Stanley A. Weiss (December 21, 1926 – August 26, 2021) was an American business executive, founder of Business Executives for National Security (BENS), and a writer on international affairs. He has been described as a "self-made man" and a "multi-faceted ... multi-movied bon vivant".
Inspired by the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to search for gold in Mexico in the 1950s, Weiss became a successful entrepreneur in the mining industry before turning to politics as co-founder of the Citizen's Party and founder of BENS, and anti-nuclear advocacy group that successfully campaigned for the closure of unnecessary U.S. military bases, reforming Pentagon procurement, passing the Chemical Weapons Convention, and catalyzing President Bill Clinton's 2000 visit to India.
Weiss started writing on national security issues in 1983 and has continued to write regularly on a wide range of foreign and domestic issues for titles including the International Herald Tribune, The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Strategic Affairs'. He wrote on international affairs for the Huffington Post.
His memoir Being Dead is Bad for Business was published by Disruption Books in February 2017.
Early life and education
Weiss was born on December 21, 1926, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father worked in local Republican politics.
He joined the U.S. Army in January 1944, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, and was discharged with the rank of Sergeant in August, 1946. Weiss credited President Harry Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb with probably saving his life because he was training for the U.S. invasion of Japan when the war ended.
He attended Lehigh University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Pennsylvania Military College and the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He was also the Business Fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs, now known as the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Business success
During his time as a Georgetown student in 1951, Weiss was inspired by the John Huston film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to search for gold in Mexico.
Weiss had no experience in the mining business and struggled at first but developed his first key rule of business: Don't Die.
Although he never found gold, he found rich deposits of manganese ore, often braving dangerous or isolated conditions to secure new supplies. His business succeeded and Inc. Magazine described Weiss's 1977 book Manganese: The Other Uses as the "definitive text on the non-metallurgical uses of manganese".
Weiss diversified his businesses and in 1960, he founded American Minerals, Inc., of which he served as chairman until 1991. When the company merged with Premier Refractories, Inc., Weiss served as chairman of the merged entity until 1997. Along with partners Charley and John Gehret, Weiss also started Premier Magnesia, the largest domestic supplier of magnesia in the United States. In 2007, Premier Magnesia aligned with Giles Chemical, the largest supplier of Epsom salt.
Working with entrepreneur Ara Oztemel, Weiss also played a role in fostering trade between the United States and Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War by cutting a deal to import Soviet chromium into the United States. The Soviet-American Trading Corporation was responsible for up to eighty percent of trade between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Weiss invested in Harman International Industries before it went public in 1986. He served on the company's board of directors for two decades.
Weiss had also invested in other companies, including Footprint Ventures – a venture capital fund based in India that is run by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Neill Brownstein and his wife, Linda – and Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, run by BENS member Bill Rouhana.
Anti-nuclear activism
With the support of John Kenneth Galbraith, a liberal economist and Harvard professor, Weiss became the Business Fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs for the 1977–1978 school year.
Based in part on his work on nuclear non-proliferation at Harvard, in 1982, Weiss founded Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a non-partisan organization that represents the perspective of business leaders on national security issues.
In a February 2, 1983, interview on the Today show, host Jane Pauley asked Weiss why senior business leaders were becoming vocal about issues pertaining to nuclear war. His reply later became his signature catchphrase: "Being dead is bad for business".