Originally published in Nikkei Asia's “Henry Kravis: My Personal History"
Chapter 2
Where our golden rule began
KKR co-founder George Roberts and I are first cousins. Our family shares the tradition of pursuing the American dream.
My paternal grandfather, Harry, was born in Minsk, which was the capital of the Belarusian Governorate of the Russian Empire, and later moved to London, where he ran a tailor shop. When his son Raymond, my father, who was born in London in 1901, was around 3 years old, the family immigrated to the U.S. Harry started running a retail store in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
As my grandparents' family entered the U.S., welcomed by the Statue of Liberty, the immigration official asked them what to do with their long Russian family name. My grandmother said their family name would be Kravis and that was it. We no longer know what the original Russian name was. I was named Henry in honor of my grandfather Harry.
The Kravis and Roberts families have close family ties. My mother, Bessie, and George's father, Louis, were siblings. George is named after our common grandfather who emigrated to the United States in 1903 from Latvia, then part of the Russian empire. He was also an entrepreneur who started with very little. He had to leave his family back home until he earned enough to be able to bring them to the United States. He settled in Muncie, Indiana, and eventually invested in and owned the Roberts Hotel.
My father Raymond moved to Tulsa in 1924 after receiving his engineering degree from Lehigh University. Bessie moved to Tulsa where the couple met and eventually married around 1930.
Tulsa rose to fame and fortune thanks to its huge oil reserves. It came to be known as the oil capital of the world. The city attracted a cluster of oil businesses. My father founded an oil engineering company named Raymond F. Kravis & Associates when he was 34 years old. He was very proficient at accurately estimating oil reserves. His technical expertise was quickly noted and in a short time, his engineering consulting firm was advising the petroleum industry across the world.
When the Black Thursday stock market crash of 1929 triggered the Great Depression, my father managed to keep his company alive. His experiences offered many valuable lessons for our own business, notably the need to be able to adapt to the peaks and troughs of market cycles.
My parents were gracious and generous people who cared about others without expecting anything in return. My father was the kind of person who was always lending a hand or even money to those less fortunate. He would greet all people, including elevator operators in his office building, with a hello from his heart while looking them in the eye.
My mother was equally kind. She was involved in a charity called The Babies' Milk Fund. It offered free milk to impoverished families who could not afford to buy milk for their newborns. She also took care of her elder sister when she became a widow. I was greatly influenced by my parents' altruism as I grew up. They were deeply good people.
George's family had the same values. The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is deeply ingrained in both of us -- so much so it became a core value at KKR.
We expect individuals to be good at what they do, but excellence is not enough. We look for people who are thoughtful about the world around them and the people in it. We look at how they treat people at a dinner table or in a taxi ride, the people they may not see again. You can learn a lot about a person's character by observing behaviors in everyday circumstances.