Transcript
Introduction
"Periodically, while surrounded by the fruits of our success, the profits, the power, the notoriety, I get frustrated, and I dream of starting again, but something stops me. Perhaps I'm too old. Perhaps I'm afraid it was all luck, or maybe deep down inside, I really do like the trappings that I've accumulated. Nevertheless, when I find that we just have to clear it with legal or had a meeting to keep others in the loop or we are justifying staff versus producers, I want to scream.
We used to have the Nike motto attitude: We just did it! Now, there's a "why we can't" lurking in the background. Keeping it from coming out while we grow is our #1 management focus today. What started simple, with time has become complex. A single straightforward policy has picked up exception after exception over time. Products have grown to overlap. No one's got an excuse, but everyone's got a reason. Maddening!
Why not just quit then? Chuck it all. Sell the business. Take the money and run. Play it conservatively. Relax a little. Real entrepreneurs never do, though, and I haven't either. Generally, real builders are so focused, one-dimensional, and dedicated. They'd have a nervous breakdown after two weeks of sitting around. Their challenge, even their reason for living, would be gone. Why would I swap fun, influence, challenge, and more money than you could ever spend for only a multiple of more money than you can ever spend?
I can't think of anything better than my current situation. Should I take the company public and have to answer to more partners, stockholders, and security analysts? Why would we want to do that? We're going in the other direction. We've already bought back Merrill's 30% investment in our company. The first 10% we bought back for $200 million in 1996. And the second 20%, we bought back for $4.5 billion in 2008. Not a bad return on their original investment of $39 million. Sell? No thanks. Answering to no one is the ultimate situation. So back on the treadmill, I go. Ratchet up the risk, enter a new medium, start another project. Improve, develop, expand, go for it."
That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk about today, which is Michael Bloomberg's autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, and that is an awesome example of why this book moved up the queue. He is unapologetically extreme, and he sets the tone from the very, very beginning. This book had been recommended to me over the years, and I wanted to push it up to the front because of something I saw somebody wrote.