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212 ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES

Not every “Fustest with the Mostest” strategy needs to aim at cre-
ating a big business, though it must always aim at creating a business
that dominates its market. The 3M Company in St. Paul, Minnesota,
does not—as a matter of deliberate policy, it seems—attempt an
innovation that might result in a big business by itself. Nor does
Johnson & Johnson, the health-care and hygiene producer. Both com-
panies are among the most fertile and most successful innovators.
Both look for innovations that will lead to medium-sized rather than
to giant enterprises, which are, however, dominant in their markets.
Being “Fustest with the Mostest” is not confined to businesses. It
is also available to public-service institutions. When Wilhclm von
Humboldt founded the University of Berlin in 1809—an event men-
tioned before in this book—he clearly aimed at being “Fustest with
the Mostest.” Prussia had just been defeated by Napoleon and had
barely escaped total dismemberment. It was bankrupt, politically,
militarily, and, above all, financially. It looked very much the way
Germany was to look after Hitler’s defeat in 1945. Yet Humboldt
went out to build the largest university the Western world had ever
seen or heard of—three to four times as large as anything then in exis-
tence. He went out to hire the leading scholars in every single disci-
pline, beginning with the foremost philosopher of the time, Georg W.
F. Hegel. And he paid his professors up to ten times as much as pro-
fessors had ever been paid before, at a period when first-class schol-
ars were going begging since the Napoleonic wars had forced many
old and famous universities to disband.
A hundred years later, in the early years of this century, two sur-
geons in Rochester, an obscure Minnesota town far from population
centers or medical schools, decided to establish a medical center
based on totally new—and totally heretical—concepts of medical
practice, and especially on building teams in which outstanding spe-
cialists would work together under a coordinating team leader.
Frederick William Taylor, the so-called father of scientific manage-
ment, had never met the Mayo Brothers. But in his well-known tes-
timony before the Congress in 1911, he called the Mayo Clinic the
“only complete and successful scientific management” he knew.
These unknown provincial surgeons aimed from the beginning at
dominance of the field, at attracting outstanding practitioners in
every branch of medicine and the most gifted of the younger men,
and at attracting also patients able and willing to pay what were then
outrageous fees.