ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The acknowledgments sections in my first two books were quite lengthy because those were serious books including a lot of work by a lot of people. This one isn’t and wasn’t. This was a fun book—fun to create and I hope fun to read—so I kept more of it to myself than before. But certain key thank-you’s are in order nonetheless.

First and foremost, this book never would have happened without Barbara DeLollis. I came up with the idea, the title, a list of names and a lot of my ever-eccentric views. Barbara then, under my guidance, set out to research each of these 100 fabulous financial figures, plus a good many we ended up deciding not to include in our final list of 100. She spent hours and hours on each one, and then, with my input, handed to me a first draft of each life story which I could massage into that which you now read. I’m too busy running a financial firm to do all that. I’d never be able to take the time. Was she a ghost writer? No. I’ve been writing for years—my books, my Forbes columns, and an occasional piece here and there—I love to write. So the writing is mine. The ideas are mine.

Barbara’s contributions were considerable, but any shortcomings in the book are obviously my responsibility. The conclusions and views on each of the 100 Minds and their roles in history were always mine. Where I felt uncomfortable from time to time with Barbara’s research, I checked up on it and always found her digging to be more than adequate. She was dealing and redealing in detail, and I used her as a resource. She also indexed the book, got the photographs, and just kept moving forward toward the book’s completion until it was basically a finished draft. Thank you and good luck with your future in New York.

As each story was finished, Sally Allen, Marguerite Barragan, and Martha Post (all regulars in varying capacities at Fisher Investments) put in considerable time editing. Their contributions ranged from simple grammatical niceties to curbing me in when I would wander too far on tangents, as I sometimes am prone to do. My father, Phil Fisher, racked his brain for me remembering some of the people from his youth who otherwise might not have been included, and so you have names I might not have otherwise seen.

David Mueller, formerly of my firm, prettied up the book’s appearance and format through computer graphics and guided its indexing. But it was really, and always is, my wife Sherri who took the bull by the horns, pulled in our first editor Barbara Noble, and drove the manuscript into book form so you now can read it. Without her push and guidance it would have died in a desk somewhere. To all of you I owe my thanks.

 

KEN FISHER