BORROW FROM THE BEST—AND THE WORST
I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow.
—Woodrow Wilson
RMITs are smart enough to know that they don’t have all the answers in business or in life. Perhaps this is why they are such eternal students—and perhaps it’s the reason one of their common denominators is their almost universal interest in reading biographies of other successful people. They value those people who keep their antennae high in the air, and they strive to stay attuned to new ideas, new and better approaches to wealth creation.
The founder of IBM was someone Pat McGovern borrowed wisdom and accepted advice from. Early in McGovern’s career, Thomas Watson suggested that there was a huge market in education for technology end users. McGovern took that wise advice and subsequently founded Computerworld magazine, the cornerstone of what is now International Data Group (IDG), which brings computer information to those end users. He followed on Computerworld’s success by building an events and conference business to bring tech education to both the industry and consumers. McGovern borrowed from the best. From Watson, he learned his greatest business lesson—stay close to your customer. Always focusing on the needs of customers, staying in constant contact with them and their needs, allowed McGovern to build a $3 billion company that today has more than $1 billion in readily deployable cash, with virtually no initial investment capital—only the $5,000 from the sale of McGovern’s car.
Always borrowing from the best, McGovern recalls asking the head of a major publishing company what he thought the core principle of the business was. The executive said, “Making your readers successful.” That was simple yet radical advice, as McGovern notes that many in the publishing industry think the business is all about selling advertising or making beautifully designed pages. He never forgot that trenchant wisdom, and it has served him well. McGovern is also thankful that a top Univac executive admonished him for underpricing his research and advised him to sell his computer research widely to all the technology companies. With that counsel, McGovern sent letters offering his research to ten companies and almost immediately received nine checks for $80,000 each in his mailbox. Those nine checks provided him the base capital to start his business without having to borrow a penny. Pat McGovern instead borrowed ideas from the best—and therefore didn’t have to borrow from the bank. That’s why he has $6 billion in the bank today.
Like McGovern, El Paso’s Bill Sanders borrowed ideas and inspiration from Tom Watson. He says, “I read everything he ever wrote; I studied IBM and the Watson philosophy on the power and importance of human capital, and it deeply affected how I ran and how I run my businesses today.” In fact, Sanders told me that while running LaSalle Partners, the giant real estate investment trust company that he founded and later sold to GE for $2 billion, he hired more than a hundred managers from IBM. Even though they had little or no real estate experience, what they did have was a culture and training that, at the time, was the best in the business. He says, “I even started wearing buttondown collar shirts just like Tom Watson, and I still do.”
Sanders also borrowed from one of his peers while he was at Cornell University. He wasn’t exactly a straight-A student in high school—and as he describes it, he was “lucky to be at Cornell”—but as luck would have it, he was fortunate to have a roommate whom he labels a rare genius. Sanders knew that he could not catch up to his friend in engineering or physics, so it gave him a powerful motivation to achieve an even greater level of success in business. His silent goal (see RMIT Commandment #6) was to show his roommate, and his fellow students, that he could make it big in the business world. “My environment was a propulsion mechanism for me,” he says.
Playing in the big leagues forces you to raise your game, and you pick up a lot of pointers. Judi Paul of Boulder, Colorado, found her inspiration growing up in small-town Baxter, Iowa, through reading books. She says, “There wasn’t anything else to do.” There was no library in her hometown, only a Maytag factory, but there was a bookmobile that she looked forward to visiting when it rolled into town once a week. The tomes it brought to her town transported her to new and exciting places. She says, “Books made my world much larger than Baxter, Iowa.”
That love of reading—which she could not easily instill in her own kids years later, in the video age—presaged the creation of her wealth. She created an Accelerated Reader program that became the basis for her educational software company Renaissance Learning, Inc. Her aha moment came when she called home shortly after arriving at the University of Iowa. She told her father that having come from a small town, she didn’t know if she was going to be able to make it at the big university. She whined that her contemporaries seemed to have already taken college-level courses and seemed light-years ahead of her. Her father said, “Well, Judi, if you can’t cut it, you can always come home and work in the Maytag factory.” She says, “My dad didn’t know it at the time, but he had just delivered one of the greatest motivational speeches of all time.” Judi Paul found that she was able to compete thanks to all those books she borrowed from the bookmobile and from the motivation she received from her dad.
Gary Tharaldson, Fargo’s RMIT, proudly says, “I came from nothing.” Yet he builds, on average, twenty-five new hotel properties a year without an original idea. “I like to borrow an existing concept and make it better,” he explains. “Building hotels is not a new idea or a new business, but I found you could duplicate a successful concept, make it even better, and create one hell of a business. I have borrowed from Bill Marriott’s successes, but I have added my own unique touches. For example, I was the first to put the laundry room behind the front desk so the night manager could also do the laundry when there was little else to do.”
Jim Harrison of Harco Drugs, Bill Kellogg of Kohl’s Department Stores, David Green of Hobby Lobby, and Bernie Marcus of Home Depot all cite Sam Walton as both a friend and someone from whom they learned valuable lessons. Scottsdale, Arizona’s Bruce Halle also borrowed wisdom from the Wal-Mart founder, including humility. “Sam Walton was the best retail mind America has ever created, and I studied everything he ever did to see what I could steal. Every time I think we have done well, I remind myself that Sam Walton started Wal-Mart in 1960, the same year I started my tire business,” he says.
Halle has probably supplied many tires to fellow Arizonans, including Tucson’s richest man in town, Jim Click. Click, who owns thirteen of the most successful automobile dealerships in the country, says he borrowed wisdom and insight from both his father and his dapper rich uncle. He remembers vividly the lesson his folksy Oklahoma father taught him about quitting. Young Click called home one evening while he was at Oklahoma State University to say that he was going to quit playing football. Jim said, “Dad, these guys are just too good for me. I’m just an all-American average boy, not an All-American football player.” His dad retorted, “Bullshit—I didn’t raise you to be just an all-American average boy.” Then, after a dramatic pause, he said to his dejected son, “Okay, son, you’re right—I think I’ll just quit, too. Business is tough; I don’t want to worry about feeding your brothers and sisters or putting you through college, or providing for your mother. It’s just too much work. I’m done, too.” Father Click was so convincing that Jim said, “Don’t do that Dad. If you don’t quit—I won’t quit.” Fortunately for young Jim, he hung in and even got to play center for Oklahoma State, featuring Walt Garrison in the backfield. Garrison would later join the Dallas Cowboys as their star fullback. “Thanks to Dad’s psychology,” Click says, “I got to play with a great player like Garrison—never mind that it was because all the other centers quit the team.” Click didn’t.
The word quit was not in the vocabulary of Click’s uncle Holmes Tuttle, either. Tuttle was a member of Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet,” and he played a large role in helping Reagan become president in 1980. He also played a critical part in helping Click become the richest man in Tucson. Click recalls fondly that his uncle Holmes was the big family success story, who had left Tuttle, Oklahoma, and hitchhiked to California to make his fortune. And he eventually made his fortune, though like most RMITs, he needed a few tries and over twenty years to do so. His success and lavish lifestyle were legend within Click’s Oklahoma family.
Holmes Tuttle got his big opportunity just after World War II when Henry Ford asked him to be the first Ford dealer on the West Coast. His success with that dealership gave him a lifestyle that Click would come to covet and today enjoys himself, thanks in part to Tuttle’s inspiration and mentorship. He says, “Uncle Holmes had a big house in Hancock Park, fancy cars, fashionable clothing.” The Tuttles traveled first-class to Europe frequently. “In 1966,” Jim Click recalls, “Uncle Holmes was taking his family to Europe and he invited the poor relation, me, to come along. Having never been outside of Oklahoma, this was a life-changing experience.” Click’s grand tour began in Paris, where they stayed at the Bristol Hotel and ate at world-famous Maxim’s restaurant. Then it was London, where they stayed in the Dart family’s luxurious flat. After the theater and the opera, it was off to the Glen Eagles Hotel in Scotland, where tuxedos were required each evening. “I liked this lifestyle,” says Click, remembering what it was like when he was just twenty-two. He realized then, thanks to his uncle’s inspiration, what he wanted out of life—and it was more than a small Oklahoma town could provide.
When his uncle offered him an opportunity to come sell cars in Tucson, he didn’t hesitate. He is still selling cars today in the dealerships that he owns with his cousin and partner, Bob Tuttle, and he still loves every minute of it. He lives even better than his famous uncle did. When I ask how his life differs from his uncle’s, he says, “Well, I have a nice plane.” That says it all. As Sacramento’s sage, Buzz Oates, told me, “You’ve got to be at least $150 million rich to have your own jet.” Uncle Holmes would be proud. Click borrowed from the best. In his case, the best just happened to be his wealthy uncle.
Christel DeHaan of Indianapolis also borrowed inspiration from her extended family. She says, “I was inspired by the entrepreneurship of my mother’s uncles. Their success excited me. Their abilities to run their own companies proved to me that it was possible.” Jonathan Nelson of Providence has, for most of his career, been the youngest person in the room in his business dealings; he has consequently been exposed to many older, more seasoned executives from whom he has learned both good and bad life lessons. He says, “Wisdom truly does come with age, but you can also learn a lot that you don’t want to employ in your life and your success.” Early in his career, before founding the multibillion-dollar Providence Equity Partners, he met a very successful company founder and CEO who at the time was in his eighties. The man told Nelson that whenever he was sick, he would cross the nearby state line and stay in a hotel rather than remain in the comfort of his home. When Nelson asked him why he always left town when he was ill, the man replied, “I can only spend 180 days a year in my home state for tax reasons. I don’t want to waste a single working day when I feel good.”
That made no logical success sense to Nelson. “I vowed that I would never think like that or live like that,” he says. The man was a legendary success in business who clearly had vast amounts of money—more than he could ever spend or even give away effectively in the last decade of his life. And yet he left the comforts of his own home when he was under the weather in order to save a few tax dollars. Just as we often learn our most valuable lessons from our own failures or mistakes, if we are wise and observe carefully, we can also learn vitally important life lessons from the mistakes of others—even those who have been huge successes by virtually every commonly held measure.
One easy way of borrowing from the best is to read about the best. When it comes to reading for pleasure, Dr. Thomas Frist of Nashville, like many RMITs, says, “I only read biographies. I have never read fiction; life’s too short to read made-up stuff. I read biographies about the most exciting, accomplished, and successful people in the world and in history. Right now, I’m reading about Alexander Hamilton—a founding father of our country and America’s first Treasury secretary.” Red Emmerson, the billionaire timber baron of Anderson, California, says, “I have never subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, but I love to read biographies of successful people. There is always something to learn from the best and brightest in America—people who have experienced life or business differently than you have. Right now I’m reading about Alan Greenspan and John McCain.” Memphis’s Fred Smith cites George C. Marshall as a role model and mentor even though he didn’t know him personally. He adds, “My favorite book is American Caesar, the biography of General Douglas MacArthur, by William Manchester.” Smith credits his service in the US Marine Corps for the development of his leadership skills, which he has used while building FedEx into the $24 billion company that it is today.
Roxanne Quimby didn’t have a mentor or most influential person who affected her success, but like Fred Smith she says, “I have had heroes and heroines from history that I have kept at the top of my mind my whole life.” She admires two figures in particular because “both were amazing leaders and inspirations. I remember reading once that if you are going to be a woman CEO—since there are so few of them today—learn about Queen Elizabeth I’s life, because she was the first real female CEO. Granted, she was CEO of the English Empire, but she was a highly successful one. She reigned over England as their first female king for forty-five years of peace and prosperity. She was quite a turnaround artist—she had inherited a kingdom from her father, Henry VIII, that was in tatters. As the daughter of Ann Boleyn, who had been brutally executed, she rose out of the ashes in a very feminine way and led her constituency into prosperity and peace through her enormous courage and intelligence. I love her in a way that one can only love a dead mentor, but she has always been a major inspiration for me.” Quimby has also been inspired by and borrowed from President Abraham Lincoln. “He took a country that was divided and put everything on the line for unification,” she says, “and he was the one to say, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ He put his detractors in his cabinet, and a lot of what he did can be applied to the business world and to success today. In Maine, I didn’t have access to female business mentors, so I had to dream up my role models from history, and I think they have served me well.” She borrowed from the best.
• No matter its source, a good idea is a good idea.
• Read biographies of the best and brightest (and richest).
• Seek the counsel of wise people wherever you can find them.
• If we’re wise and observe carefully, we can learn from the mistakes of even the most successful people.