Do People Grow Out of Feeling Like Outsiders?

Michael Moritz does not think people grow out of feeling like outsiders. He thinks what happens is that people work with a certain intensity in their late teens, their 20s, and maybe their early 30s, and that intensity diminishes over time. The inner being does not change. The outward intensity changes.

He first came across the pattern in Detroit as a correspondent for Time magazine. With a colleague he wrote a book about the Chrysler Corporation and about Lee Iacocca, the man who turned Chrysler around at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s and who was, for a time, the best-known business figure in America. Iacocca was the son of Italian immigrants and grew up in Pennsylvania. Interviews made clear he felt like an outsider. In the upper ranks of the automobile industry, he thinks Iacocca was always viewed with suspicion, most notably at the Ford Motor Company by Henry Ford II and other people who were much more members of the establishment. Iacocca never felt like a member of the establishment. All of it stemmed from his childhood. As the years went by, Iacocca began to interpret later slights, including not getting the top job at Ford, as the result of being seen as an Italian immigrant.

Founders he meets are often only 20 or 21, so background questions cover a large share of a life, and there is no chapter in the 50s to ask about yet.