My Path to Success

America's leading designer in the classic tradition, Ralph Lauren grew up in the Bronx, son of a Russian immigrant mural painter. He showed a flair for fashion while still in his teens and earned his first commission at age 15, designing warm-up jackets for his baseball team. He dropped out of college at 22 and became a tie salesman. In 1967 he broke with the prevailing fashion for dark, narrow ties and launched his own line, Polo, introducing unprecedented color and variety to men' s fashion. He quickly progressed to a complete line of Polo menswear, and moved on to womenswear, boyswear, girlswear, fragrances and home furnishings, all part of a unified vision, exemplified by his flagship store, a sumptuously restored mansion on New York's Madison Avenue. He has built hundreds of Polo stores around the world, and continues to defy trends and fads to remain true to his own vision of freedom, comfort and timeless elegance.

When George Lucas was attending USC Film School he didn't even need a hundred feet. While still a student, he turned 32 feet of 16 millimeter film into a one-minute animated short that not only won awards at festivals nationwide, but set a new standard for animated films. He's been making motion picture history ever since, creating many of the most popular films in motion picture history, including the phenomenally successful Star Wars and Indiana Jones films. Today, George Lucas is Chairman of the Board of Lucasfilm Ltd., parent company of LucasArts Entertainment Company and Lucas Digital Ltd. Lucasfilm's THX division has changed the way we hear films in movie theaters and at home. LucasArts Entertainment Company is a leading international developer of entertainment software. Lucas Digital Ltd., which indcludes Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and Skywalker Sound, is the leading visual effects and post-production company in the industry. No man comes as close to representing the art, technology, and business of the movie industry as George Lucas. His clarity of vision as storyteller and mythmaker, his zeal for innovation, and his leadership in forging a new relationship between entertainment and technology, has revolutionized the art of motion pictures.

George Lucas addressed the student delegates and answered their questions at the 1989 Achievement Summit in San Francisco.kds

A pioneer of the private equity industry, George Roberts, co-founded Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Co. For over 30 years, George Roberts, along with KKR co-founder Henry Kravis, has led the firm in its growth into a leading global alternative asset manager. After graduating from the University of California Hastings Law School in 1969, Roberts joined Bear Stearns and Company. By the age of 29, he was a partner in the firm. Along with Henry Kravis and Jerome Kohlberg, he pioneered the leveraged buyout, borrowing money to buy a controlling interest in a given company, a practice that revolutionized the financing of American industry. The trio left Bear Stearns to found their own firm, KKR, in 1976. Since its founding, KKR has undertaken the biggest corporate acquisitions in history. The list of the companies Roberts' firm has controlled over the years constitutes a virtual roll-call of great American brands: Safeway, Beatrice, Borden, Playtex, Samsonite, Culligan, Texaco and Nabisco. KKR completed the first leveraged buyout in excess of 1 billion dollars, the first friendly tender offer in the buyout of a public company, and the largest buyouts ever completed in the U.S., the Netherlands, Denmark, India, Australia, Turkey, Singapore, and France. In addition to his historic business achievements, George Roberts is founder and Chairman of the board of directors of REDF, a San Francisco non-profit organization. REDF uses the practices of venture philanthropy to create job opportunities through the support of social enterprises that help people gain the skills to help themselves.

Millions of Americans have been inspired by the life story of Colin Powell, from his boyhood in the South Bronx as the son of Jamaican immigrants, through a distinguished military career, to his term as Secretary of State. General Powell was the first African-American and the youngest officer ever to serve as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ranking officer in the United States military. Most Americans got their first vivid impressions of General Powell in this role, at his televised press briefings during the 1991 Gulf War. His articulate, forthright manner and unassuming dignity made him a favorite of statesmen, journalists and the general public. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed him Secretary of State, a position that placed him at the head of America's foreign policy, and fourth in line of succession to the Presidency itself. He served throughout the first term of the Bush administration, a period that included the September 2001 attacks on the United States and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He remains one of the most admired Americans, a leader whose prestige transcends party and ideology. This address was recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 1998 Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, while General Powell was serving as National Security Adviser to President Ronald Reagan.

The pre-eminent playwright of his era, August Wilson (1945-2005) was the author of a monumental cycle of ten dramas, chronicling African American life in the 20th century, with each play set in a different decade. Born in Pittsburgh to a German immigrant father and an African American mother, Wilson grew up in the impoverished Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He dropped out of school after ninth grade and educated himself in the public library, supporting himself as short-order cook while struggling to find his voice as a writer. The first of his plays to win national attention was "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom." An enormous success on Broadway in 1984, it was followed by "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," both of which received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. August Wilson died shortly after completing "Radio Golf," the last play in the series. It took more than 20 years for Wilson to complete his cycle of plays; they stand as an achievement without parallel in American drama.

Beginning as a young trainee at a funeral home, Steven J. Ross (1927-1992) effected an ingenious series of deals and mergers, building a publicly traded company that expanded into publishing and entertainment, acquiring businesses including DC Comics and Mad magazine, before taking over the ailing Warner-Seven Arts motion picture studio in 1969. Under Ross's leadership, the studio became Warner Communication Inc., a leader not only in motion pictures, but in the recording industry and cable television, creating a host of profitable subsidiaries, including MTV, Showtime and the Movie Channel. In this 1988 address to the Academy of Achievement, Ross describes the first steps in his extraordinary career. Only months after addressing the Academy, he engineered the most daring coup of all, merging Warner Communication with Time Inc. to create the largest media conglomerate in the world.

When Turkish-born Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006) came to the United States as a boy with his diplomat father, he fell in love with American music. Rather than returning with his family to Turkey a few years later, he remained and started a record label to record the jazz and blues music he loved. Starting in a one-room office in 1947, the upstart label, Atlantic Records, became the premier outlet for the new sounds of rhythm and blues. Atlantic also enjoyed a reputation for treating artists fairly in an era when musicians, especially African American ones, were routinely exploited and cheated of their earnings. Atlantic Records made stars of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, and its roster later expanded to include British rock acts such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. For his irreplaceable contributions to modern music, Ahmet Ertegun was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. The company he founded remains one of the most vital forces in the music industry. In this 1988 address to the Academy of Achievement, Ahmet Ertegun discusses his early life and the origins of the record label that changed American music.

Edna Buchanan was heralded as the best police-beat reporter in the United States and one of the nation's first female crime journalists, when she wrote for the Miami newspapers. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for general reporting. A high school graduate who worked wiring switchboards at a New Jersey Western Electric factory when she decided to take a creative writing course at night. She visited Miami on vacation, fell in love with the city, and immediately moved there. Buchanan soon landed a $45-a-week job as a society reporter at the Miami Beach Sun, and won local awards for her writing. She became a reporter for The Herald covering the crime scene in Miami where her tireless fact gathering has chronicled thousands of violent deaths over the three decades, creating compelling tales of killers, drug dealers, heroic police officers, and brave citizens. This legendary reporter earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for her vivid descriptions of one of the most frightening and fascinating cities on the American scene. Two years later, she addressed the student delegates at the 1988 Achievement Summit about her life and career.

In the early 1960s, James Rosenquist emerged as a leader of the Pop Art movement, employing the techniques of advertising illustration and the imagery of popular culture to provoke sharp questions about the nature of a society steeped in consumerism and mass-produced images.

Through solid academic training and a long apprenticeship painting giant advertising billboards, Rosenquist mastered powerful techniques for rendering the bright, reflective surfaces of industrial products, and learned to work on a massive scale. Breaking with the dominant school of purely abstract painting, he deployed his formidable technical skills to render familiar objects and images in startling combinations. He gained international renown with monumental works, such as the painting F-111. Ten feet high and 86 feet wide, it interspersed images of a jet fighter plane and a mushroom cloud with those of a tire tread, light bulbs, an umbrella, a child's head in a gleaming domed hair dryer, and a tangled mass of spaghetti in red sauce.

In the sixth decade of an enormously productive career, James Rosenquist's work continues to astonish with its brilliance, playful humor and unflagging invention. His unique, original vision has transformed our perception of the world around us.

For over 40 years Johnny Cash wrote and sang about the lives of hard-scrabble farmers, homeless drifters, broken-down cowhands, broken-hearted lovers and men behind bars. He gave a voice to the lonesome and the lost, the dispossessed and the disillusioned. He came by this sympathy naturally, growing up on his family's cotton farm in rural Arkansas in the depths of the Depression. America first discovered Johnny Cash in the mid-1950s, and since then people around the world have heard in his voice an unmistakable honesty about the hard facts of life, love and faith.

Johnny Cash placed at least two hits singles a year on the Country music charts for 33 years running, and over 53 million copies of his record albums have been sold since 1959. Songs like "Folsom Prison Blues," and "I Walk the Line," have become part of the national inheritance. In his eighth decade, he won over a new generation of admirers with his interpretations of songs ranging from traditional ballads to the dark and moody songs of contemporary rock bands.

Since his death in 2003, Johnny Cash and his songs have remained an institution in our national life. Thanks to his recordings, the "Man in Black," with the cavernous baritone voice, is still as much a part of the American landscape as the Mississippi River or the Rocky Mountains.

In this podcast, recorded at the 1988 Academy of Achievement Summit, Cash spoke to student delegates about his early life growing up and working on a cotton patch. At the end of the podcast, Cash asnwered a few questions from the students.