Peter Baida was born on July 26, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland. After receiving degrees from Harvard College (B.A., magna cum laude, 1972) and Boston University (M.A., 1973), he completed an M.B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. Upon graduation he began a lifelong affiliation with the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where he took on diverse responsibilities, culminating with an extended and successful tenure as the center’s director of direct mail fundraising from 1984 through 1999.

Since Baida established himself within the financial and business communities of New York, it is perhaps not surprising that his first book-length project was on business. His Poor Richard’s Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump, published in 1990, was immediately well received as an entertaining social history that explored the personalities and business acumen of entrepreneurs and also showed the spirit of...