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Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel - Hardcover

Zell, Sam

 
9781591848233: Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1591848237 ISBN 13: 9781591848233
Verlag: Portfolio, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

The traits that make Sam Zell one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs also make him one of the most surprising, enigmatic, and entertaining mavericks in American business.
 
Self-made billionaire Sam Zell consistently sees what others don’t. From finding a market for overpriced Playboy magazines among his junior high classmates, to buying real estate on the cheap after a market crash, to investing in often unglamorous industries with long-term value, Zell acts boldly on supply and demand trends to grab the first-mover advantage. And he can find opportunity virtually anywhere—from an arcane piece of legislation to a desert meeting in Abu Dhabi.

“If everyone is going left, look right,” Zell often says. To him, conventional wisdom is nothing but a reference point. Year after year, deal after deal, he shuts out the noise of the crowd, gathers as much information as possible, then trusts his own instincts. He credits much of his independent thinking to his parents, who were Jewish refugees from World War II.

Talk to any two people and you might get wild swings in their descriptions of Zell. A media firestorm ensued when the Tribune Company went into bankruptcy a year after he agreed to steward the enterprise. At the same time, his razor-sharp instincts are legendary on Wall Street, and he has sponsored over a dozen IPOs.  He’s known as the Grave Dancer for his strategy of targeting troubled assets, yet he’s created thousands of jobs. Within his own organization, he has an inordinate number of employees at every level who are fiercely loyal and have worked for him for decades.

Zell’s got a big personality; he is often contrarian, blunt, and irreverent, and always curious and hardworking. This is the guy who started wearing jeans to work in the 1960s, when offices were a sea of gray suits. He’s the guy who told The Wall Street Journal in 1985, “If it ain’t fun, we don’t do it.” He rides motorcycles with his friends, the Zell’s Angels, around the world and he keeps ducks on the deck outside his office.

As he writes: “I simply don’t buy into many of the made-up rules of social convention. The bottom line is: If you’re really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be who you really are.”

Am I Being Too Subtle?—a reference to Zell’s favorite way to underscore a point—takes readers on a ride across his business terrain, sharing with honesty and humor stories of the times he got it right, when he didn’t, and most important, what he learned in the process. 

This is an indispensable guide for the next generation of disrupters, entrepreneurs, and investors. 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sam Zell is the chairman of Equity Group Investments, the private investment firm he founded in 1968, and the chairman of five NYSE companies. He is an entrepreneur and investor who is active in a diverse range of industries, such as energy, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and communications, and of course real estate. He lives in Chicago with his wife, Helen.

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Chapter One

An Impossible Life

My father was the first person I knew who had done something "impossible." At thirty-four, he escaped his hometown in Poland on the last train out, just hours before the Luftwaffe bombed the tracks, and then led my mother and two-year-old sister on a twenty-one-month trek across two continents to safety.

As a result, I grew up believing that anything is possible. And when you're not aware there are any limitations, nothing stops you from trying.

My parents each grew up in middle-class homes in Polish towns close to the German border. They were from large families, both of which were devoutly Jewish and highly educated. They were distant cousins and met through family, and after they married in 1936 they stayed in the region, settling in a town called Sosnowiec.

My father, Bernard, bought and sold grain throughout Eastern Europe. By virtue of traveling to different countries and interfacing with different people and cultures, he had a more worldly perspective and was more attuned to geopolitics than most of his family and neighbors. He was also an avid follower of current events and relied on his shortwave radio for news, since radio in Poland was censored. He and my mother listened to reports in different languages, including reports from Germany, Britain, and America. So he was very aware of the growing danger for Jews in Poland at a time when many of his more provincial friends and family dismissed the possibility of extreme scenarios.

My father was a realist, and a man of foresight and action. By 1937, growing anti-Semitism in Poland, and Germany's increasing aggression concerned him enough to take action. My mother, Rochelle, sewed jewelry into the lining of some of their clothes to use as currency, in case they had to escape, but they knew they would need more funds than they could carry. At the time, Poland had outlawed the transfer of assets out of the country, and people suspected of economic crimes were known to disappear. So my father took an enormous risk by making a clandestine transfer of money to a bank in Tel Aviv (then Palestine). To avoid detection, he requested that no confirmation of the deposit be sent.

A year later, by the time of the Kristallnacht in late 1938, my father had made the final decision to leave. But he first wanted to establish a broader economic base outside of Poland. The plan was to confirm that the funds he had sent to the Anglo-Palestine Bank in Palestine were indeed there, send those funds to a bank in the U.S. and replace them with more money from Poland. This money transfer operation was organized by a Jewish agency to help Jews move their assets out of Poland. To make the transfers, however, my father needed my mother's help, and they had to be very careful.

He went to Tel Aviv on a three-week tourist visa, and wrote my mother every day to make his communications back home seem commonplace. Every letter coming in or going out of Poland was read by police, so he had to provide inconspicuous clues as to what he needed her to do. Each of his letter emphasized the number "50," which my mother knew indicated she was to prepare 50,000 zlotys (about $10,000). (They kept all their money that was in Poland in the house.) One day, my mother received the typical envelope, but all that fell out was a tiny piece of torn paper with just a few words on it. It was odd, and she knew it meant something but had no idea what. Then, on the last week of my father's trip a stranger showed up, unannounced, on the family's doorstep. This was in itself always an anxiety-producing event. The man said he was the president of the Anglo-Palestine Bank, and he had a carbon copy of the little torn piece of paper my mother had received in the mail from my father, so she gave the stranger the 50,000 zlotys. He could have been from the police or he could have just kept the money. She had no real way of knowing how genuine he was. But it all worked out; my father returned home having completed his mission. He had added money to his account in Tel Aviv and transferred money to a bank in New York, listing both his and Rochelle's signatures on the accounts.

My parents each had six siblings, and they made numerous appeals to their brothers, sisters, and parents to leave Poland. But every one of their family members refused to consider it. Like many people in the community, in spite of witnessing and experiencing anti-Semitism, they thought they would be okay if they just stuck it out, like they had during the Great War. After all, the Germans were civilized, cultured people. Certainly the prospect of leaving their entire families behind most certainly delayed my father's decision to pull the trigger.

Then, on August 24, 1939, my father was traveling east on a business trip to Warsaw when his train made a stop at the halfway point. He saw a newsboy selling papers and stepped off to buy one. The headline read that Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a nonaggression pact. He knew with certainty that Poland, squeezed in the middle between Germany and Russia, would be attacked from both sides and divided between the two aggressors. It was time to get out. My father immediately crossed the tracks to board a train heading back home.

His train arrived in Sosnowiec at 2:00 p.m. It was a ten-minute walk home, and when he got there he told my mother to pack what she could carry; they were boarding the 4:00 train out that afternoon.

He took my mother and sister Julie to a relative's house in Kielce, about seventy-five miles away, and then returned to their hometown in one last effort to beg their families to leave Poland with them. It felt like a race against time. But again they refused. So my parents and sister started out alone on a nearly two-year odyssey. The Germans invaded Poland at dawn. My father had caught the last train out of Sosnowiec before the Nazis bombed the railroad tracks.

My family couldn't go west toward Germany, so they headed northeast, across Poland, into Lithuania. They traveled on foot, by bus, by horse-drawn carts, and by cattle train. They were often part of an early wave of refugees to enter each city. Growing up, I heard many stories of the help my family received along the way-often from my father's business associates, Jews and non-Jews alike. For that reason he always impressed upon us the importance of tzedakah-righteousness, kindness, and giving to others. Tzedakah saved my parents' lives.

In Vilnius, Lithuania, they rested and my father began selling grain to local merchants. My mother was tired of running and wanted to settle there to wait out the war. But my father never lost his sense of urgency to get out. He was right, of course. Most of the Jews who remained in Lithuania perished.

His ultimate goal was either Palestine or the U. S., but first they had to get out of Europe, and for that they needed visas from a safe country that was willing to accept them. There were few consulates left in Vilnius, and most were from countries in Western Europe that were already at war or under German occupation. However, there was an honorary Dutch consul named Jan Zwartendijk who lived in nearby Kaunas, and the Dutch-controlled island of Cura‚ao, off the coast of Venezuela, didn't require visas to get in. The bad news was that the Dutch...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1591848237
ISBN 13 
9781591848233
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
M.E.G Cards & Gifts
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paula@megcards.com

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