Justin Kerby

This month, we read “Am I Being Too Subtle?” by Sam Zell in the Entrepreneur Book Club on Goodreads. It’s an autobiography, that accounts the life of self-made billionaire Sam Zell. Zell made his money in real estate and prides himself on going against the crowd and being an outlier.

Here’s the book jacket.

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 disruptors, entrepreneurs, and investors.

I think this book will be a nice change up from reading about tech-billionaire Jeff Bezos, hopefully giving our book club a look at another path to success. I’ll have my review up shortly.

My Goodreads Rating: 3/5

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My thoughts on The Everything Store by Brad Stone:

1. Bezos is clearly a visionary. His ability to turn something as simple as selling books online into one of the world’s largest companies is epic in every sense of the word. The thing I admire the most about Bezos is his focus. His focus on satisfying customers is what made Amazon different. Keeping razor thin margins may have scared stock market investors initially, but it clearly doesn’t anymore. It’s allowed Amazon to delight its customer base and turn them into brand loyalists.

At times in the book, he seems too cut throat – I’m sure most of you will agree that when he decided to hire an ambulance and place it outside of the Amazon warehouse during a heat wave (as opposed to bringing in air conditioning) was pretty heartless. There are certain ways I don’t want to save a buck.

2. More than anything, I loved the “Have a bias for action” mantra. I’ll always try to carry this with me.

3. I’ve found Amazon’s acquisitions very interesting – I’d love to hear others thoughts on this. Zappos treated their employees so good – it’s a different approach and I’m a little surprised they sold to Amazon. I think Amazon, with their purchase of Diapers.com, began to realize that the products that people need to order consistently (food, clothes) can be extremely profitable. It’s where we see a lot of their focus presently.

4. I have no idea where Amazon will be in 10 years. Every month they seem to enter a new product/service category. There’s almost nothing I would be surprised to see them enter into. I could see a bigger emphasis on Space travel/exploration emerge from Bezos personally. The book makes it seem as though that is his true passion.

5. I found Amazon’s survival during the dot-com bubble very interesting. I think they managed to survive due to Bezos focus on top-line revenue and market share increases despite the drop in stock price. Without him, and his focus on grabbing market share in exchange for short term profits, I’m not sure they would have survived. Today, Amazon’s ability to end businesses that have been established for centuries is remarkable. Their largest competitor, Walmart, should be worried. Their flexible nature and focus on data give them a major advantage. Their data could be their biggest advantage.

Also, I think their focus on trying to figure out how to charge less, as opposed to other companies who try to figure out how to charge more, is unique.

6. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in business as a topic. The entrepreneurial journey of Bezos is almost larger than life. While at times it can hard to relate to (in no way do I want to go to space!) I think there are some solid things to take from the book. Mostly:

-have a bias for action
-be obsessed with your customers
-have a high bar for talent at your company
-always be innovating

Favorite quote: “We don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions.” 
-Jeff Bezos 

My Goodreads Rating: 4/5

Join the Entrepreneur Book Club on Goodreads!

One of the best books I read last year was “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise” by Anders Ericsson.

If you haven’t heard of it, you still may be familiar with Ericsson’s work. Malcolm Gladwell famously credits his notion of the 10,000-hour rule to Ericsson, though it is not described by Gladwell in a way that satisfies Ericsson.

Basically, Peak discusses the best strategies for improving performance. Ericsson believes that practice makes perfect and that there is no such thing as innate talent. If you look deep into famous “prodigies” throughout history, you’ll find that all of them put in thousands of hours of work. While Ericsson doesn’t agree that 10,000 hours is the magic number, he does believe the underlying principle – if you want to be great at something, there is no shortcut to mastery, you need to put in the hours.

He also outlines a specific type of practice, called “Deliberate Practice”, that he recommends to anyone looking to improve their skills. It requires breaking down the skills needed to become an expert at something, paired with the consistent practice of those skills and immediate coaching feedback. You must keep pushing yourself, according to Ericsson, if you want to become an expert – simply repeating the motions will not suffice.

I love this.

That’s why I’m going to make deliberate practice a part of my daily routine. There are several things I want to improve on, which I won’t go into in this post, that I will begin to monitor closely. I will push myself and increase the difficulty of my daily practices, track them, ask for feedback, and keep grinding.

At the very least, hopefully, I can shave a few strokes off of my golf handicap.