Business Management

As many of my readers and friends know I have a passion for history, especially business history. I think it's a shame that history has always been taught as though it were made up only of stories of kings and princes. Real history is about business. I'm an American, I'm a capitalist. I love the History Channel, I arrived home one afternoon after a particularly harrowing day. I flipped on the History Channel and started watching a documentary about the Great Fire of 1906 that burned San Francisco to the ground after a terrible earthquake. One interesting story that jumped out at me was the story of an italian immigrant who started a bank, The Bank of Italy, in San Francisco in 1904. His name was Amadeo Giannini. After the earthquake struck, he kept his whits about him. Amadeo saw the fire coming, and, thinking quickly, loaded all of the money out of his vault into boxes, put the boxes in a wagon, covered the boxes with vegetables, and took the money to his home which was several miles outside the city.
After the fire was finally put out (three days later), it had burned all of his competitors's banks down to the ground and all of their depositor's money was lost, "up in smoke" if you will. So Amadeo drove his cart back to town. Finding his bank building burned to the ground he proceeded to make an office out of a plank and two barrels and started making loans to local businesses well ahead of his competitors. His quick thinking had saved his bank and kept his depositor’s trust. A decendant of the bank that he started is still in existence today. Gianinni's Bank of Italy merged in 1929 with another California bank that was the first to develop the concept of branch banking. The name, the Bank of Italy was changed in 1929 with the merger. The two bank presidents agreed to co-manage the new bank and the company formed by the merger still exists. Today it is known as The Bank of America.