On Your Side: The Story of the Nationwide Insurance Enterprise

by Diana Britt Franklin and Peter D Franklin

Book Overview

Book by Franklin, Peter D This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0964358417
• ISBN13: 9780964358416
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Enterprise
• Length: 291 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Nationwide's Bio A Page-turner

It's not often that a book about the birth and growth of an insurance company can catch the reader's imagination so that he'll be engrossed for almost 300 pages. With subject matter as dry as this, business biographies are traditionally yawners. Not so ON YOUR SIDE. In it, author Peter Franklin has managed to write a book that glues the reader happily to the page with vivid descriptions and clear prose. ON YOUR SIDE presents fascinating, larger-than-life characters charting new ground as they build one of America's most progressive insurance companies. Anecdotes about these creative and forward-thinking pioneers spice nearly every page. The story begins in the Roaring 20s with Nationwide's founder, Murray Lincoln, a visionary Farm Bureau secretary who considered selling life insurance to farmers and wound up selling them automobile insurance instead. From one employee -- Ezra Anstaett, also the first policy holder -- the company "mushroomed" into a giant conglomerate dabbling in a variety of businesses, from broadcasting to grocery stores, worldwide. John Fisher, George Dunlap, Dean Jeffers -- the people who guided it along the way are unforgettable and their successes as well as some of their mistakes make lively reading. Sixteen pages of photographs illustrate major players and major events. ON YOUR SIDE stands out from the world of business books as positively as its subject dominates the insurance one. You'll learn a lot about how to and how not to run a business when you read this one; and you'll enjoy every word.