Lessons

...One superb candidate for the video library of inspiring American stories is Dr...

...Had they a Horatio Alger, they might be hundreds of thousands...

...Wang stresses the importance confidence played in his decision to enter business for himself...

...There is no doubting Dr...

...ne of the marks of a great entrepreneur is the ability to foresee changing circumstances and alter his company accordingly—though that means, in a sense, erasing part of his own life's history and legacy...

...An Wang who interests us, whose life inspires, and whose lessons we seek to learn...

...Within the course of the next 25 years, Wang essentially re-founded his company three times...

...By the early 1970s, Dr...

...In its first incarnation, Wang Laboratories sold memory chips and the computer expertise of Dr...

...And that is not unbelievable at all Michael A. Scully's articles and reviews have appeared in Harpers, Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications...

...How foolish it would be for a survivor of war and anarchy not to believe in luck...

...not then (the 1850s), not now...

...Wang and a small group of colleagues...

...Yet it is Dr...

...The International Settlement was overrun by the Japanese within months of his departure...

...At the age of 20, Wang graduated 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 from the university...

...Namely, that the successful education of the young is not, in any simple sense, a function of spending money...

...It is often suggested, especially by people who denigrate "Horatio Alger stories" (though few of them have read one), that they are unbelievable—that they are, literally, fantastic...

...Unfortunately, however, his autobiography does not escape Epstein's dictum...

...He remarks toward the end of one of his early chapters: . . . I never dismiss luck as a factor in a person's destiny...

...Thus this modest proposal: why not put all that audio-visual equipment to good use, by developing and distributing to schools videotapes of interviews featuring successful living Americans`Horatio Alger stories...

...The "Horatio Alger" story succeeds insofar as it convinces the reader that the improbable is possible...

...A corollary proposal, this one for a foundation: finance well-written Spanish and Portuguese adaptations of some of Alger's books and cast them as bread upon the waters of South America and the Philippines...

...His father taught English in a private elementary school in a nearby city...

...The "concessions" were a nine-squaremile area which had been under the control of foreign powers, including the U.S., British, and French, since the Opium War of 1839-42...

...At 13, young Wang left home to attend a boarding school ten miles away, and at 16 entered Chiao Tung University in Shanghai...

...He managed, by application and some luck, to become respectably middle class...

...Of course, the truth behind Epstein's wise comment is that people read biographies out of self-interest...

...The last third of the book engages neither its readers nor, it seems, its writers (Lessons was written with the assistance of Eugene Linden...

...After about a year, Wang took a job in Canada, but almost immediately returned to Cambridge, to a seven-dollarper-week boarding house, and pursuit of his doctorate...

...And, of course, there is also the encouragement that comes from knowing that the improbable is possible...

...Wang is a great man, whohas done great things, and given greatly to improve life in and around Boston...

...Indeed, like many remarkable men, he seems to have had a genius for good fortune...

...It is his good sense, however, and his willingness to share it, that makes his autobiography, Lessons, worth reading...

...Wang has made his living doing what he likes doing, and he considers that the mark of his success...

...in applied physics (a result of hard work, not luck...

...Sixteen months later he had his Ph.D...

...This is the only asset I ever gave the trust...

...Wang discovered when he took his company public in the late 1960s...

...In the early and mid-1960s, Wang Laboratories developed and sold the first desk-top calculator, called LOCI (an acronym for logarithmic calculating instrument...

...In 1945, Wang took advantage of an opportunity to spend a year in the United States...

...Since few G.I.'s had yet returned from the war, admissions were easier than they would have been in subsequent years, so Wang insists, and attributes his admission to the lucky timing of his arrival...

...Wang spent the next three years in the International Settlement, isolated from the war whose sounds he could hear all around him...

...The further Lessons proceeds, the more its focus shifts from Wang the man to Wang the company...

...Since the decline in educational standards roughly coincides with the introduction of huge federal expenditures on education, and levels of total expenditure greater than at any time in history, it occurs to some people that the commonsense view was right all along...

...An Wang, the founder of Wang Laboratories, nowadays best known for its office computers...

...It is, for example, much more a function of students' motivation...

...The paragraph is as follows: We established the [family] trust with Marty Kirkpatrick as trustee [in 1957], and . . . a fifteen-thousand-dollar par debenture...

...Yet the "ragged Dick" of Alger's first book did not grow up to be rich as Croesus...

...Joseph Epstein has written that readers lose interest in biographies at precisely the point at which the hero succeeds...

...Wang's genius, an attribute shared by few...

...Wang could foresee that the microchip would make calculators into a commodity...

...In fact, I believe that it is selfdeceptive—even dangerous—to think that one's life is entirely the product of one's own decisions and actions...

...The further one reads beyond the first half of Lessons, the more its prose and perspective degenerate into those of a corporate annual report...

...He spent a year teaching there, before sneaking to one of the Central Radio Corporation facilities in the interior of the country, where he and his colleagues designed and built radio transmitters for Chinese government troops, often with scavenged and improvised parts...

...Wang soon found a job as a research fellow at the Harvard Computation Laboratory, which was nurturing an infant technology, computers...

...Sales would be based merely on the lowest price...

...This, too, was a stroke of good fortune, as Dr...

...The business biography, especially, is a high-class form of self-improvement book...

...In the most engaging section of Lessons, Wang describes how, within the next several years, he invented one of the essentials of computer technology (memory cores), patented his discovery, and founded his one-man company in an unfurnished 200-square-foot office...

...An Wang was born the eldest son of a middle-class family in Shanghai, China, in 1920...

...Japan invaded China about this time, and Chinese authorities moved the university to leased buildings within the French concession inside Shanghai's International Settlement, a border the Japanese respected until Pearl Harbor...

...A man naturally moderate and prudent, he determined to build his business at a steady pace, one within the bounds of his own growing knowledge of business...

...His anthology, The Best of THIS WORLD, was recently published by University Press of America...

...It was an enormous success, especially on Wall Street...

...Yet what critic ever awoke in a boy a willingness to try, as Alger did, with the story of a street waif named "ragged Dick," who slept in a box in an alley near Fulton Street...

...Of course, such stories easily degenerate into the merely formulaic, becoming parodies of themselves, and boring as well...

...Shortly after arrival, it occurred to him to apply to study physics at Harvard...

...Thus he transformed Wang Laboratories once again, this time pioneering the office computer market, which Wang dominated for most of the 1970s...

...In the next couple of decades, thousands of kids who sleep in boxes in the stinking streets of Third World cities will do it...

...A sensible man, Wang appreciates the importance luck plays in shaping a life...

...My favorite passage in Lessons is rendered all the more delightful by the reader's sense that Dr...

...Today, although the Family Trust is some fifty-thousand times larger than it was at the outset, Marty is still the trustee...

...That is the charge critics level against most of Alger's own 100-plus books, and surely they are right about many of them...