Business Brilliant

by Lewis Schiff

  The vast majority of self-made millionaires are different. They go right back at whatever failed because they know that it often takes more than one attempt to gain the insights and knowledge necessary for succeeding at anything. Each time they miss the mark, they bring themselves that much closer to making it on the next try. They end up becoming Business Brilliant because it is this rare quality of persistence that ultimately sets them apart.

  THE TECHNIQUE: Take 30 minutes. Look at the pro forma (Essential 5) on the project that failed. Take down a few notes on each assumption within the pro forma that fell short of expectations. Even if you feel it’s obvious what went wrong, write it down for the same reason you commit your financial goals to paper—to make it real. A concrete set of failed expectations, clearly written out, gives you some firm points of reference and sets the stage for the second or third try.

  ESSENTIAL 14: KEEP YOUR CHANGES TO YOURSELF

  There is a difference between persistence and banging your head against a wall. Before you try a second time at something that didn’t work, you need to consider what’s worth trying to change and what’s not.

  Self-made millionaires are almost unanimous on one point: When rebounding from failure, don’t try changing other people. Only 1 percent said they are most likely to “Try to change your partner’s behavior or approach the next time.” Instead they put the onus on themselves. About 7 in 10 said they were most likely to change their own behavior or approach, with the other 3 in 10 saying they would likely try to change circumstances on a second try.

  It’s a point that’s pretty consistent with all the 17 Essentials. Whatever happens, you should assume it’s 70 percent due to your own actions and 30 percent due to circumstances, because those are the only two factors you can control or change next time. When you take that next crack at anything that failed or fell short of expectations the first time, you will save yourself a lot of wasted effort if you keep this much in mind.

  THE TECHNIQUE: Take 20 minutes. Go back over the notes you made in Essential 13. Rewrite each element of what went wrong in language that makes you accountable for making sure it goes right next time. Wherever it appears that one of your partners dropped the ball, scratch it out. You need to take the risk he’s learned from the mistake. There’s little or nothing you can do about it, short of getting a new partner.

  ESSENTIAL 15: TRY, TRY, TRY, TRY AGAIN

  Discovering your full Business Brilliance is an “iterative” process. The term comes from the Latin word iterare, “to repeat.” Mathematicians who use iterative calculations start out with an initial guess at an answer. Then they run a series of ever finer approximations to get closer and closer to the correct result. The reason they use the iterative method is very instructive: Some equations would take longer than a lifetime to solve if they were computed by exact mathematical formulas.

  The same is true with Business Brilliance. It can’t be done perfectly and exactly. There aren’t enough hours in a day or in your lifetime to find the precise method of getting it right on the first attempt. You’re better off starting out today with iterative expectations. You draw up your pro forma, you make your deal, and you move forward, knowing that there’s a lot you don’t know.

  Maybe you succeed. Maybe you succeed only modestly. But if you fail or merely disappoint yourself, consider that you’ve just taken the first step toward homing in on your target. Now you’re better informed. You know where some of the pitfalls lie. The second go-round might reveal still more pitfalls, but because it’s your second time, you’ll be better prepared to deal with them, too.

  Remember that anything worth trying is worth trying again. And again. And again.

  THE TECHNIQUE: Take 30 minutes. Review your worksheets from Essentials 13 and 14. Then go back to Essential 5 and run the numbers all over again for a new pro forma.

  ESSENTIAL 16: DON’T PROCRASTINATE

  Procrastination is largely fed by fear of failure. If you can acclimate yourself to occasional setbacks and disappointments, it’s easier to move ahead because you’re starving procrastination of its fuel.

  Procrastination is also about perfectionism. Lots of people put off pursuing their dreams because it can be more fun to imagine achieving something great than to endure the difficulties of achieving anything even reasonably good. Putting off making decisions and taking action are the two most certain ways to avoid bad decisions and poor results.

  Business Brilliance requires that you take the opposite tack. You keep making decisions with imperfect information, because as long as you’re doing more right things than wrong things, even a bad decision is usually better than no decision at all. That’s the synergy effect of these 17 Essentials. When you set out with a strong set of goals and work at your Center, in the Line of Money, with a talented team and a strong network, the only real mistake you can make is the mistake of not trying.

  THE TECHNIQUE: Go down the list of 17 Essentials. If you’re procrastinating, find the one Essential that may have gotten you stuck. When in doubt, rely on your network. If you’re really stuck, you may need a new coach.

  ESSENTIAL 17: MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK

  Self-made millionaires are lucky and they know it. In our survey, 7 out of 10 ascribed “luck” as important to their financial success. Only career choice and persistence ranked more highly. Education, creativity, and putting one’s own capital at risk were all considered less important than luck when it came to financial success.

  Researchers have studied people who consider themselves lucky. They find the same personal preferences and qualities among the lucky that I find among self-made millionaires. Lucky people nurture their goals and expect them to happen. They make the most of opportunities that come their way. They associate with other people who consider themselves lucky. They turn their misfortune into good luck by persevering and seeing the good side of even the worst circumstances.

  Business Brilliance and making your own luck are really the same thing. They both draw upon the ordinary, mundane practices laid out by LEAP: Learning, Earning, Assistance, and Persistence.

  LEAP, at long last, is just another way to spell LUCK.

  THE TECHNIQUE: Double down on what you do best. Press your advantage whenever and wherever you have the advantage. Work your network. Try and try again. Above all: Ask. Ask for what you want. Ask even when it feels uncomfortable. Ask for more than what you need. Ask for what you’re afraid to ask for, and ask for it more than once. Ask until the word “No” loses its sting. When you can laugh at “No” and look at each setback as a source of instruction, then you’ll know you’ve become one of the lucky people destined to become Business Brilliant.

  Notes

  The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

  CHAPTER 1: “BUSINESS BRILLIANT”

  3 His multiple Super Bowl wins and lifetime game-winning average of .683: Pro Football Hall of Fame (http://www.profootballhof.com/).

  3 “arguably the greatest coach in the history of the league”: From a personal interview with Charley Casserly on March 20, 2012.

  4 “We specialized in vision, not just sight”: From a personal interview with Dr. Harry Wachs on March 21, 2012.

  4 Redskins scouts traveled the country carrying a Wachs-Berger toolkit: Ken Denlinger’s roundup of advanced football training techniques in his article, “FOOTBALL SMARTS: Are Computers and Thick Playbooks Necessary When Team That Blocks and Tackles Best Usually Wins?” in the Los Angeles Times, January 10, 1988.

  4 “football brilliant”: a term Coach Gibbs uses often. I first heard him use it at a speech in Miami on June 5, 2011. He also uses it in his book Racing to Win to describe great football strategists.

  6 For the past 25 years, Russ Prince has worked: I met Russ Prince in 2000. Even though we worked together for several years he wouldn’t speak to me directly for the first year of our relationship. We
worked through an intermediary. Eventually, we began working directly with each other and became friends, colleagues, and eventually coauthors and business partners. Most of what I know about wealthy people I’ve learned from Prince. Everything I know about Prince, I’ve learned from him firsthand because no one has ever written about him. There’s a pretty thorough, though out of date, bibliography of Russ’s work at http://russalanprince.com/bibliography.html.

  7 Prince and I go back a ways: A good place for chocolate milkshakes and reasonably priced food in New York is Burger Heaven at 20 East 49th Street.

  7 In 2006, Prince and I: Russ Alan Prince and Lewis Schiff, The Influence of Affluence: How the New Rich Are Changing America (New York: Broadway Books, 2009).

  9 or the way a poison gas: I am indebted to Harvard professor Amy C. Edmondson for this simple and memorable example of synergy. It appears on page 40 of her book, A Fuller Explanation: The Synergetic Geometry of R. Buckminster Fuller (Pueblo, CO: Emergentworld, 2009). On the same page, Edmondson quotes Fuller’s elegant definition of the word: “Synergy means the behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.”

  11 In May 2003, Dr. Richard Shannon: The main source for this story is Naida Grunden, The Pittsburgh Way to Efficient Healthcare: Improving Patient Care Using Toyota-based Methods (New York: Healthcare Performance, 2008). See also Bernard Wysocki Jr., “Industrial Strength: To Fix Health Care, Hospitals Take Tips from Factory Floor,” Wall Street Journal, April 9, 2004; Douglas McCarthy and David Blumenthal, “Case Study: Perfecting Patient Care at Allegheny General Hospital and the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative” (Commonwealth Fund, 2006), http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Innovations/Case-Studies/2008/Sep/Case-Study—Perfecting-Patient-Care-at-Allegheny-General-Hospital-and-the-Pittsburgh-Regional-Health.aspx.

  11 Tens of thousands of hospital patients: The 250 deaths per day figure was attributed to the Centers for Disease Control and quoted in a National Public Radio interview with Dr. Richard Shannon, “Q & A: How One Hospital Cut Infections,” May 11, 2006.

  14 In the past six years: According to the Federal Reserve, household net worth peaked at $67.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2007. Then it lost $16.2 trillion over the next 18 months, cratering at $51.3 trillion during the first quarter of 2009 (on March 6, 2009, the Dow Jones closed at a 12-year low of 6,547.05). Three years later, during the first quarter of 2012, household net worth had climbed back to $62.9 trillion, which was still $4.6 trillion below the 2007 peak. Flow of Funds Accounts of the United States (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, June 7, 2012). See also Federal Reserve Bulletin, 2nd ed., vol. 98 (Washington, DC: Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, June 2012).

  14 The Census Bureau estimates: Alfred Gottschalck and Marina Vornovytskyy, “Changes in Household Net Worth from 2005 to 2010,” Random Samplings: The Official Blog of the U.S. Census, June 18, 2012, http://blogs.census.gov/2012/06/18/changes-in-household-net-worth-from-2005-to-2010/.

  14 White-collar unemployment: Marios Michaelides and Peter R. Mueser, “Recent Trends in the Characteristics of Unemployment Insurance Recipients,” Monthly Labor Review (Washington, DC: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, July 2012). See also Lawrence Mishel, “White-Collar Unemployment Double Its Pre-recession Level for Almost 2.5 Years,” Economic Policy Institute, Economic Snapshot, September 28, 2011, http://www.epi.org/publication/white-collar-unemployment-level/.

  16 The vast majority of hospitals: Dr. Peter Pronovost of Johns Hopkins, a leader in the movement to reduce hospital infections, told ABC News in 2011, “Mistakes happen at every hospital. Our current response is to tell the doctors and nurses to be careful instead of making it impossible for mistakes to happen.” Pronovost wants device makers and systems engineers to be hired to improve patient safety by implementing synergistic processes like the Toyota Way. “We need to invest in the science of health care delivery,” Pronovost said. “The U.S. spends two pennies on the science of health care delivery for every dollar it spends on finding new genes.” Katie Moisse, “Hospital Errors Common and Underreported,” ABC News Medical Unit, April 7, 2011.

  Pronovost blames arrogance among doctors and healthcare executives for producing a set of barriers to the development of “measurable, achievable and routine ways to prevent patient harm.. . . It’s unconscionable that so many people are dying because of these arrogance barriers,” Pronovost said in 2010. “You can’t have arrogance in a model for accountability.” From “Bringing True Accountability to Health Care: Lessons from Efforts to Reduce Hospital-Acquired Infections,” Johns Hopkins Medicine news release, July 13, 2010, http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/

  bringing_true_accountability_to_health_care_lessons_

  from_efforts_to_reduce_hospital_acquired_infections/.

  17 It could be a question of motivation: From Making Health Care Safer: A Critical Analysis of Patient Safety Practices (Rockville, MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2001), 25. “ [It] is undeniable that some industries, most notably commercial aviation, have safety records far superior to that of healthcare.”

  17 You’ve probably never heard: Haque’s article, “The Economic Roots of Your Life Crisis,” appeared in the March 16, 2012, entry of Haque’s Harvard Business Review blog, http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/.

  18 For the first time in U.S. history: In December 2001, 71 percent of Americans thought it was likely that children would go on to have better lives than their parents. By May 2011, that number had dropped to 44 percent, and was only 37 percent among households with annual incomes in excess of $75,000. Elizabeth Mendes, “In U.S., Optimism about Future for Youth Reaches All-Time Low: The Highest-Income Americans Are Among the Least Optimistic about the Future,” Gallup Politics, May 2, 2011, http://www.gallup.com/poll/147350/Optimism-Future-Youth-Reaches-Time-Low.aspx.

  19 And most people running hospitals: Richard Shannon used the phrase “theory of inevitability” in his May 11, 2006, interview with NPR and in the chapter he authored for Infection Prevention and Control: Current Research and Practice (Oakbrook Terrace, IL: Joint Commission Resources, 2007).

  CHAPTER 2: DO WHAT YOU LOVE, BUT FOLLOW THE MONEY

  23 If you had been one of Guy Laliberté’s parents: Most of the facts and figures about Cirque du Soleil have been provided by the company. Details about Laliberté and Cirque’s early history are drawn from the company’s authorized history, Tony Babinski and Kristian Manchester, Cirque du Soleil: 20 Years under the Sun—An Authorized History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004).

  24 Le Grand Tour had been conceived: Doug Fischer authored an excellent account of Cirque’s early years from a distinctly Canadian perspective in the Ottawa Citizen, October 4, 1988.

  25 Thanks to his majority interest in Cirque’s parent company: As of March 2012, Forbes put Laliberté’s net worth at $2.6 billion, making his fortune the 11th largest in Canada and 464th in the world.

  26 Marsha Sinetar said the idea came to her: From Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood (New York: Dell, 1989). Sinetar went on to publish more than twenty books, including one titled To Build the Life You Want, Create the Work You Love: The Spiritual Dimension of Entrepreneuring (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).

  28 And that was the case with Guy Laliberté: For more on the story of Cirque du Soleil and its place in circus history, the best available book is Ernest J. Albrecht, The New American Circus (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995).

  30 Laliberté and Caron split on bitter terms: Caron’s disparaging remarks about Laliberté appeared in Ian Halperin’s unauthorized 2009 biography Guy Laliberté: The Fabulous Life of the Creator of Cirque du Soleil (Montreal: Transit, 2009). Halperin’s book contained some salacious passages regarding sex and drugs at Cirque parties, and other allegations about Laliberté’s personal life. Laliberté and Halperin took legal action against each other and then settled out of court in 2011. Halperin apologized to
Laliberté without retracting any of the book’s contents.

  31 Hirst was born into even less auspicious circumstances: For Hirst’s well-documented personal history, see Richard Lacayo, “Damien Hirst: Bad Boy Makes Good,” Time, September 15, 2008, and Donald N. Thompson, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  32 By then Hirst’s reputation had been solidified: The $12 Million Stuffed Shark includes a story on page 68 about a friend of Hirst’s named A. A. Gill, who wanted to sell off a portrait of Joseph Stalin that he had bought for £200. Christie’s auction house refused to handle the painting because of its political nature, but Gill thought to ask, What if it were a Stalin portrait done by Hirst? Christie’s replied they’d be happy to auction anything by Hirst. So Gill asked his friend to do him a little favor. Hirst painted a red clown nose on the Stalin portrait and signed it. Christie’s estimated the portrait’s top value at £12,000, but after 17 competing bids, it sold for £140,000. Writes Thompson, “It was, after all, a signed Hirst.”

  33 Around the time of that announcement: From “Dumping the Shark,” New York Times editorial, July 20, 2007.

  35 In the spring of 1969: From Deci’s own account in his excellent book, coauthored with Richard Flaste, Why We Do What We Do: The Dynamics of Personal Autonomy (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995).

  36 “[This is] what millions of us”: From Alfie Kohn’s bestseller, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).

  41 O’Hurley appeared in just 20: Episode figures are from the Internet Movie Database, www.imdb.com.

  41 Patrick Warburton, who played: Susan King, “A Life beyond Puddy,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2001.