Ian Greer

The invitation arrived without explanation: a date, a location, nothing more. Now you stand on a Mediterranean shore, the night air cool against your skin, waiting for whatever comes next. Ahead of you, at the end of a slender pier, a hooded figure waits with a staff in hand, beckoning

After graduating from Parsons in 1985, Tom Ford set his sights on landing a job with prominent sportswear designer Cathy Hardwick. He called her office every day for a month. Fed up with the persistent caller, Hardwick finally answered herself, and asked how soon he could come in for a

Eli Lilly is now worth more than a trillion dollars. It began in a rented building on West Pearl Street in Indianapolis, where Colonel Eli Lilly ran a small medical wholesale operation, and its entire first year of sales totaled $4,470. An oil refinery today is a multibillion-dollar

Steve Jobs walked back into Apple in 1997. The company, he said later, was "ninety days from being insolvent." He arrived with no new product and no pricing strategy, just three objectives: set the direction, recruit the talent, and inspire that talent to execute. That sounds too simple

A young man once found himself in the presence of J.P. Morgan. Eager to make use of the moment, he asked the great financier what the market would do next. Morgan's reply became legend: "Young man, I believe the market is going to fluctuate." The

In the 1860s, chemists faced a mess. Sixty-three known elements, each with its own quirks, and no logic connecting them. Dmitri Mendeleev refused to accept that nature was chaotic. He arranged the elements by atomic mass and valence, and a structure emerged: the properties of each element repeated in