Buch, Englisch, 463 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 916 g
Buch, Englisch, 463 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 916 g
ISBN: 978-0-262-19276-7
Verlag: Penguin Random House LLC
Cecil and Ida Green made a fortune almost by chance. In 1941 they bought a quarter
share of a faltering oil exploration company; government contracts during the war led to the
creation of a small instrumentation division that became Texas Instruments. In 1954 scientists at
Texas Instruments created the first silicon transistor, and the rest is history. What is remarkable
about the Greens, however, was their joint decision to share the fruits of their success as widely
as possible. Their donations of more than $150 million have left an indelible mark on American
scientific and medical education. This warm, anecdotal biography by the Greens' longtime friend, MIT
geologist Robert Shrock reveals the human impulses that led to their success, the unique combination
of the analytical and the personal that they brought to their business decisions and to their
investments in humanity's future. Shrock describes the early years of the Greens' life together in
and around Texas, exploring for subsurface structures possibly containing oil and gas: fifteen years
of hard field work followed by ten years as geophysical entrepreneurs. He follows the transformation
of their first acquisition, a risky geophysical venture, into the wildly successful Texas
Instruments. Their fortune made, Shrock details the decades in which the Greens imaginatively shared
their wealth - funding academic buildings, hospitals, health care centers, libraries and other civic
buildings; endowing professorships, fellowships, and scholarships in ten different schools and
research institutions; assisting in founding two new colleges - at the University of Texas at Dallas
and at Oxford - and an innovative educational audio-visual TV network in Dallas. In choosing their
grantees, Shrock notes, they applied exactly those analytical skills that had paid off in business
decisions: the Greens could be as hard-nosed in dealing with the cost-benefit aspects of
redistributing wealth as in amassing it. At the same time their approach was always intensely
personal and direct.
