He fled apartheid South Africa at 26—then built a $13 billion Fortune 500 company. Here are his rules

Stanley Bergman grew up in a country that didn’t make sense to him. Born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, to Jewish parents who’d fled Nazi Germany in 1936, he was raised in a household where racism was explicitly condemned—and then walked each morning to a school segregated because of apartheid. He’d come home to the working-class suburb of South End, which Bergman describes as a “totally functional multicultural environment”—until 1963, when the government declared it a “whites-only” area, forced out friends and neighbors by race, and eventually bulldozed it. Soon after Bergman got his accounting degree, he and his wife, Marion, a physician who’d been working in the Black township of Soweto, left for London, and came to New York a year later.

He was 26. He brought with him a philosophy of leadership that would shape his career and his tenure as CEO of Henry Schein, which ended earlier this month after 36 years at the helm. (Fred Lowery became CEO on March 2, with Bergman staying on as chairman.) Bergman took it from a regional dental supplier with $225 million in revenue to a $13.2 billion-a-year global distributor of dental and medical supplies that’s No. 333 on the Fortune 500 list. He credits that growth not only to acquisitions and innovation but also to the values of social impact and philanthropy.

What drew him to join t...