You Can Do It! A Tribute to Stanley Dashew, Credit Card Pioneer and Philanthropist

We don’t call it a recession.  Usually we refer to it as ‘an economic downturn’, or ‘financial crisis’, and however tough things are now, most of us still have it easy compared with what our parents and grandparents endured during the 1930s.  Call it what you will, it has been going on for over seven years now and for most of us, financially at least, things are not exactly going to plan.  So what better time to take some career and business inspiration from the life of an entrepreneur who started his career at the height of the Great Depression, and, against all the odds, built a successful business empire?

I am talking about Stanley Dashew, credit card pioneer, inventor, visionary, entrepreneur and philanthropist, who helped transform the payments industry through the introduction of plastics and embossing technology.  Stanley must always have been a businessman and entrepreneur at heart, because he started up his first business, bottling and selling root beer, at the tender age of just fifteen. Before setting up his own business, Stanley tried out a number of other interesting careers, however, including law, journalism and sales. 

Stanley Dashew, Still at the Helm in his 90s

In an article in the Christian Science Monitor, written near the end of his life, Stanley relates in vivid detail how he had his heart set on a journalistic career, but was forced by circumstances to settle for a sales job:-

I had many career detours. After deciding not to pursue my father's profession of law, I wanted to become a writer. But I knew in 1936 that the Great Depression was upon us (even back then, we knew the downturn was "great"). So I gave myself 60 days to find a job, and set my sights on a job at an ad agency or newspaper.

It didn't happen. But I did get an interview with the Addressograph-Multigraph company in New York. I still hoped for a spot in the ad department. Instead, the company thought I'd be perfect for sales.

Although my deadline was up and I could hardly afford to be choosy, I was leaning toward declining. On my way to what would have been my final interview, I was walking toward Fifth Avenue when I heard a loud noise. I looked across to the Empire State Building and saw the body of a nicely dressed young man – about my age – on the sidewalk. He had jumped from the world's tallest building.

I proceeded to the interview, somewhat numb but no longer conflicted. I accepted the job. And you know what? I was good at sales.

A tough lesson, and one that nobody would want to learn at first hand, but it makes this powerful point: there is a time to follow the dream, and a time to grab an opportunity with both hands!  Stanley was a visionary, but he was practical and pragmatic too, and in the same magazine article he offered these five pieces of career advice:-

• Take calculated risks
• Keep an open mind
• Never quit
• Show, don’t tell
• Don’t bend the rules

 He was a creative personality who held 40 patents in diverse fields from mining to medical equipment, but what interests me is his vision for revolutionising the credit card industry.  Back in the late 1940s, although credit cards were already in use in the USA, they were pretty much still part local schemes run by individual department stores.  Stanley’s great contribution to the payment industry was to understand that the full potential of the credit card would not be fully realised as long as they continued to be made of cardboard, which had a limited life-span and limited technical capabilities.

He realised that a much more durable card could be created out of plastic, and launched his plastic card company, Dashew Business Machines, in 1950.  As Stanley very eloquently put it:-

Like the Dustin Hoffman character in the movie 'The Graduate', it was revealed to me that the answer to all my problems -- well, at least this one - was "plastic." I had to find a way of creating a plastic credit card.

At first Dashew Business Machines produced a variety of machines that embossed identification tags for the military and similar industrial uses.  Then, in 1957, Stanley became interested in what he called ‘the new-fangled charge cards’ that were starting to appear.  The banks knew there was a huge potential market for the new cards, but something was holding them back.  Talking to the bankers, Stanley realised that they had problems with the flimsy paper cards which soon wore out and became difficult to read. He had the idea of harnessing his plastic embossing machines to the new, state-of-the-art technology of the IBM punch card.  Et voila! Problem identified, problem solved!

 

Diners Club Cards, Old and New

Stanley’s resulting invention, the Databosser V100, was the first machine to emboss credit cards automatically, thus eliminating the problem of human error caused by handwritten credit-card slips. From an initial order for 300,000 BankAmericard plastic credit cards, the company went on to spawn BankAmericard, the first plastic bank credit card system, and led to the creation of the company now known as VISA.  Stanley’s technology was also used by the Bank of America, Chase Manhattan, and Amex, and made him a very rich man.

Stanley was a philanthropist who made sure his wealth was put to good use, and generously shared his good fortune with others.  He was also a keen sailor and avid traveller with a desire for world peace and international understanding which led to him and his late wife, Rita, becoming active with the International Student Center at UCLA.  Together they travelled the world and supported efforts to strengthen international ties and promote peace.   The Dashews went on to plan, finance and build the Dashew Center for International Students and Scholars, which was founded on the UCLA campus in 1998. To date, students from more than 110 countries have benefited from the center's services and have returned to their home countries to become civic, business, educational and artistic leaders.

Stanley never lost his love of writing and journalism, and in 2011, well into his 90s, he published his first book, an inspirational self-help manual called You Can do It! Inspiration and Lessons from an Inventor, Entrepreneur and Sailor. "Life is not about whether you fail," Dashew told the Los Angeles Business Journal in a 2011 interview. "It is about whether you pick yourself up after a failure and proceed forward anyway. Anything is possible with the right attitude and a dose of hard work."

Sadly, Stanley died on April 25 2013 in Los Angeles. He was 96.