Leading Article: What every young capitalist needs

ANDREW CARNEGIE, one of the richest men in American history, was said to have left school at 14 with boundless confidence but little else. When he went for his first job interview, hoping for work as a messenger boy, he found to his horror that at least 100 other applicants were already waiting in a neat line. Fearing that one of them might get the job before he reached the front of the queue, the aspiring tycoon scribbled a few words on a piece of paper, signed it, and handed his sealed message up the line of applicants to the interviewer. Three minutes later, a voice boomed down the hall: 'Carnegie, my boy, I admire your nerve. The job is yours.' His message had been daring. 'Don't hire anyone,' it said, 'until you've seen me.'

The story illustrates the point, made on our education page yesterday, that business tycoons tend to start young - and show very early the daring and ruthlessness that later make them successful. This is evident above all in the American computer industry. Bill Gates, who heads Microsoft, the world's leading computer software house, designed a software package to help local councils analyse road traffic patterns from paper tapes when he was still at school. The founders of Apple Computer dropped out of college and set up shop in a garage. Michael Dell, the billionaire owner of a leading mail-order personal computer house, is not yet 30.

Taken too seriously, that list might suggest that the first thing a young capitalist needs to do to secure a glittering future is to drop out of school and start work. Many of the world's greatest self- made businessmen had remarkably little education: the record is probably held by Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of the world's biggest electronics concern, who left school at nine to become the apprentice of a maker of hibachi charcoal grills. But Matsushita had little choice. It was not contempt for schooling but his family's grinding poverty that drew him to work so young - and instead of taking pride in the millions of customers across the world who used his National and Panasonic products, he was always shamed by his inability to write Japanese characters properly. Studies of entrepreneurship today suggest that a university degree is more a help than a hindrance to the tycoon.

Like great musicians or artists, successful capitalists have plenty to learn from schooling. Other qualities - the power to persuade sceptical bank managers, the capacity to work for that next million when most of us would be happier relaxing and spending the first - will grow of their own accord, and no amount of education can replace them if they are missing.

Not all those who show great entrepreneurial promise at the beginning of their careers, however, end them with the same glory. Seven years ago, a pair of bright young Oxford graduates named Darius Guppy and Ben Marsh were running a fast-growing business selling monocles to department stores. Today, the pair are two weeks into five-year jail sentences after faking a gems robbery in New York. A modicum of honesty, it seems, is something that even the world's greatest capitalist needs to learn.