Excerpts from “1,000 Dollars & An Idea” by Sam Wyly:
p 10 – “Confident is good but overconfident can be fatal” Perks, power and prestige can go straight to managers’ heads. They get seduced by attention and flattery.
p 18 – “My parents were driven by a uniquely American frontier spirit, fueled by optimism and an insistent belief that the future would be better … I simply cannot overstate how much this influenced my life and shaped my attitudes about business.”
p 22 “…earning money is only part of making a living … you have to love what you do.”
p 54 – “My restlessness was forcing me to live up to this single truth: I was not at heart a big company man. I didn’t want to be under anone else’s authority. I wanted to call the shots for myself.”
p 60 – “(Consider) what real estate developers did with land: buy it by the acre, the resell it by the square foot.”
p 63 – “Sure, everyone feels discouraged when progress grinds to a halt, but you can’t let frustration take over and and control you. Rational problem solving is essential to company building.”
p 63 – “Building successful economic models is hard, but they’re part of the game. More often than not, if it’s too easy, somebody else did it already … Wen you’re knocked down, don’t give up, get up. If you can’t be creative, disciplined, persistent, and rationally optimistic in the face of repeated failure, you need to consider a different line of work (than being an entrepreneur).”
p 72 – The difference between owning 49% and 51% of your company “is all the difference in the world.”
p 74 – “Make it work once, then add zeros. If it works in one place, it can work in ten places. If it works in ten places, it can work in a hundred places. You just keep adding zeros to the right side until you are everywhere in the world.”
p 82 – “Hire the best people, link pay to performance, and when they perform, pay them handsomely.”
p 83 – “There is just too much to know, there are only so many hours in a day, and there are many ways to do everything. You have to agree on the objectives and delegate BOTH responsibility AND authority.
p 86 – “Each manager understands what we are trying to accomplish, has his own set of specific goals to meet, and needs to keep his eye on patterns that allow him to see red flags. We also required routine audits … in a decentralized structure it is vital to have routine audits in place and a methos for the financial officers to tell the board the truth without having to go through line managers.” (Reagan: “Trust but verify”)
p 116 – Borrow $$, buy asset, sell half of stock, use proceeds to pay off loan = owning 50% of a business for zero net cost.
p 146 – “Surrounding yourself with people you already know and trust can give you a real head start … (however) it’s easy to surround yourself with people who will tell you only what you want to hear. Company people need to be comfortable with being honest, with telling you the truth as they see it … You need to be a simple seeker of truth.”
p 147 – Enable people to do good work and give them the freedom to make their own decisions. “Trust, but inspect … pick the right people, get in agreement on company goals, pay them well, then get out of the way.”
p 152 – Admires decentralized comapnies: bottom-up, not top-down.
p 153 – Whether you grow through mergers and acquisitions or not, you need good management at all levels.
p 153 – When buying another company: (1) integrate quickly and smoothly; (2) you need to find a way keep your new employees as passionate about their work as they were before; and (3) clarify your vision.
p 191 – “I don’t believe there’s a single moment in life when you wake up and, once and for all, know …who you are.”
p 195 – Sam Walton: “There is only one boss, the customer.” To find out what customers are thinking, talk to people on the front lines, who talk to customers every day.
p 219 – Sam Walton: “I borrow other peoples’ ideas.”
p 221 – “If you want to preserve and grow your wealth you must think independently.”
p 229 – The tragedy of the Commons (Aristotle, paraphrased): “free access and unrestricted demand create abuse” For example, common land will have way too many cows grazing on it for free.
p 243 – People love to assign labels to a person in order to “avoid thinking much about who you actually are.”
p 244 – “I read a lot … You have to work hard, apply yourself fully, do your homework diligently, but you also have to be true to your interests, your ethics, your ideas, your desires and your passions.”
p 247 – He loves “the Woodrow Wilson ideal of freedom, democracy and free markets.” Amen.
As an aside, I don’t know Sam Wyly’s stance on social issues, but after reading this book and knowing he’s got plenty of money and isn’t for sale to special interests, I think he’d be a GREAT person to serve in national office. President Wyly anyone?
Also, Sam Wyly owns the Explore Bookstore and Vegetarian Bistro in Aspen, CO.