Historian comes up empty on self-made manhunt.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Book review

Ben Franklin was a great entrepreneur, scientist and statesman, but he was not the self-made man some have made him out to be. Neither was the Pittsburgh steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

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The self-made man is a myth, with Franklin and Carnegie leading the way. That is the conclusion of Pamela Walker Laird in her book, "Pull: Networking and Success Since Benjamin Franklin."

"They both started off poor, and they both went from rags to riches," Laird says of Franklin and Carnegie, in her mind the most enduring symbols of the "self-made man." But she adds, "They had access to influential networks," and she explains in detail the connections and circumstances that each parlayed to great achievement.

Laird, a history professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, says she started off studying the biographies of the 100 most famous businesspeople from Franklin on up to Jack Welch and Bill Gates, many of them so-called self-made, and found that in every single instance, upon close inspection, they had relied on mentors and access to powerful networks to reach the heights they did.

Even Bill Gates, who is often romanticized as a whiz kid who dropped out of Harvard to strike out on his own, had the benefit of growing up in one of Seattle's most prominent families and attended the city's best prep school that even in the '60s had computers for students. He had a million-dollar trust fund from his grandparents he didn't even need to tap into to set up Microsoft, Laird says.

The author points out that Gates' mother, Mary, was the first female chair of Seattle's United Way chapter and had extensive ties to prominent business leaders, and this helped young Gates land his first major contract--with the notoriously insular IBM. Laird cites what she calls an apocryphal but oft-quoted statement by the IBM official who decided to award a contract to an outsider: "Let's give it to Mary's boy."

Bill Gates a mama's boy? Say it ain't so.

All of this is not meant to suggest that great achievers in business have not possessed inordinate intelligence and initiative. "It's really important to understand that these people worked very hard, they're very smart, they're very creative and innovative," Laird says. "But they can't do it by themselves. Business is a social process, and we're comfortable doing business with people who are most like us, who we can trust, whose...