Like many words in common usage “influential” has become devalued.

Just about any individual, especially if they are also chief  executives are considered to be “influential”  these days irrespective  of whether or not they have ever had an original thought in their lives,  much less the ability to both articulate it and put it into practice.

This is something that could not be levelled at John (Jack) Clifton Bogle, who died on 16 January at the age of 89.

For Mr Bogle, the founder of Malvern, Pennsylvania-based Vanguard  Group, had many original thoughts most of which subsequently appeared in  print in 13 books as well as a plethora of articles.

More importantly Mr Bogle almost single handedly changed the way in which individuals and institutions save and invest.

Passive, or index-tracking investment vehicles were not completely  unknown when Mr Bogle launched the First Index Investment Trust (now the  Vanguard 500 Index Fund) in 1975. But these were still relatively thin  on the ground and confined to the institutional market.

The new Vanguard vehicle, the world’s first index mutual fund changed  all that. Individual, as well as institutional investors, could also  avail of the benefits of passive investment, not least lower cost  investing.

Irrespective of the ability of passively-managed vehicles to  outperform their actively managed peers without the need to employ an  army of expensive managers and analysts index funds enjoyed much lower  cost bases.

And because Vanguard’s funds were genuinely mutual the cost savings  were passed on to investors, so removing a significant proportion of the  cost drag on returns.

Nonetheless, although vast sums of money are now invested in either  index-tracking mutual funds or index-linked exchange-traded funds  (ETFs), and Vanguard is now one of the biggest investment management  groups in the world with over $5 trillion of client assets under  management, the concept took a protracted period of time to take root.

“Our index fund was derided for years and was not copied until nearly  a full decade had passed,” wrote Mr Bogle in “Enough: True Measures of  Money, Business and Life”.

“The new fund ...began with just $11 million of assets, and was  dubbed “Bogle’s Folly”. But it proved its point. The first index fund  gradually earned compound returns that were substantially higher than  the returns earned by traditional equity funds and would become the  largest mutual fund in the world.”

But passive investing was just one of the innovations pioneered by Mr Bogle.

It was not long before Vanguard transformed the way in which mutual  funds were distributed in the United States by effectively abandoning  the networks of intermediaries such as stockbrokers that had originally  dominated this function to distribute direct to investors on a much more  cost efficient basis.

And therein started a new crusade for Mr Bogle: a near relentless  attack on the pricing policies of mutual fund firms that was to continue  almost until Mr Bogle’s death.

Vanguard certainly practiced what it preached by not only slashing  the investment fees on its funds to the point at which they now amount  to just a few basis points but also pioneering no sales-charge free  funds.

And eventually the rest of the industry has had to follow both in the  US and the rest of the world to the ultimate benefit of investors.

Mr Bogle certainly disrupted the investment funds industry.

But he also did much more, especially in the philanthropic field  where he made substantial donations to Blair College and Princeton  University amongst other institutions.

He was also a keen historian who named the new investment management  company he formed in 1974 after HMS Vanguard, the flagship of Admiral  Horatio Nelson at the Battle of the Nile.

“I named our new company after HMS Vanguard, Lord Horatio Nelson’s  flagship at the great British victory over Napoleon’s fleet at the  Battle of the Nile in 1798,” he wrote in Enough. “I wanted to send a  message that our battle-hardened Vanguard Group would be victorious in  the mutual fund wars, and that our Vanguard would be, as the dictionary  says “the leader in a new trend.”

It certainly was - and is.