer you snippets of first-hand wisdom from the (probably) older and much more concise Havamal text (roughly 5,000 words compared to the 190,000 words of the New Testament).
If a man gets an hysterical, or bi-polar, or a compulsive lying woman for a girlfriend/wife, then he's in for a hard time.
[Pre-amble: This is one in a series of posts which includes an alternative set of lyrics to a well known song.Each post will also contain a short introduction to the topic at hand, and a brief explanation of the song itself.A video of the original song will be included so that the reader can listen to the original song while reciting the alternative lyrics at the same time.]
The Song: Shine On (Based on Shine On by House of Love)
This is a song about a story from Norse mythology, and involves just three characters (one of whom you know): Thor, Sif (a fertilitity goddess who is married to Thor, and is known for her golden hair), and Loki (a fire giant who is known as 'The Trickster' because, well, that's what he is!).
The story goes that one night, Loki, in a mischievous mood, decides to creep into Sifs house and cut her golden hair off.When Thor comes back home and finds out what has transgressed, he threatens to bash Loki with his hammer (Mjolnir) if Loki doesn't put the situation right.Loki listens to Thor and so pays a visit to some Dwarves (who are well known for being excellent craftsmen) who make a replacement wig for Sif, made of pure gold.Loki gives the wig to Sif, who takes it and puts it on.The wig then fuses with her head and becomes like her original hair, only golder and brighter. (A full re-telling can be found HERE.)
Loki from the Uppsala site.A fire-haired Loki displays his fire-minded ways.He is very much like fire: chaotic, on-edge, unpredictable, impetuous, dangerous yet also necessary.It's never a dull moment with Loki around!
I don't know what the moral of this story is.It depends whether you see Loki as 'a loveable rogue whose impetuousness gets him into sticky-situations', or as a 'cunning soul with far-sightedness that helps everyone'.If you see him as a 'loveable rogue' then his Mischief-Making is only childish fun.But if you see him as 'cunning' then you see his Mischief-Making in a completely different light.
Play the song and sing along with the lyrics given below.
This is another in a series of posts about men from history who have either achieved great things in one form or another by pushing boundaries: either in themselves or in society or science or exploration of some form. Boundary pushing and growth is what men do, it's their nature: to grow and push outwards. We, as men, are the frontiers men, the first to discover/uncover new territory, in a metaphysical sense (i.e. including both material and the immaterial) that is later colonised and 'civilised' by the rest of humanity.
Malcom MacLean
Malcolm P. McLean, a truck driver, fundamentally transformed the centuries-old shipping industry, an industry that had long decided that it had no incentive to change. By developing the first safe, reliable, and cost effective approach to transporting containerized cargo, McLean made a contribution to maritime trade so phenomenal that he has been compared to the father of the steam engine, Robert Fulton.
As a youth growing up on a farm in a small town of Maxton, North Carolina, McLean learned early on about the value of hard work and determination: His father was a farmer who also worked as a mail carrier to supplement the family's income. Even so, when young Malcolm graduated from high school in 1931, the country was in the midst of the Depression and further schooling was simply not an option. Pumping gas at a service station near his hometown, McLean saved enough money by 1934 to buy a second-hand truck for $120. This purchase set McLean on his lifelong career in the transportation industry.
McLean soon began hauling dirt, produce, and other odds and ends for the farming community in Maxton, where reliable transportation was hardly commonplace. Eventually, he purchased five additional trucks and hired a team of drivers, a move that enabled him to get off the road and look for new customers. For the next two years, his business thrived, but when poor economic conditions forced many of his newly won customers to withdraw their contracts, McLean scaled down his operation and got behind the wheel again.
Not just one trailer, or two of them, or five, or a dozen, but hundreds, on one ship.During this setback in his life, when he almost lost his business, McLean came across the idea that changed his destiny. The year was 1937, and McLean was delivering cotton bales from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to Hoboken, New Jersey. Arriving in Hoboken, McLean was forced to wait hours to unload his truck trailer. He recalled: "I had to wait most of the day to deliver the bales, sitting there in my truck, watching stevedores load other cargo. It struck me that I was looking at a lot of wasted time and money. I watched them take each crate off the truck and slip it into a sling, which would then lift the crate into the hold of the ship."1 It would be nineteen years before McLean converted his thought into a business proposition.
For the next decade and a half, Mclean concentrated on his trucking business, and by the early 1950s, with 1,776 trucks and thirty-seven transport terminals along the eastern seaboard, he had built his operation into the largest trucking fleet in the South and the fifth-largest in the country. As the trucking business matured, states adopted a new series of weight restrictions and levying fees. Truck trailers passing through multiple states could be fined for excessively heavy loads. It became a balancing act for truckers to haul as much weight as possible without triggering any fees. McLean knew that there must be a more efficient way to transport cargo, and his thoughts returned to the shipping vessels that ran along the U.S. coastline. He believed "that ships would be a cost effective way around shoreside weight restrictions . . . no tire, no chassis repairs, no drivers, no fuel costs . . . Just the trailer, free of its wheels. Free to be lifted unencumbered. And not just one trailer, or two of them, or five, or a dozen, but hundreds, on one ship."2 In many ways, McLean's vision was nothing new. As far back as 1929, Seatrain had carried railroad boxcars on its sea vessels to transport goods between New York and Cuba. In addition, it was not uncommon for ships to randomly carry large boxes on board, but no shipping business was dedicated to a systematic process of hauling boxed cargo.
Seeing the feasibility of these types of operations may have inspired McLean to take the concept to a new level. Transporting "containerized cargo" seemed to be a natural, cost-effective extension of his business. McLean initially envisioned his trucking fleet as an integral part of an extended transportation network. Instead of truckers traversing the eastern coastline, a few strategic trucking hubs in the South and North would function as end points, delivering and receiving goods at key port cities. The ship would be responsible for the majority of the travel—leaving the trucks to conduct short, mostly intrastate runs generally immune from levying fees.
He needed to convince lots of customers to rely less on his former business, trucking.With the concept in mind, McLean redesigned truck trailers into two parts—a truck bed on wheels and an independent box trailer, or container. He had not envisioned a Seatrain type of business, in which the boxcar is rolled onto the ship through the power of its own wheels. On the contrary, McLean saw several stackable trailers in the hull of the ship. The trailers would need to be constructed of heavy steel so that they could withstand rough seas and protect their contents. They would also have to be designed without permanent wheel attachments and would have to fit neatly in stacks. McLean patented a steel-reinforced corner-post structure, which allowed the trailers to be gripped for loading from their wheeled platforms and provided the strength needed for stacking. At the same time, McLean acquired the Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, which was based in Alabama and had shipping and docking rights in prime eastern port cities.
Buying Pan-Atlantic for $7 million, McLean noted that the acquisition would "permit us to proceed immediately with plans for construction of trailerships to supplement Pan-Atlantic's conventional cargo and passenger operations on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts."3 He believed that his strong trucking company, combined with newly redesigned cargo ships, would become a formidable force in the transportation industry. Commenting on McLean's controversial business plan, the Wall Street Journal reported: "One of the nation's oldest and sickest industries is embarking on a quiet attempt to cure some of its own ills. The patients are the operators of coastwise and intercoastal ships that carry dry cargoes."4 The cure, the article noted, was business operators like McLean who were breathing new life into the shipping industry.
Though McLean had resigned from the presidency of McLean Trucking and placed his ownership in trust, seven railroads accused him of violating the Interstate Commerce Act. The accusers attempted to block McLean from "establishing a coastwise sea-trailer transportation service."5 A section of the Interstate Commerce Act stated that it "was unlawful for anyone to take control or management in a common interest of two or more carriers without getting ICC's approval."6 Ultimately unable to secure ICC's endorsement, McLean was forced to choose between his ownership of his well-established trucking fleet or a speculative shipping venture. Though he had no experience in the shipping industry, McLean gave up everything he had worked for to bet on intermodal transportation. He sold his 75 percent interest in McLean Trucking for $6 million in 1955 and became the owner and president of Pan-Atlantic, which he renamed SeaLand Industries.
The maiden voyage for McLean's converted oil tanker, the Ideal X, carried fifty-eight new box trailers or containers from Port Newark, New Jersey, to Houston in April 1956. Industry followers, railroad authorities, and government officials watched the voyage closely. When the ship docked in Houston, it unloaded the containers onto trailer beds attached to non-McLean owned trucking fleets and its cargo was inspected. The contents were dry and secure. McLean's venture had passed its first hurdle, yet it was just one of many obstacles that he encountered. He needed to convince lots of customers to rely less on his former business, trucking. McLean also needed to persuade port authorities to redesign their dockyards to accommodate the lifting and storage of trailers, and he needed to rapidly expand the scope of his operations to ensure a steady and reliable revenue stream. Securing new clients proved the least difficult, since McLean's SeaLand service could transport goods at a 25 percent discount off the price of conventional travel, and it eliminated several steps in the transport process. In addition, since McLean's trailers were fully enclosed and secure, they were safe from pilferage and damage, which were considered costs of business in the traditional shipping industry. The safety of McLean's trailers also enabled customers to negotiate lower insurance rates for their cargo.
McLean's next challenge was convincing port authorities to redesign their sites to accommodate the new intermodal transport operation. Although he received his first big break with the backing of the New York Port Authority chairman, McLean continued to run into resistance. The tide did not change until the older ports witnessed the financial resurgence of port cities that had adopted containerization. His business got an additional boost when the Port of Oakland, California, invested $600,000 to build a new container-ship facility in the early 1960s, believing that the new facility would "revolutionize trade with Asia."7 To achieve the dramatic reductions in labor and dock servicing time, McLean was vigilant about standardization.The labor savings associated with McLean's intermodal transportation business was a major victory for shippers and port authorities, but it was a huge threat to entrenched dockside unions. The traditional break-bulk process of loading and unloading ships and trucks necessitated huge armies of shore workers. For some ports, the real threat to the industry was not McLean but other modes of transportation that were making ship transport obsolete. By endorsing McLean's business strategy, port officials believed that they were protecting the future of their business. If that meant fewer workers, so be it. They reasoned that it was better to have fewer workers in a prosperous enterprise than many in a declining one.
To achieve the dramatic reductions in labor and dock servicing time, McLean was vigilant about standardization. His efforts to increase efficiency resulted in standardized container designs that were awarded patent protection. Believing that standardization was also the path to overall industry growth, McLean chose to make his patents available by issuing a royalty-free lease to the Industrial Organization for Standardization (ISO).8 The move toward greater standardization helped broaden the possibilities for intermodal transportation. In less than fifteen years, McLean had built the largest cargo-shipping business in the world. By the end of the 1960s, McLean's SeaLand Industries had twenty-seven thousand trailer-type containers, thirty-six trailer ships, and access to over thirty port cities.9 With a top market position, SeaLand was an attractive acquisition candidate, and in 1969, R.J. Reynolds purchased the company for $160 million. When he set out to gamble on his idea of containerized cargo, McLean probably did not realize that he was revolutionizing an industry. McLean's vision gave the shipping industry the jolt that it needed to survive for the next fifty years. By the end of the century, container shipping was transporting approximately 90 percent of the world's trade cargo.10 Though we have coded McLean as a leader in our research, some of his approaches and characteristics have more of an entrepreneurial flavor. There is often a fine line between creation and reinvention, and though the lines sometimes blur, we have generally tended to cite individuals as leaders when their innovations help restructure or reinvent an industry rather than create an entirely new one. For this reason, we see McLean as a leader.
'If something needs doing then do it yourself' is a common phrase that can certainly apply to Malcom MacLean. The shipping industry had been using the same methods for loading and unloading ships for centuries and were badly in need of unpdating, yet no one was willing to do it, so he did. And what's more is that he had little experience in shipping and started off from a humble background, showing that you don't need to be born into an industry to excell at it. This streamlining and standardisation of the container industry has increased the efficiency of the entire world economy, which we all benefit from; that's quite a feat. Yet how often do we hear of men like Maclean? He also had the foresight to make the patent royalty free, which allowed the container revolution to really take off.
Check out some of the other entries from the 'Men of Yore' series:
I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with
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