Harlan Steinbaum

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended University City High School in St. Louis before going to Tulane University and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. I received a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration from Tulane in 1954. In college, I was in the Air Force ROTC, and upon graduation from Tulane, entered the Air Force as an officer and was stationed in Lubbock, Texas. After the Air Force, I went back to St. Louis and joined my father in the real estate business. (My father was a truly self-made man. He immigrated from Poland when he was a child. He and an older brother were sent to the U.S. by their parents, who stayed behind in Poland with the rest of their family.)

After I married, I was asked to join Glaser Drug Stores, a family-owned chain of retail drug stores founded by my father-in-law, Morris Glaser. My father-in-law wanted to grow the company, and the opportunity for a young, eager person like me was very exciting. I joined in 1968, and helped the company as it increased its footprint in St. Louis as well as other states. After my father-in-law retired, I became president and CEO, and the company expanded into new territories and concepts: we enlarged the size and product mix of stand-alone pharmacies, opened eyewear stores, and hearing aid stores. The company was renamed Medicare-Glaser Corporation (by the way, we had the name “Medicare” before the US government– and our business had nothing to do with the similarly-named government health care program).

In 1972, we sold our company to Pet, Inc., a New York Stock Exchange company. While at Pet, I became group president, with profit and loss responsibility for six out of seventeen operating divisions. But seeing the company that my family had built absorbed into a large conglomerate with a mixed agenda did not sit well with me and other family members. In a highly unorthodox move that many observers thought was crazy, the Medicare-Glaser management team bought the company back from Pet. We took on a lot of debt to buy back our independence, but it was worth every penny to be able to, once again, have control over our own destiny. The company continued to innovate and grow and in 1982, we became a public company listed on NASDAQ. One of our innovations was a mail order prescription service that we founded in partnership with an HMO, Sanus, and the New York Life Insurance Company. That was the beginning of Express Scripts, which is now a Fortune 500 company. In 1987, I became first chairman of the board of Express Scripts. In 1989, the retail drug chain portion of the business was acquired, and after a brief stint as head of Express Scripts, I decided to retire from active business. Thereafter, my wife and I took extended trips and spent time together in a way that we had only talked about while I was in business. During this time, I also started exploring the ideas that would become the foundation of the book.