Prominent Dutch American Entrepreneurs tells the stories of successful businesses started by Dutch-Americans in the United States. Its author is Professor Emeritus Carl Pegels of the University at Buffalo who taught Business Management there and has written extensively on that subject throughout his career. We spoke with him about his book.

Born in Rotterdam

Professor Pegels is a Dutch-American himself. He was born in a suburb of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. At age 16 he and his family emigrated to Canada. He studied in the US and in 1966 received a Ph.D. from Purdue University. He had always been interested in history but did not pursue that as a career in academia because he felt there was much more of a future for him, economically, teaching Business Management.

"I started writing about Dutch-American entrepreneurs after my retirement six years ago. Looking into my own family's history got me interested in genealogy and I was inspired by a survey of German immigrants into the United States. I realized there was no in-depth study on what Dutch-American individuals had achieved. "

Fascinating history

"When I started writing biographies I expected to maybe write 40 or 50 of them -- but there are now more than 300! I think they constitute a fascinating history. These immigrant families have made real contributions. Just think of Thomas Edison, for instance.”

"It wasn't my original plan to publish a book, so initially I just focused on writing online profiles." It became clear professor Pegels had enough material for a book, which he began about two years ago. "It was a good fit with my academic background. Moreover, I had a lot of fun with this project, writing about all these amazing stories where people start out with nothing and make it to the top."

With a wealth of facts, figures, and details Prominent Dutch American Entrepreneurs is a true source book and primer for college courses in Entrepreneurship, American History, Culture, Society and Economy. However, it will appeal to a wider audience, especially to Dutch-Americans.

The book uses a broad definition of "Dutch-Americans". Professor Pegels: "There was no hard and fast rule in selecting subjects in the book: if they had a reasonable Dutch background and were more famous, I included them". Among those featured: the Vanderbilts, Thomas Edison, as well as the Koch brothers -- whose grandfather came from the Netherlands to the Texas frontier. These and other famous Americans all have a place in the book which mainly focuses on the past 150 years, although some chapters on early immigrants in the 17th and 18th century are also included.

The book is highly structured, with a logical grouping by generation and subject. The grouping by subject makes for interesting comparisons. For example, in that framework, professor Pegels discusses three successful Mid-West companies together: Pella Corporation, with its $1 billion sales, Vermeer Manufacturing, also based in Pella, and Prince Manufacturing. All three companies were founded by Dutch immigrants.

Professor Pegels: "The stories of these entrepreneurs are stories about immigrants who were very ambitious, creative, and entrepreneurial. A good example is Cornelius Vanderbilt, who really started from scratch, was amazingly successful, and became one of the richest men in the United States. Even today Vanderbilt draws the most attention on our website. We track the page views with Google Analytics, and the Vanderbilt page is by far the most popular.”

Dutch coffee culture

The book has many more fascinating stories of successful enterprises. For instance, the Dutch coffee drinking culture made its way to the United States through the Peet family. "Alfred Peet grew up in a family that owned a gourmet coffee and tea distribution company in the Netherlands. After the Second World War he moved to the United States and was appalled that you could not find a gourmet coffee shop anywhere. So he opened his first gourmet coffee bean and coffee shop in Berkeley, California during the 1960s." It would prove to be the start of an amazing coffee empire: employees of Starbucks were later trained under Peet.

Professor Carl Pegels covers the 17th and 18th centuries, the transportation pioneers, industrial and infrastructure development, merchandising and services, innovation and development and finally the arts, culture and education. He has written a comprehensive study of the lives, histories and business endeavors of Dutch-American entrepreneurs.

Prominent Dutch American Entrepreneurs
C. Carl Pegels, University at Buffalo
199 pages, available as paperback and hardcover
http://www.infoagepub.com/products/Prominent-Dutch-American-Entrepreneu…

Today I packed up a lot of my belongings at work, including my beloved bookshelf. Next week will be my last week at my current employer.

We went out for drinks last night with my team, that was fun. Today we had lunch together -- North Carolina BBQ, of course. It's sad saying goodbye; it's a great group of people.

Yesterday afternoon we had our summer social at work.

Michael, a colleague, volunteered his pool and garden and we organized a BBQ/pool party for our office. It was a beautiful afternoon and it was a lot of fun.

I've started a training course at work. It's called Bullet Proof Manager, and there's a session once a month. Today was the first one, and the topics were 'negotiating' and 'listening'. It was quite interesting, and I especially liked the role-play, a good exercise.

The training was in SciWorks, a technology museum for children, in Winston-Salem. There was a divers group of participants, from many different industries.

Well, this week No Meeting Friday did not exactly work out: I have nine scheduled meetings tomorrow.

Lot of things to catch up with but it's fun to be back at work.

Today Petra and I went for lunch in an Thai/Chinese/Indonesian cafe in Cary. It was nice to catch up with her.

We examined the nasi goreng and satay with a critical Dutch eye. The verdict: it was delicious, but the nasi goreng especially was different than in the Netherlands.

Later I prepared my cubicle at work for the holiday season.

Today is a study day, and I'm reading up on HTML5. We do a lot of user interface development for my product, and I've always had a strong preference for industry standards above proprietary products such as Flex and SilverLight.

HTML5 has some cool features but the transition to the full spec in the industry will take a while. However, many aspects are already supported by major browsers. Incidentally Secha, a Javascript library we chose for my product at work two years ago, is making a major push into HTML 5/CSS3 and today released a new product to support their vision.

I'm reading "HTML5 for Web Designers" by Jeremy Keith, a great introduction. I'm at the car dealership today to get some major maintenance done. They're fixing the breaks, battery, the engine cooling system... a big job.

A delegation of a European customer visited our headquarters in New Jersey this morning and I spent three hours with them (through a conference call). This is a major financial institution, and they were one of the first large customers for my product a few years ago. It's great to see them using the product, and talk with them about their needs. The product is deployed in several of their data centers now and they're using it extensively.

By chance I visited a second huge customer in the afternoon. They are located in the Research Triangle which makes it easy to stop by and discuss things. That was a productive visit as well.

It's great to make software that solves real needs.

I'm in San Jose, California for a business trip; we arrived a few hours ago. I just finished checking my e-mail and worked through the updates from our bug tracking system.

It's 5.00 pm here, 8.00 pm at the East Coast, and we're going for a run. First meeting at 8.00 am tomorrow.