Success Quote by Andrew Carnegie

Carnegie isn’t offering a kumbaya lesson in teamwork; he’s giving away the key to scale while quietly defending the moral architecture of his own empire. “Great business” here means something precise: an operation too large to be run by brute force personality. If you “want to do it all himself,” you’ve mistaken entrepreneurship for craftsmanship. You might be admirable, even industrious, but you’ll cap your output at the limits of one body and one mind. Carnegie’s intent is pragmatic: delegation isn’t a virtue, it’s infrastructure.

The second half is sharper: “or get all the credit.” He’s naming the ego trap that keeps founders small and executives brittle. Credit is control in disguise; the person who hoards recognition typically hoards decision-making, too. Carnegie implies that the leader’s real job is to create conditions where other people’s competence becomes the engine of growth, even if it dilutes the leader’s visibility. That’s a hard sell in any era, and it’s especially pointed coming from a man often positioned as a singular titan.

Context matters. Carnegie built vast steel operations in an age when industrial firms were becoming managerial machines, dependent on systems, specialists, and layers of authority. The line reads like a directive to ambitious strivers: if you can’t share authorship, you can’t build institutions. The subtext is almost managerial propaganda, smoothing over the messy reality that credit and reward in capitalism rarely travel together. Carnegie asks you to surrender applause while the enterprise accumulates power.