"I would rather be my own tyrant than have some one else tyrannize me."
"Competition is a sin" — attributed to him
"For Rockefeller, ledgers were sacred books that guided decisions and saved one from fallible emotion." — Ron Chernow, biographer
With his first paycheck as a sixteen-year-old assistant bookkeeper, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) bought a small red notebook, named it Ledger A, and began recording every cent he earned, spent, and gave to the church — a practice he maintained for the rest of his long life. He would later speak of that ledger with more visible emotion than he permitted himself on nearly any other subject. The builder of history's most complete monopoly, was at his core a keeper of sacred order — an LSI, of the high-discipline, closed, imperturbable configuration — whose forecasting and entrepreneurial gifts, the Gamma NT (and more ILI than LIE, honestly) accent on the base, were spent in the campaign to abolish chaos.
Consider what he actually did to the oil industry, and, more diagnostically, what he believed he was doing. Early oil was an anarchy: boom and bust, gluts and shortages... His own self-understanding was the opposite of a competitior in the jungle. Competition, he held, was "ruinous" — a wasteful, destructive disorder — and Standard Oil was its remedy. His mentality was that of a central planner who happened to operate privately, absorbing an entire chaotic ecosystem into a single uniform structure. Even the name he chose for the enterprise is telling: Standard Oil — the same uniform product, the same quality, everywhere, always!
Every cost in the Standard Oil universe was computed to several decimal places, the rationality of the head office was extended, in Chernow's phrase, "down to the lowest rung." Rockefeller trusted the numbers over the men — the books "gauged performance, exposed fraud, and ferreted out hidden inefficiencies" — while your typical LIE is one of the only two members of "central/decisive" quadras who has an above-average trust in people (the other one being IEI). And the decimal-counting is less LIE "strategic" future-minded efficiency focus, and more LSI's inspector-style "tactical" focus on small details.
Chernow's phrase about his temperament is "eerie self-control": he arrived at 9:15 precisely, silk hat, umbrella, gloves; he took his breaks on schedule; he celebrated the anniversary of his first job — "Job Day" — as a private holy day for eighty years. Chernow opens his biography by remarking that the life "was marked to an exceptional degree by silence, mystery and evasion" — not particularly typical of a LIE, but the essence of the "central introverted" small group, which is often called "secretive" for a reason. Contemporaries were unanimous that he "always sees a little further than the rest of us"; his method, as one summary has it, was to be "very patient in the way he masters his plans — but once he was sure, he just took off." Chernow calls him "an instinctive entrepreneur and an analytical manager" in one body, and the Ni-ish forecast accent is what makes the phrase true.
But every one of those enterprising and strategic gifts was spent in the service of consolidation. Sony founder Akio Morita's doctrine was to make his own products obsolete before rivals could; Rockefeller stabilized — prices fell eighty percent under Standard not through creative destruction but through uniformity, and the decimal-point elimination of waste. Even Henry Ford founded his company on a data-defying vision of an unbuilt mass market. Rockefeller founded on a bookkeeper's appraisal of which segment could be systematized.
His critics called him a glorified clerk, and Chernow rightly objects that this misses the breadth of vision and the executive force, titling his biography of him "Titan." But the clerk and the titan were one and the same. The vision was one of a clerk, magnified: everything recorded and standardized, all the world's ruinous disorder gathered into balance.
Of the famous American titans of industry, if Andrew Carnegie was a pretty clean LIE, and Ford was a LIE with a notable LSI/SLE accentuation, Rockefeller was a LSI with a Gamma NT accent. Carnegie, quite a gregarious man personally, famously tore out functioning, sometimes nearly new, plant the moment better technology appeared, running the business by strategic letter, having staffed operations with subordinates he'd spotted young. Rockefeller was an accountant-inspector on a grand scale, and Ford was a mixture of the two.
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