The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future - Softcover

Pickens, T. Boone

 
9780307396013: The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307396010 ISBN 13: 9780307396013
Verlag: Crown, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

It’s Never Too Late to Top Your Personal Best.

Both a riveting account of a life spent pulling off improbable triumphs and a report back from the front of the global-energy and natural-resource wars, The First Billion Is the Hardest tells the story of the remarkable late-life comeback that brought the famed oilman and maverick back from bankruptcy and clinical depression. Along the way, the man often called the “Oracle of Oil” shares the insights that have made him a legend–and describes the billion-dollar bets he is now making in hopes of securing America’s energy independence.


“Sassy...breezes along...salted with earthy aphorisms.”—Bloomberg Businessweek

“Boone’s analysis of America’ s energy situation is 100 percent on the money....The country should listen to him– now!” —Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

“Self-deprecating and audacious...overall, it’s decidedly informative about the machinations of business.” –Dallas Morning News

“A fascinating, eye-opening book by one of America’s greatest iconoclasts and entrepreneurs. Boone Pickens’ sense of daring and innovation has never been sharper.”–Steve Forbes, president and CEO, Forbes Inc., and editor in chief of Forbes magazine

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. BOONE PICKENS is, in his ninth decade, the very active strategic and managerial force behind BP Capital, one of America’s most successful energy companies. Currently, he ranks among the world’s richest men.

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CHAPTER 1

Blood, Guts, and Feathers

Booneism #1: Don't rush the monkey, and you'll see a better show.

Risk has always been a part of my life. I'm not sure whether I'm drawn to it or it's drawn to me, but at every point in my eighty years, I've been faced with a challenge, and in just about every instance I've taken it. Even my birth was a do-or-die proposition.

My mother went into labor on May 21, 1928. It was a long ordeal, and things weren't going well. The doctor, George Wallace, took my father, Tom, into a small room and closed the door. He had a grave look on his face, and my father immediately spotted a large book on a table. He assumed it was a Bible.

"Your wife has been in labor a long time, and she can't deliver. I'm worried about her. You can save your wife or your baby, but not both," Dr. Wallace said.

My father wasn't an either-or sort of guy. He was a natural-born risk taker and the son of a Methodist preacher. And so when Dr. Wallace, who happened to be a surgeon, told him that it was either my mother, Grace, or me, my father refused to choose. He pleaded with the doctor to try the first Caesarean section in that hospital's history.

"Well, Tom, I've heard about a C-section, but I've never done one," the doctor said. He pointed to the book on the table. "All I've got is a page and a half and one picture in that medical book to go by."

"We're gonna pray, and you're gonna deliver the baby," my father told him.

A short time later, Dr. Wallace came out of the operating room with a broad smile on his face. He had just performed his first Caesarean. The procedure wouldn't be repeated at that hospital for more than twenty-five years. Dr. Wallace was a surgeon-no general practitioner would have ever performed a C-section-and he'd lived in that small town in Oklahoma for just two years. The odds of him being the man that delivered me were slim at best. I've always thought I was the luckiest man alive, and right from the start I proved it.

"You've got a little boy," Dr. Wallace told my father. "And your wife is doing fine."

the sign read: welcome to holdenville. where the pavement ends, the west begins, and the rock island crosses the frisco. And that, sports fans, was Holdenville, a railroad town in eastern Oklahoma, a speck in the grand sweep of the Great Plains, where the open land was vast, rolling, and endless.

My father was in the oil business. Outgoing, generous, a great

storyteller, and a gifted poker player, he arrived in Holdenville at age twenty-five. He was a lawyer but soon realized that law was nowhere near as exciting as oil. So he became an independent land man, convincing landowners to lease him their mineral rights, which he in turn sold to oil companies. I was an only child, but I was always surrounded by family who lived next door: my grandmother Nellie Molonson; my widowed aunt, Ethel Reed; and my cousin Billy Bob, who was like an older brother to me. My parents were hardworking, thrifty, honest, and self-sufficient. They came from an era when a job was viewed as a privilege, not a right. I grew up during the Great Depression, but our family always had food on the table. My grandmother had a large vegetable garden, and each night she served fresh or canned vegetables. Some nights we had meat to go with the vegetables, and some nights we didn't, but we were never hungry.

My mother, Grace-the disciplinarian in our family-instilled important lessons in me early on, which prepared me for the challenges ahead. During the war, she ran our area's Office of Price Administration, which rationed gasoline and other goods. She had a great sense of integrity; if she said she would do something, you could consider it done. My grandmother Nellie was so disciplined that most nights she would have only one cup of tea and a slice of dry whole wheat toast for supper. She taught me things I've never forgotten.

"Remember, a fool and his money are soon parted," she said when I told her I was going to spend 50 cents on a haircut, a movie, and a bag of popcorn.

"Sometime, everybody has to learn to sit on their own bottom," she said whenever I asked for too much help with something.

As soon as I was old enough, I started mowing lawns, which I did until I could take on a paper route at age twelve. I began on a street grandly named Broadway of America with the smallest route in town: twenty-eight houses with a penny-a-paper profit per day. When other routes came open next to mine, I talked my supervisor into letting me take them on. Within five years my route grew from 28 papers to 156 and I had saved close to $200, which I hid in a hole under the floor in my closet. It was my first experience in the takeover field: expansion by acquisition.

In my first year as a paperboy, I found a wallet on the sidewalk. Inside it were the name and address of the owner. I delivered it to the man, and he gave me a dollar reward. It was a windfall. My mother, grandmother, and aunt were on the porch when I got home. They didn't respond as I'd expected or hoped to the news of my finding the wallet and getting the reward. They didn't looked at one another. They didn't have to. They were so much alike that their heads moved in unison, almost as if each head was attached to the others by a string. I pleaded my case over and over, but they sent me straight back to return the dollar to the man.

"You are not going to be paid to be honest," my grandmother told me.

So I had to go back to the man and give his dollar back.

"No, no, this is for you!"

"I know!"

"And you should have it!"

"I know!"

But I also knew better than to go against anything my mother, grandmother, and aunt told me. I gave the money back and headed home on my bike in a downpour. I damn near drowned. I got home drenched and looking for sympathy. I could play the pitiful routine really well. Aunt Ethel didn't buy it.

"If you hadn't argued with us, you'd have been back before it rained," she said.

In 1927 a major oil field had been discovered in Seminole, a sleepy little town just down the road from Holdenville. It had turned into a boomtown. By 1938 the search for big oil in our area had run its course. My father began to run out of luck. Instead of playing it safe with land deals, he started investing in wildcats, which were wells drilled by independent oilmen in uncharted territory. Successful wildcats came with big payoffs-but at great risk. Our family was soon pinched. The yellow Pierce Arrow sedan my father had bought for my mother during a streak of good luck was gone; our Chevy wasn't new anymore. Dad took a job with a regular paycheck at Phillips Petroleum Company. In 1943, he was reassigned to an office in the Texas Panhandle. My mother and I joined him in 1944. I was sixteen, loved Holdenville, and didn't want to leave. But move we did. I had learned important lessons from my high school basketball coach in Armarillo, T. G. Hull. He told us to play all out but not to dwell on either successes or losses. He taught me that when the game is over, it's over.

Our team did well in high school basketball, and I attended Texas A&M on a basketball scholarship. A little short and slow for college basketball, I lost my scholarship after a year and transferred to Oklahoma A&M at Stillwater (now Oklahoma State University) my sophomore year. At my father's urging, I decided to switch my major to geology. When I graduated at the age of twenty-two, Phillips Petroleum hired me as a geologist. It was a difficult time in the oil industry. Geologist jobs were in short supply. By this time in my life, I had mowed lawns and thrown papers. I'd worked on a drilling rig as a roughneck,...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2009
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307396010
ISBN 13 
9780307396013
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
296
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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Hardcover