Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline, Scotland over 180 years ago. His Wikipedia page is here.
When he was thirteen years old he emigrated to the United States with his extremely poor parents where he started work. By 1901 he was one of the richest men in the world having amassed a fortune in those days of $480milliion, which nowadays would be worth closer to $100billion. For the last eighteen years of his life he entered into the world of philanthropy and wrote a text which was renamed ‘The gospel of wealth’ which was published in the UK by the then- Prime Minister. In this he argued that successful business people had two aspects to their life, the first to accumulate wealth and the second to give it away for the benefit of society.
I first came across anything to do with Andrew Carnegie when I was playing golf in my childhood holiday destination, which was a caravan park in the North East of Scotland in a place called Dornoch.
Carnegie had bought in his time Skebo Castle (Madonna got married there) and it’s just down the road from the campsite. He also donated the Carnegie shield to Dornoch Golf Club which is a beautiful trophy and a high level golf competition which occurs every year to this day. If you read the Wikipedia page you can see some of the other stuff he did with his money and in the end he gave away 90% of everything he made.
Carnegie died at 83 and it was only the last eighteen years of his life that he truly entered into philanthropy but it was eighteen years well spent. His story got me thinking about the difference between an entrepreneur and a philanthropist, particularly in health care.
The dental entrepreneur seeks to take a health care business model and leverage as much profit from it because that’s what entrepreneurs do; they increase the value of the business, they don’t work in it and the sell it. That’s the point of being an entrepreneur. To do this you increase turnover and decrease costs, it’s really simple. The bit in the middle of that equation is your profit and when that gets high enough you sell it for a multiple of that and either go off and do it again or live off the money you’ve made.
The dental business model though can be so much more than that. It gives us the opportunity to build organisations which change the lives of people, both the people who work within them and the ‘end user’ – the patient. It gives us the opportunity to be a trusted pillar of society of our local societies and our world society. It gives us the opportunity to give back.
It took Andrew Carnegie 66 years to figure out that he had enough. He was a clever man but would have perhaps been all the more clever if he had realised that before hand.
It’s time for a new wave of dental entrepreneur who use the privilege they have been given to make a difference to society – the society of dentistry and society overall, to understand our place in the community and to ‘spend our fame wisely’.
Blog Post Number: 1161
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