Success Quote by Harvey S. Firestone

Firestone’s line reads like benevolence, but it’s also a hard-nosed blueprint for scale. “Only as” is the giveaway: this isn’t charity stapled onto capitalism, it’s a causal claim about durability. You don’t “permanently succeed” by grinding harder; you do it by multiplying capability beyond yourself. For a businessman who built an industrial empire in the early 20th century, that’s not soft sentiment. It’s logistics.

The specific intent is managerial: invest in people so the system outlives the founder’s personal energy and whims. “Develop” is a loaded verb here, halfway between mentorship and manufacturing. It implies shaping talent, building skills, creating leaders, training a workforce that can execute without constant supervision. Firestone is selling a philosophy of organizational immortality: your success becomes less a spotlight and more an infrastructure.

The subtext is also reputational. Industrial titans of Firestone’s era were dogged by accusations of exploitation, labor unrest, and monopolistic muscle. A maxim about developing others offers moral cover while still defending the company’s self-interest. It frames labor not as a cost to be minimized but as an asset to be cultivated - which conveniently lowers turnover, raises productivity, and stabilizes operations.

Context matters: mass production, vertically integrated supply chains, and the rising professional manager. In that world, “permanent” success doesn’t come from one brilliant inventor-CEO. It comes from a pipeline of competence. Firestone’s aphorism works because it flatters the executive’s self-image as a builder of people, while quietly insisting that the only leadership worth anything is the kind that makes itself replaceable.