Shane Parrish

There was a culture war.

So Harrison brought a group of Oreida managers to Florenceville and walked them through the operation, told them about the company and where it was going.

The Oreida people were surprised by the roll-up-your-sleeves attitude by senior executives who knew the details of the production line, not just the P&L.

Most of the managers who made that trip were still with the company a decade later.

Within a year, the integration was largely complete.

$500 million investment was repaid in about three.

The dream Harrison had written into that 1981 memo

A single sentence about finding an American company and paying top price had come to pass.

They showed they were not wed to any one playbook and they could adapt to the opportunity.

By McCain's 50th anniversary in 2007, the numbers told the story.

$6 billion in annual revenue, 57 factories across six continents,

and the United States, at last, was pulling its weight.

By the time America was won, Harrison was in his 70s.

He'd been building for more than four decades.

He'd always wanted to write a book about entrepreneurship, but he never got around to it.

But over the course of this story, he developed a set of operating principles that carried him through every chapter.

Number one,

Avoid competition when you can.

He saw that Canada had no frozen fry producer and built one.

He saw that Britain had no frozen fries and shipped them over.