Never undersell yourself. That was the first business lesson learnt by a young Pat McGovern, at the time an undergraduate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. More than four decades later, it is one of a handful of basic business principles, followed with uncanny single-mindedness, that has enabled the 70-year-old Bostonian to build one of the publishing world's biggest fortunes.

Mr McGovern, who had landed a job with a computing magazine in the early 1960s, had gone to meet the head of one of the biggest computer makers of the day. His interviewee asked him to carry out a census of the technology used by the rudimentary information technology departments - something the would-be journalist agreed to do for him for $40,000.