Harry Stine

Harold George Stine was a 24th-century industrialist and one of the richest men of that era. Orphaned in his teenage years, he inherited a chain of hardware stores which he capitalized and later sold to finance his other endeavors. These endeavors were multifaceted and widespread, but can generally be summed up as turning spaceborne manufacturing from a niche industry to one of the largest sectors of the UEG economy. By the time of his death, he had a hand in everything from metal foams to fusion reactors to space station kits.

Although he earned several technical degrees, many of the patents held in Stine's name were developed by researchers in his employ. Many of these researchers were well-compensated and had an excellent relationship with the subsidiary companies that employed them, but a few prominent researchers clashed with Stine and went on to become harsh critics and rivals of the industrialist. These high-profile fights would eventually soil Stine's legacy after he passed away.

Management Style
One of Harry Stine's signature quirks was his management philosophy. Stine was, by training and education, an engineer and a computer scientist. He never went to school for management, and felt that much of the efficiency and cost-saving measures of contemporary management fads actually hurt business more than they saved money. To quote the man at a 2331 industrial symposium, "If a sequoia were to trim away its least nourishing roots one by one, it will soon uproot itself."

Stine's main holdings, and many of the subsidiary companies, employed teams of engineers whose only job was to crunch numbers. Stine revived the nearly forgotten career of the draftsman to turn engineering calculations into solid designs. And where most corporations left it to the engineers to produce reports and even presentations, Stine hired extra secretaries, graphic designers, and even modelmakers to turn ideas into designs and promotional materials. This extravagance ate into the profit margins, but its success can be seen in the utter dominance of any industry that Harry Stine set foot in.

A sharp critic of defense contractors in particular, and any company that relied on government contracts in general, Stine nevertheless earned a considerable fortune in selling specialized materials and machinery to those corporations. This skepticism only deepened later in life, perhaps driven by his abortive attempts to enter the aerospacecraft market. In 2365, Stine famously declared that all but the best-run companies was just two generations away from decadence and dissolution. Better that that a company be run by a man who founded it than a suit who inherited it and had no hand in its creation.

In the last decade of his life, Harry Stine began to dissolve his industrial empire. At first this involved a restructuring of his primary holdings, but soon Stine was selling microfacs to the men and women who managed them. This effort was stymied by both angry board members and by Stine's own son, who hoped to take over as soon as the old man retired. Harry Stine spent the rest of his life in one court or another, seeing that his final wishes could be done for good.