My Path to Success

Sarah Ophellia Colley Cannon (October 25, 1912 - March 4, 1996) was known professionally as Minnie Pearl. She was America's best-loved country comic, who appeared at the Grand Ole Opry for more than 50 years (from 1940 to 1991) and on the television variety show "Hee Haw" from 1969 to 1991. Sarah Colley was the daughter of a successful lumber salesman. She graduated from Ward-Belmont College, at that time, Nashville's most prestigious school for young ladies. After graduation, she taught dance and dreamed of becoming a Broadway star. She produced and directed plays for a touring theater company throughout the South during the Great Depression, and developed her Minnie Pearl routine to promote the group's shows. She first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry on November 30, 1940 and, over the next five decades, became a legendary country comedienne. Pearl's comedy was gentle satire of rural Southern culture. She always dressed onstage in "down home" dresses and wore a hat with a price tag hanging from it, displaying the price of $1.98. Her catch phrase was "How-w-w-DEE-E-E-E! I'm jes so proud to be here!" delivered in a loud holler. She suffered a serious stroke in June 1991, three years after addressing the students at the 1988 Academy of Achievement Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2002, she was ranked as one of the 15 greatest women in the history of country music. A bronze statue of Minnie Pearl is displayed in the lobby of the famed Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

In 1966, anxious for a business of his own, George Gillett invested in the Miami Dolphins and became the team's business manager. In 1968, with two partners, he bought the Harlem Globetrotters. In 1975, he sold his stake in the Globetrotters for $3 million and began looking for troubled companies that he could turn around quickly. His first deal, in 1978, was a string of UHF television stations in small markets. Gillett's most dramatic turnaround began that same year when he took over a failing beef plant in Green Bay, Wisconsin. He focused the company on lean, low-cholesterol beef for the changing demands of the American diet, and sales soared. With a steady source of cash (his initial $240,000 investment produced more than $100 million in cash), he looked to invest in other enterprises. Utilizing junk bonds and financial leverage, he purchased a string of television stations (including the purchase of the WSM television station in Nashville with no cash and $42 million in notes) and the Vail and Beaver Creek ski resorts in Colorado. In 1992, Gillett's companies sought Chapter 11 protection, but he salvaged the remains and soon re-launched his business empire, and stitched together a $1 billion food empire. In 2001, he purchased the famed Montreal Canadiens hockey team and their arena (which he then re-sold in 2009 for a reported $550 million to Molson Brothers). Gillett addressed the Academy student delegates at the 1988 Achievement Summit, at the peak of his success as a broadcasting entrepreneur and flamboyant corporate turnaround artist.

Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman ever to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Yet when she first graduated with honors from Stanford University Law School, third in her class, the only job she was offered by a law firm was to work as a legal secretary. She found work as a deputy county attorney in California, before moving to Arizona, where she opened her own law firm. She was elected to the Arizona legislature and became majority leader of the Arizona Senate. She served as Attorney General of the State of Arizona and was elected Superior Court Judge in Phoenix. In 1981, President Reagan appointed her to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2006, she retired from the Court after 25 years of distinguished service.

Wayne Thiebaud is a painter whose most famous works are of cakes, pastries, boots, toilets, toys and lipsticks. He is associated with the Pop art movement because of his interest in objects of mass culture, although his works, executed during the fifties and sixties, slightly predate the works of the classic pop artists. Thiebaud uses heavy pigment and exaggerated colors to depict his subjects, and the well-defined shadows characteristic of advertisements are almost always included in his work.

Dr. Leroy Hood is the Co-founder and President of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle and one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. He received the Lemelson-MIT Prize for inventing "four instruments that have unlocked much of the mystery of human biology" by helping decode the genome. Hood also won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research for inventing the automated DNA sequencer and an automated tool for synthesizing DNA. A pillar in the field of biotechnology, Hood has played a role in founding fourteen major biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Darwin, and Integrated Diagnostics. Hood grew up in Shelby, Montana in a family of engineers and researchers. In high school, he worked with a team to map a Wyoming anticline (a geological formation featuring layers of rock that bulge up out of the earth). He entered his results, which showed what had led to the buildup of oil in the anticline, in the 1956 Westinghouse Science Talent Search, and was named a finalist. When he left to go to Washington, D.C. for the finals, the high school band came down to the train station and played. He went on to the California Institute of Technology, then to Johns Hopkins Medical School, where he became immersed in the new field of immunology. Hood returned to Caltech and over the next few decades, developed a protein sequencer, which tells scientists which amino acids make up a given protein; a protein sequencer, which tells scientists which amino acids make up a given protein; a peptide synthesizer, which puts those amino acids together to form proteins; and an automated DNA sequencer, which gives scientists the genetic letters that spell out a given gene. The last was critical because it allowed scientists to gather information much more quickly. By the time the DNA sequencer made the Human Genome Project possible in the late 1990s, scientists were mapping genes at thousands of times the rate that they had done two decades before. Hood's vision and inventions had permanently influenced the course of biology and revolutionized the understanding of genetics, life and human health. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, one of only 10 people in the world to be elected to all three academies. Hood has also received 17 honorary degrees from universities around the world. In 2007, he was elected to the Inventor's Hall of Fame. Dr. Leroy Hood participated in the 1987 Achievement Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona and spoke to the student delegates about his life-long fascination with molecular structures, technology, and the immune system.

Henry Kravis is one of the most successful investment bankers in history. He is famous in the business world for pioneering the leveraged buyout (or LBO), that is, borrowing money to buy a controlling interest in a given company. As managing partner of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR), he is responsible for the biggest corporate acquisitions in history. The list of companies Henry Kravis has bought and sold over the course of his career is a roll-call of great American brand names: Safeway, Beatrice, Borden, Playtex, Samsonite, Culligan, Texaco.

In 1988, Kravis engineered the buyout of RJR Nabisco, a struggle dramatized in the book and film, Barbarians at the Gate. The purchase price, $24.88 billion, was the highest that had been paid for a commercial enterprise up to that time. In 2007 he surpassed his own record with the $45 billion acquisition of Energy Future Holdings (formerly TXU), the biggest corporate takeover in history.

In addition to his business activities, Henry Kravis is active in charitable causes as a patron of the arts and a generous supporter of medicine and higher education. In 2010 he donated $100 million to the Columbia Graduate School of Business, by far the largest gift in its history.

Paul Fireman founded Reebok USA in 1979 and as of mid-2004 had been the company's only CEO. Reebok USA was formed when Fireman, attending a sporting goods trade show in London, bought the rights to the Reebok line of custom running shoes from the British shoe company J. W. Foster & Sons. Fireman introduced the first women's athletic shoe, for aerobics, in 1982, spurring a fitness wear and fashion revolution that molded Reebok into one of the fastest-growing companies of all time. Under Fireman Reebok expanded rapidly throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The Reebok brand eventually became available in more than 170 countries.

The American chemist Dudley Herschbach received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for contributions including his "crossed molecular beam" experiments that have yielded a molecular-level understanding of elementary chemical reactions, such as those used in the synthesis of drugs, plastics and industrial chemicals. Professor Herschbach addressed the Academy of Achievement at its 1987 Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. In this podcast, he relates how, as a small child, he was first inspired to pursue a career in science and became the first member of his family to pursue higher education. He also discusses the molecular basis of chemical reactions and the significance of his own research. Today, he is a Professor of Physics at Texas A&M University , and continues his long relationship with Harvard University where he is Professor Emeritus. To date, he has published over 400 research papers. He continues to pursue research at the frontiers of molecular chemistry.

Dr. Kenneth H. Cooper is heralded as the "Father of Aerobics" and the leader of the international physical fitness movement. He published his first best seller, "Aerobics," in 1968, and introduced a new word and a new concept - launching a worldwide fitness revolution. He continues to be credited with motivating more people to exercise in pursuit of good health than any other person. In 1968, only 100,000 people were jogging in America, and now the number is more than thirty million strong, thanks to the influence of Dr. Cooper. His father was a periodontist, who instilled within him the desire to practice preventive medicine. He earned his medical degree at the University of Oklahoma and went on to receive his master's in public health at Harvard. Dr. Cooper joined the military in 1957 and during his 13 years of service as a flight surgeon, created the conditioning program to prepare American astronauts for space flight. He also developed the 12-minute and 1.5-mile fitness tests and the Aerobics Point System used today by the military and universities around the world. It was his own health crisis that made aerobics his life's work. While water skiing at age 29, Dr. Cooper thought he was having a heart attack. At the hospital, his doctor told him he was simply out of shape, having gained 40 pounds due to the stress of medical school. The experience catapulted the young doctor to lose weight and run his first marathon a year later. After the publication of "Aerobics" (which has been translated into 41 languages and sold 30 million copies), Dr. Cooper left the U.S. Air Force to pursue full-time exploration of the relationship between cardiovascular fitness and health and longevity. In 1970, he opened the Cooper Aerobics Center in Dallas where he serves as chairman of eight health and wellness companies and a research and education foundation, The Cooper Institute. Dr. Kenneth Cooper addressed the student delegates at the 1986 Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. about the importance of aerobic exercise and a healthy lifestyle.

Dr. Herbert W. Boyer and Robert A. Swanson (1947 - 1999) co-founded Genentech in 1976 and launched the biotechnology revolution. It remains one of the leading biotech companies in the world. Boyer was a Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics at the University of California Medical School at San Francisco whose pioneering research in gene-splicing paved the way to "a new age of man-made wonders." Swanson was a graduate of MIT Sloan School of Management who became a venture capitalist. After reading about Boyer's controversial gene-splicing discovery, Swanson placed a telephone call to Boyer's laboratory, and Boyer offered Swanson ten minutes on a Friday afternoon. Bob Swanson's ten-minute audience with Herb Boyer lasted several hours, and they fed each other's excitement and they left for a local saloon. Many beers later, each had agreed to put up $500 to form a partnership to exploit recombinant DNA technology. Without any initial financial help, Swanson rented a small office in downtown San Francisco, and working closely with Boyer, he developed the business plan for the company he hoped to found. The scientist drafted proposals for the technical end of the operation and the venture capitalist wrote out marketing schemes, and they revised and merged their work as they went along. In April 1976, Boyer and Swanson dissolved their $1,000 partnership and incorporated their enterprise under an abbreviation for "genetic engineering technology" - Genentech. Without any employees of its own, without facilities, without anything but a name and a promising technology, Genentech was born. The company soon became the catalyst of the genetic revolution, a symbol of the awesome commercial potential of biotechnology, and Biotech's "first superstar." Herb Boyer went on receive the Albert Lasker Award, the highest honor in American medicine, for his pioneering research in gene-splicing and donated $10 million to the Yale School of Medicine, where he spent three years in post-graduate work. Robert Swanson was inducted into the U.S. Business Hall of Fame and died, in 1999, at the age of 52, from brain cancer. Genentech was purchased by the pharmaceutical conglomerate Hoffmann-La Roche in 2009 for nearly $47 billion and employs 11,000 people in the Bay Area. Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson addressed the student delegates at the 1986 Achievement Summit in Washington, D.C. and spoke about their pioneering work and launching the biotechnology revolution. For many years, Herbert Boyer was the Board Chairman of the American Academy of Achievement.