Super-successful business people tend to be brilliant, hard working, optimistic. And a subset of the super-successful – the special and few ones – also are generous, humble and strive to empower others.
Los Angeles lost one of those special few July 29 when John E. Anderson died at age 93.
Anderson was born in Minneapolis to a barber and an immigrant mother who had spent time in an orphanage. He came here in 1936 during the Great Depression to attend UCLA on a hockey scholarship. From those humble beginnings, he ended up a billionaire.
Brilliant? Well, consider that he was valedictorian of his high school and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from UCLA, which helped him get another scholarship – to Harvard Business School, where he earned his M.B.A.
When he graduated, World War II was under way, so he went into the Navy. This is where his work ethic began to define his days. He passed his CPA exam while in the military. When he returned to Los Angeles, he began work at the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, but went to Loyola Law School at night, where he later recalled, he studied in the library so late every evening that the dean finally gave him the keys to the place so he could lock up. Of course, he graduated first in his law class.
Most beginning lawyers have their hands full with their new career. But that just wasn’t enough for him, so he taught taxation and corporate law mornings and evenings at Loyola.
He co-founded a local law firm in 1953, which started his amazing entrepreneurship phase. He soon was offered a struggling Hamm’s beer distributorship, which he bought with a loan, and turned it into a success. He bought numerous other beverage distributorships (including a local Anheuser-Busch distributorship), got involved in real estate, car dealerships, financial services – dozens of enterprises in all. This self-made man had a net worth of $2.59 billion last spring, when he ranked No. 14 on the Business Journal’s List of Wealthiest Angelenos.
A lot of his success came from his abiding belief in people. Many of his managers got no salaries but a cut of the profits. According to a 2004 article in the Business Journal, five general managers at Anderson’s car dealerships at the Thousand Oaks Auto Mall got to keep an unusually generous 20 percent of their net profits. “It’s almost like they are partners,” one executive was quoted saying in that article.
His favorite saying was “Do the right thing.” He stayed humble and was noted for driving a Subaru he got from one of his dealerships. Of course, the graduate management school at UCLA is named for Anderson, thanks to the $15 million gift from him and his wife, Marion, in 1987. They followed that up this spring with a $25 million gift, the largest in the school’s history.
The Business Journal named Anderson its Business Person of the Year in 2004, the third person to get that honor.
When we caught up with him two-and-a-half years ago for our annual Special Report about older workers named Eight Over 80, we asked him why he hadn’t retired. “I enjoy working,” he said. “I look forward to it every day. I own and operate 42 companies, and each and every one of them is making money. I especially enjoy working with other people.”
He allowed that he had slowed down a bit: He no longer worked more than eight hours a day, although he still logged five- and six-day workweeks. His age at the time: 91.
The most unsurprising part of that interview came when we asked him what advice he’d give.
“Work hard,” he said. “Also, I believe very strongly that you should always be ethical in your business. Always do the right thing.”
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
