In the last post, I presented some quotes from a New Yorker profile of billionaire Sheldon Adelson. I found an interview Charlie Rose did with him fairly recently:
(As a bonus, the same episode of Charlie Rose also has James Bond actor Daniel Craig and Alex Trebek!)
And here are some lessons he presented to an entrepreneurship class:
* Keeping your word is the most important thing in business.
* Work with advisors to identify a space which offers a high return on investment and then cultivate a business in that space.
* Entrepreneurs are “like an actor on stage. He performs, listens to the applause, which then dies down. He, then, needs more applause, so he performs again”
* “The goal of entrepreneurship should be satisfaction, not money.”
* “Challenge the status quo.”
* “The best business is one in which the owner is protected by a patent or by market share, because the product or service is so good that it is better than all the others.”
* “Be willing to take a risk. If there is no risk, there is no gain.”
* Accept “the honor, not the obligation, of sharing.”
* “Promote employees on seniority, but first on merit.”
The article focuses mainly on the political intrigue surrounding Adelson’s involvement with political action groups that seek to influence foreign policy as it relates to the USA and Israel. What grabbed my interest, however, were the paragraphs that focus on Adelson’s musings on success and the meaning of life.
Here are my favorite quotes and excerpts:
“In my sixty-three years in business, in over fifty different businesses, I’ve broken the mold and changed the status quo”
…
He attended a trade school to become a court reporter, and when he joined the Army, three and a half years out of high school, that was his assignment. He told the audience at the Venetian that it was then that his commitment to helping others crystallized. “I know that a lot of people think that guys like me succeed by stepping on the broken backs of employees and other people,” Adelson said, “but they don’t understand that we, too, have philosophies and ideals that we adhere to very scrupulously.”
…
He imagined himself at a “corned-beef soirée,” trying to figure out why he was here on earth. First, he thought it was to feel good, but then he decided that that was too selfish. What about helping others? “If I make other people feel good, I feel good!” He added, “I literally, mentally, went like”—he paused, brushing his hands together in a dismissive gesture—“it’s over with! I don’t have to think about that issue ever again in my life.”
In January, Bill Gates gave a widely reported speech proposing some intriguing changes to traditional business models. He discussed some ways businesses could improve the standing of traditionally marginalized groups and simultaneously make a profit. Now a new blog invites economists and other scholars to debate the idea of creative capitalism.
From the blog’s about page:
Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book — a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development — to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.
Here’s some of the main points:
* Economics isn’t a zero sum situation. You can “make the pie bigger” in a way where everyone benefits.
* Employees (particularly younger ones) want to work for a company that has a purpose beyond simply maximizing shareholder value.
* A small percentage of the corporate income tax could be given to a fund managed by business leaders that focuses on improving the world.
* The market system currently doesn’t reward making services that improve the lives of the poor.
* Creating solutions for the poverty traps that exist in developing countries would lead to explosive growth.
* Humanitarian solutions can bring greater visibility to companies and improve their reputations.
* Businesses should allow shareholders to have a say in the direction of charitable donations, instead of having funds given to executives’ pet projects.
* Helping a nation’s citizens can lead to favorable treatment when competing for government contracts.
* Corporations should apply feedback systems to their humanitarian activities.
* Grand challenges and contests are a great way to find solutions for problems.
This is a unique opportunity to gain wisdom from two of the richest men in the world. Maybe Carlos Slim Helú could join them for a future meeting?
I’ve listened to some of Nido Qubein’s books on CD, and he is one of the most impressive speakers in the world today. Even better, he has the qualifications to share the keys to success.
From his about page:
“Nido Qubein’s business savvy led him to help start a bank in 1986 and today he serves on the board and executive committee of a Fortune 500 financial corporation with 115 billion-dollars in assets and 25,000 employees. He is also chairman of Great Harvest Bread Company with 218 stores in 42 states. He serves on the boards of several national organizations including the La-Z-Boy Corporation, one of the world’s largest and most recognized furniture retailers.”
There’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that discusses Qubein’s experience as the president of High Point University, a private university in North Carolina: http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i43/43a00104.htm
The article gives insight into some of the factors that contribute to Nido Qubein’s success in business. From personalized birthday cards to free food, there are many inexpensive ways to create a customer experience that energizes students and faculty members. If you compare High Point University to the bureaucratic and impersonal nature of many other schools, it’s easy to understand why High Point is growing and increasing revenue.
I found this interesting interview with Mort Zuckerman from a few months ago:
Here are the main points from the billionaire publisher and real estate investor:
I think we’re in the 4th inning of a nine inning ball game. We’re nowhere near the bottom of this problem and nobody knows exactly where the bottom is but we’re going to have a very serious recession that’s going to go on for a couple years.
I think the fundamental strategic flaw in our economy these days is housing prices. This is two thirds of the balance sheet of the average American family. Housing prices have been going down at an extraordinary rate. They’re going to continue to go down because we had a bubble in housing that was unprecedented, a bubble that was once in a century. And we will see, I think, continued decline in the value of homes. It’s going to affect the sixty nine percent of American families who have homes. Right now you have nine million mortgages that are greater than the value of the homes and it’s going to go up to fifteen million, which means there will be negative equity or no equity in those homes. Nobody knows what people are going to do when they find out their mortgages are more valuable than their homes and we can have a major drop in consumer spending as people feel the net worth they once had in their homes has gone down dramatically.
Keep in mind that billionaires can make wrong bets. Still, it’s always interesting to hear the thoughts of someone who made it big like Zuckerman.
I found a post from the Freshly Tilled Ideas blog that’s a few years old. Still, the advice is timeless. The blog author dealt with a wealthy investor who mentored him and helped keep the business on track by asking a series of questions. The blog post linked below has more information regarding each point, but here’s a quick cheat sheet:
1. Who will be involved?
2. Is this a people thing or an idea thing?
3. Are they the same people that will ultimately run the company?
4. How much money will you need before you make a profit?
5. Do you really need a chief financial officer or can you get away with a good accountant?
6. Can you raise your capital from somewhere other than venture capitalists?
7. How can this business be scaled?
8. What’s the difference between a hobby and a business?
9. Are you wetting your bed and or are you facing facts?
10. Do you have an exit strategy?
Before Facebook, before MySpace, and before Friendster, there was TheGlobe. TheGlobe.com was a community-focused site that experienced the rise and fall of the dotcom boom. The book “A Very Public Offering” describes the process Stephen Paternot went through to get the site running.
I read through the book a few years ago and found it to be an exciting first-person account of starting a business during a time of structural change. Now, via Private Equity Hub comes an interview with Paternot. Whether they’ve had huge successes or not succeeded and simply moved on to other opportunities, I love advice from entrepreneurs who’ve seen it all.
Here’s a couple of great quotes:
* The Internet goes through evolutions. People couldn’t see beyond Yahoo for a long time, and suddenly there was Google. I couldn’t see what was beyond the tools that were available to me [at TheGlobe] at the time. But as markets get bigger, they fragment, then gel around more specific ideas. It will re-fragment again. I’m an active Facebook user and have loved it since using it a few years ago. But Facebook has something like 80 million users. Not everyone wants this one homogeneous experience.
* My advice would be that if you’re company is worth anything, $5 million or $15 million, and you have the chance to take some money off the table, do it!
Also, check out Paternot’s advice about succeeding big by replicating a successful business in a different country.
The 800 CEO Read blog provides some more information based on a summary from the publisher’s catalog:
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, OUTLIERS is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.
And an excerpt from the book:
OUTLIERS is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In OUTLIERS, we’re going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We’re going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey and soccer players, and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates, and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy, and investigate the world’s greatest law firm, and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don’t. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us–the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual–I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong.
The book doesn’t come out until November and it already has a Amazon.com sales rank hovering around 2000 (and it was like this when I first checked the book’s Amazon page a couple weeks ago, so it’s not just a bounce from the New York Times article). I thought Gladwell’s previous books Blink and The Tipping Point were ok, but I already knew about most of the psychological studies he referenced in the books. I’m really excited about his new book. I’m guessing he will probably interview Anders Ericsson, one of the top researchers regarding expertise and deliberate practice. Overall, the book sounds exciting and I can’t wait to get it.
He covers most of the important points in a fast-growing startup’s life:
* Narrowing the field of ideas to find the best case for starting a business
* Raising outside funding
* Locating hosting, storage, and fulfilling other technical requirements
* Inspiring employees
* Monetizing a large audience
* Automating legal requirements
* Architecting and scaling a system with a huge number of users
* Deciding whether to grow the company or sell it
* Developing a service that changes the world
* How to react to competitors
Like the earlier post on Geosign, it offers a cautionary tale of what happens when relying on a single company for success. In this case, it involved negotations with AOL, and later the possibility of an acquisition by Apple. The Audion retrospective also includes a couple of passages when the founders meet Steve Jobs, which give some good insight’s into Jobs’ strategic thinking and the company’s attitude towards acquisitions.
I’m glad this story has a happy ending too. From the conclusion:
If we could do it all over again, would we change anything?
You know what? No, we don’t think so. Panic is still here — almost quadrupled in size! (Okay, so that’s from two people to eight as of this writing, but next stop: NASDAQ!) And while we may not be rich, we consider ourselves incredibly fortunate — we’re doing what we love, making enough money to at least pay the bills, and enjoying every minute of it. Not everyone on this Earth is in such a lucky position. And while we may not have made iTunes, or the iPod, or retired to Antigua, we continue to follow our hearts, learning new things daily, and we consider ourselves seriously lucky bastards.
