One of the best things about this book is that Rockefeller is constantly talking about the way that him and his partners built their business and he would compare and contrast the methods that they would use compared to some of his quote unquote Un intelligent competition which is the word and the phrase

that he uses and his description of unintelligent competition was the type of person who never

really knew all the facts about their own business,

that they kept their books in such a way

that they did not actually know

when they were making money or when they were losing money.

And he has a great phrase for this

where he says, this casual way of conducting affairs did not

appeal to me and even when years before he found it standard oil when he was

working for other people when he was 16 years old he said I learned to have great respect for

figures and facts no matter how small they were.

The importance that Rockefeller put on cost control jumps off the pages and he repeats it over and over and over again.

This obsession with cost control is something that Rockefeller had in common with Andrew

Carnegie. In fact, Andrew Carnegie is mentioned multiple times in Rockefeller's

autobiography. There's a great line in one of Carnegie's biographies that I read that said.

Carnegie would repeat this mantra time and time again.

Profits and prices are cyclical subject to any number of transient forces of the marketplace.

Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and in

Carnegie's view, any savings achieved in costs were permanent. This shared obsession is something

that I was talking about with my friend Eric who's the co-founder and

CEO of RAMP. RAMP is now a partner of this podcast. I've gotten to know all the

co-founders of RAMP and have spent a ton of time with them over the last year or two.

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