Nightly Business Report Presents Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of our Times

4. Identifying an Underserved Market

The most successful companies of the last 25 years haven’t always been based on radically new products or technologies. Some have sprung from their leaders’ ability to identify and cater to markets that were emerging but whose needs had not yet been identified. Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle sold index funds directly to shareholders who previously had been charged high sales commissions and management fees; Charles Schwab, through his San Francisco-based discount brokerage, gave “Main Street access to Wall Street;” and Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, set out to “break the cycle of poverty” in his native Bangladesh by making loans to very poor villagers, thereby enabling them to become self-supporting ...