If you love, say, medicine, and find that practicing medicine is not enough, but you need to serve your profession and patients even more, say, by running a hospital or an insurance company or a research lab, by doing with a business that which no one man working alone could, that is the next step up from just being a skilled professional.

I once had a professor who told me that he was too old to do creative work in the sciences any more, but that he could still be known for the caliber and achievement of his students.

But the people who feel that a capitalist enterprise is simply a machine for generating profit, who feel there is no fundamental difference between running an airline or a chain of supermarkets--that I have no respect for.

And you're right. It is rare.

I've written here before about my friend who is a naval architect and the CEO of a major yacht design and construction firm. He has not only designed some novel and superb ships, he has created and grown a company which has built many yachts for many satisfied customers, while employing many workers.

The man could sit down at the drawing board and draw the lines of a high-performance ocean crossing machine of beauty and elegance, but then he went much further, and created and maintained and grew an organization that did this on an industrial scale, hundreds of boats from scores of designs, over a quarter century, amassing a remarkable reputation while competing successfully against many gifted competitors in a highly competitive market. And the final product, a work of art which could challenge the Great World Ocean itself.

There is much more here than just knowing how to build a sailboat. This is metaknowledge of a very high order. He hires naval architects now, and he instructs and supervises them, but he still occasionally draws the lines himself. There is an intense humanity in that.