Culminating its look back on the century in business, FORTUNE magazine has named automobile giant and entrepreneur Henry Ford Businessman of the Century-beating out runner-up Bill Gates of Microsoft-and has chosen General Electric’s Jack Welch Manager of the Century. Ford was among four finalists chosen from a series of profiles on the Twentieth Century’s business greats that appeared in FORTUNE starting in the April 26, 1999 issue. The other finalists who were recognized for having dominated their respective quarter century in business were: General Motors’ Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. (1876-1966), IBM’s Thomas J. Watson (1914-1993), and Microsoft’s Bill Gates (1955- ). “Businessman of the Century” co-written by FORTUNE Executive Editor Peter Petre, FORTUNE Editor at Large Brent Schlender, and Thomas Stewart and Alex Taylor III of FORTUNE’s Board of Editors, appears in the November 22 issue of FORTUNE. The article is available on www.fortune.com beginning at 8:30 a.m. ET on Monday, November 1.

As Alex Taylor writes, Henry Ford (1863-1947) didn’t invent the automobile, but he invented the automobile business. And though he was the worst manager of the four finalists, Ford was also the greatest managerial thinker: “No fewer than three of the biggest management brainstorms of the century happened in Ford’s head: the idea of a moving assembly line, the idea of paying workers not as little as possible but as much as was fair, and the idea of vertical integration that made Ford’s River Rouge plant the chief wonder of the industrial world….[Ford] was a builder of industry that transformed the very land we live on; the first to create a mass market as well as the means to satisfy it; as great an entrepreneur as we’ve ever seen.”

At a time when the automotive landscape was dominated by Cadillacs, Packards and Pierce-Arrows that cost several thousand dollars, Ford’s genius was to make cars simple, solid and inexpensive necessities. That philosophy paid off when Ford’s $850 Model T became the most successful vehicle ever produced in America which helped propel Ford Motor Company to become the largest industrial organization of the early 20th century. As Stewart explains, however, Ford’s impact on Twentieth Century business was perhaps most important for the immeasurable impact he had on American life. “As Ford adapted the emerging principles of mass production to the automobile and hired tens of thousands of workers to put those principles into practice, he gave rise to an entirely new phenomenon: the blue-collar middle class.” Stewart continues: “In creating a huge body of un-like-minded people who shared not only their work but many social and economic interests, Ford, to his lasting regret, spurred the development of industrial labor unions.”

In describing Ford’s nomination as Businessman of the Century, FORTUNE makes clear that its decision was entirely shaped by the legacy he left to the world of Twentieth Century business and to America as a whole, regardless of the personal failings that ultimately stained his reputation: “In his latter years he surrounded himself with goons, spouted ugly anti-Semitic bile, and he left his company in terrible shape.”

Businessman of the Century runner-up Bill Gates is described as perhaps the shrewdest business strategist of the last quarter of the century: flummoxing much larger competitors like IBM, stealing a march on brilliant IT innovators like Apple and Netscape, and unlike most techno-entrepreneurs of his generation, using his skills as an imaginative manager to keep pace with his company’s break-neck growth. According to Brent Schlender, Gates’ genius lies in the fact that Microsoft Windows, and its predecessor, the MS-DOS PC operating system, were the high-tech equivalents of Ford’s Model T. “They may not have been the sleekest or most elegant pieces of software, but Gates figured out how to make them almost universally used, and they transformed the entire IT world.” And, Gates’ decision to make Microsoft the first company to use stock options as an integral element of employee compensation minted literally thousands of millionaires, not to mention a handful of billionaires, and cemented employee loyalty in an era and industry rife with job-hoppers.

Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. earned his place among the top four finalists for Businessman of the Century for having created the modern, divisionalized corporation and showing the world how to make it work. As president of General Motors, Sloan invented the art of managing a large corporation, first by creating a corporate office to allocate resources and coordinate the company’s operating divisions, second by linking the divisions by means of promulgating a set of “Standard Procedures” to guide operations, and finally by creating interdivisional councils where executives and staffs could share ideas or find ways to exploit economies of scale. According to Tom Stewart, “Every leader since stands on his shoulders-up to and including FORTUNE’s Manager of the Century, Jack Welch, the ultimate practitioner of the art Sloan invented.”

Thomas J. Watson, Jr. was lauded by FORTUNE for being one of the great entrepreneurs of the first half of the century. He not only put IBM on the map, the company he shaped was also the greatest success story of America’s postwar boom. During his tenure, IBM created more wealth for its shareholders than any company in business history-an achievement that stood until the bull market of the 1990s, and one that led FORTUNE in 1987 to declare Watson “arguably the greatest capitalist who ever lived.”

In selecting the Businessman of the Century, the editors of FORTUNE sought to choose someone who was “celebrated at the time he labored, and is still renowned today-that is, a person who was conspicuously successful in both the short run and the long. He should have been captain of an enterprise of some scale, for in this century, size matters. And the Businessman of the Century should have been part of one of the Businesses of the Century, of an industry characteristically Twentieth Century.”

In “The Ultimate Manager,” FORTUNE Editorial Director Geoffrey Colvin describes how the genius in Manager of the Century Jack Welch’s thinking is that he returned power to the little people: the worker and the shareholder. Welch transformed GE and multiplied its value beyond anyone’s expectations: from a market capitalization of $14 billion to more than $400 billion today-making GE the second-most-valuable company on Earth. As Colvin writes: “Welch wins the title because in addition to his transformation of GE, he has made himself far and away the most influential manager of his generation….As the most widely admired, studied, and imitated CEO of his time, Welch has enriched not only GE’s shareholders but the shareholders of companies around the globe. His total economic impact is impossible to calculate but must be some staggering multiple of GE performance.”

Welch took the reins at GE at a time when the old, manufacturing-based world started giving way to the new one. According to Colvin, Welch leads the annals of management history not for anticipating the new world’s changes ahead, but for acting on them: “His great achievement is that having seen it, he faced up to the huge, painful changes it demanded, and made them faster and more emphatically than anyone else in business. He led managers into this new world, which we still inhabit, and just as important, he showed business people everywhere a method of attacking change of any kind.”

To educate Indian audience about the achievements of the Businessman Of The Century-Henry Ford, we are published a copy of an article from timewarner.com produced on November 01, 1999. It is an exceptional article, brilliantly written that we reproduced it as it is. We hope in the interest of educating people in India about Henry Ford, TimeWarner will excuse us for reproducing this article.

Welch was born in Massachusetts, USA in 1935. His father was a Boston & Maine Railroad conductor. Welch is a Chemical Engineering graduate from the University of Massachusetts and then received his M.S. and PhD degrees (as a Chemical Engineer) at the University of Illinois.

In the year 1960 after finishing his degree Welch joined General Electric as a Chemical engineer. Later he moved up the ranks to become vice president of GE in 1972, senior vice president in 1977 and vice chairman in 1979 and finally he became GE’s youngest chairman and CEO in 1981 succeeding Reginald H. Jones. In 1982, Welch changed much of the earlier management put together by Jones and came up with innovative strategies.

GE saw great growth and expanded dramatically from 1981 to 2001 under Jack Welch’s leadership. The major changes include streamlining operations, acquiring new businesses, expanding the broadness of the stock options program, adopting Motorola’s Six Sigma quality program in late 1995, destroying the nine-layer management hierarchy and bringing a sense of informality to the company and many more to increase the market capital drastically.

He wanted to ensure that each business in GE should be the best in its field. Many business leaders imitated his leadership style and management skills. During his 20 years tenure GE is named for its constant change. In making business decisions he became hard, ruthless and fired managers who are resistant to change and replaced them with someone who could change. Company had huge revenues in his reign and gained the reputation of most valuable and largest company in the world.

Jack Welch is an exceptional manager with his innovative ideas and leadership strategies. The fortune magazine named him as “manager of the century” in 1999. After retiring from GE in 2001 he has written a best selling book “Jack, Straight from the Gut.”

Sloan joined as a draftsman in the Hyatt Rolling Bearing Company at Harrison, N.J, a company that makes roller and ball bearings. At the age of 26 he became president and general manager of Hyatt, which was running in loses. Sloan brought drastic changes to the firm by moving into the manufacture of steel roller bearings for the automobile industry and eventually became the owner of the company. In 1916 Hyatt merged with United Motors Corporation and finally became part of General Motors Corporation. In 1918 he became Vice-President to the GM, then President (1923), and finally Chairman of the Board (1937). He retired as GM chairman in1956 and died in 1966.

The major changes he brought to GM include establishing annual styling changes (planned obsolescence), confronted its workforce, established a pricing structure for (from lowest to highest priced) Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac which is referred to as the ladder of success not having competition with each other. With these changes GM became the largest and most successful company the world had ever known. In 1930 GM became the sales leader in the Industry and retained this position for over 70 years.

Dhirubhai Ambani returned to India and setup “Majin” in partnership with Champaklal Damani to import polyester yarn and export spices. Initially the Reliance Commercial Corporation was set up in Masjid Bunder with two assistants to help them with their business.

In 1966, Dhirubhai started his first textile mill at Naroda, near Ahmedabad with the brand “Vimal”. After years, Dhirubhai diversified his business into petrochemicals, telecommunications, information technology, energy, power, retail, textiles, infrastructure services, capital markets, and logistics. Reliance growth and evolution is mainly through the backward vertical integration from textiles to various businesses. It is fully integrated through the materials and energy value chain. Reliance Industries Limited is being the youngest and the largest private sector company in India and also listed as one of the Fortune Global 500 companies.

His people skills were extraordinary. He had different ways of dealing with different groups of people, be they employees, shareholders, journalists or government officials. Ambani was always a step ahead of the competitors. And eventually became a business tycoon in India making the Ambanis the richest family in the world. He learned these people skills not from the formal education but through his life experiences.

In 1998, he was honored with the Dean’s Medal by The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, for setting an outstanding example of leadership. He passed away in 2002 due to the brain stroke. The union government released a postage stamp on his first anniversary.

At 13 he enrolled in the Lakeside School, an exclusive preparatory school where he wrote his first computer program on GE computer machine: an implementation of tic-tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. In 1973 enrolled at Harvard College and spent a lot of time using the school’s computers. Gates with his pal Allen worked on a version of the programming language BASIC, which was the basis for the MITS Altair the first microcomputer available.

Later he dropped out of college and joined with Paul Allen they named their partnership “Micro-Soft” in the year 1975. Gates never returned to Harvard to complete his studies. The role of Gates for most of its history at Microsoft was primarily a management and executive role. Without any Management education Gates ran such a big company. This is a great example to show a manager need not necessarily have management education.

Being the richest man in the world more of his wealth goes to charity and especially to the “Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” which was formed in 2000. In 2006, Gates announced that he would remain “Chairman” and “Chief Software Architect” at Microsoft to dedicate more time to philanthropy. He would be transitioning from full-time work to part-time work at Microsoft and full-time work at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Mark Hurd born in New York City in 1957. He has done his Bachelors degree in Business Administration from Baylor University in 1979. He was an active member of various activities at college he played tennis, and a member of Phi Delta Theta, the Tryon Coterie.

In 1980 Hurd began his career at NCR Corporation as a junior salesman. Hurd had 25 years of experience at NCR Corp., where he executed various roles of management, operations, and sales and marketing. In 2001 he became president and chief executive officer. His made successful efforts to improve operations, supported the position of NCR’s product line and build a powerful executive team.

Mark Hurd joined HP in 2005 as chief executive officer and president and later after a year became chairman of the board of directors in September 2006.

He is known for turning around the HP and making it the leader in the sales of desktop computers and laptop computers, and increasing its market share in inkjet to 46% and laser printers to 50.5% in 2008.Hurd, known for his aggressive cost-cutting measures, eliminating 15,200 jobs, cutting the IT department from 19,000 to 8,000, decreasing the number of software applications from 6,000 to 1,500 and consolidating the HP’s 85 data centers to 6. This made HP to hire more salespeople.

Ellison switched from job to job, worked as a technician for Fireman’s Fund and Wells Fargo bank for the next eight years. During the 1970s, Ellison joined Ampex Corporation as a programmer. He is an active participant in building the first IBM-compatible mainframe system and one of his projects was a database for the CIA, which he named “Oracle”.

In 1977, Ellison with two of his Ampex colleagues, Robert Miner and Ed Oates, founded Oracle Company under the name Software development Laboratories (SDL). In 1979 it was renamed as Relational Software Inc., later renamed Oracle. Ellison served as Chief Executive Officer from the beginning. Ellison inspired by a paper called “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks” by Edgar F. Codd, describing a concept Codd had developed at IBM and saw the commercial potential in the concept of a Structured Query Language (SQL).

Until the rise of Microsoft SQL Server in1990s Oracle enjoyed years of industry dominance. IBM’s DB2 is the Oracle’s main competitor for new database licenses on UNIX, Linux, and Windows operating systems, which is still dominating the mainframe database market. In1997 Ellison was made a director of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs came back to the company. Ellison resigned in 2002. Ellison has received numerous honors and awards and named as the Entrepreneur of the Year from the Harvard School of Business. Mr. Ellison sits on the board of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

After 30 years, the company stood as the world’s second largest independent software company and the world’s leading supplier of software for information management. Almost every Industry is implementing the Oracle technology. Oracle is one of the first companies to make available its business applications through the Internet on its entire product line, which includes database, business applications, and application development and decision support tools.

It has released Oracle Fusion Middleware, which connects all levels of enterprise technology to help customers access the knowledge they need to respond to market conditions with speed and agility. Oracle under Ellision’s innovation and commitment developed Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Grid Computing, support for enterprise Linux, and Oracle Fusion all helping in the success of the company.