Sorry, I mean inherited in that the children of the founders ran the place.
My assumption (which I also need to verify), is that at the time this was written (1911), the number of companies run by heirs of the founders was higher.
What I'm trying to tease out is whether the distrust ("war", as the author states), is a result of a child who grew rich, and thus often had encounters where workers would try to take them for a ride, relative to a founder who grows up poor. So the latter would be more on the same side of the workers, whereas the former might have a bias toward a more antagonistic relationships. Pure speculation. Haven't looked at data yet.
Are they? My gut says its very difficult to conclude anything in a vacuum here, or even to make generalizations across the companies. I don't think we can simply conflate success and productivity and call it a day.
As an example, take a look at how many developers are employed at Twitter or Facebook over time; its difficult to look at that geometric growth in developers and exclaim that high productivity is self evident.
