If creating wealth for shareholders is the best measure of a businessman's success, Thomas J. Watson Jr. is the greatest capitalist who ever lived. When Watson, now 73, retired as IBM's chief executive in 1971, the company's stock was worth $36 billion more than when he got the job from his father 15 years before.
Watson's father, one of the most successful industrialists of the 1920s and 1930s, was a selling genius. He gave the world the much-admired, sometimes parodied motto THINK. Under him IBM built and dominated the market for punch card accounting equipment.
