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If you would work [negotiate with] any man, you must either know his nature and fashions, and so lead him; or his ends, and so persuade him; or his weakness or disadvantages, and so awe him; or those that have an interest in him, and so govern him. In dealing with cunning persons, we must ever consider their ends to interpret their speeches; and it is good to say little to them, and that which they least look for. In all negotiations of difficulty, a man may not look to sow and reap at once; but must prepare business, and so ripen it by degrees.
To become rich you must be an owner. And you must try to own it all.
Just like Gollum, it is your Precious and they are all “filthy little thieves.”
To become rich, every single percentage point of anything you own is crucial. It is worth fighting for, tooth and claw. It is worth suing for.
Ownership is not the most important thing. It is the only thing that counts.
What mattered is that I held on to every single share in my company. I would run the entire bloody company myself, write the articles, design the pages, answer the phone and sell the ads if I had to. But I would not part with a single, solitary share. Not for love. Nor for fairness. Not for loyalty. Not for anything. And certainly not for moral blackmail.
“Why doth treason never prosper? For shouldst thou fail, thou must hang. And if it doth succeed, why, ’twas never treason!”
results. Millions of dollars have been paid out in such bonuses over the years. But I will not give them a share. Not one. Not for love. Nor for loyalty. Not to be fair. Because capitalism isn’t fair. Life isn’t fair. The lottery of what genes we are born with isn’t fair. The moon and the stars and the gas clouds of Alpha Centauri aren’t fair.
Except for your loved ones or closest friends, it’s every man for himself in this world, in case you haven’t noticed: “No prisoners! The Lord will know his own!” Or, in the rapier advice of Benjamin Jowett, a nineteenth-century master of Balliol College, Oxford: “Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.”
Money making and fairness having nothing to do with each other.
If Peter and Bob had represented every iron I had in the fire, if our partnership had been the only hope I had of making real money, then I believe it might well have disintegrated almost before it began—
But in a partnership, the making of money comes first. Friendship and affection come later—if you’re lucky, as I have been.
I hope that you, too, dear reader, will one day be lucky enough to find such partners and enjoy similar success. But my earnest advice is that you establish yourself first,
as much control of any start-up or acquisition as you can, and then, and only then, seek pastures new...
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Ownership means never having to waste time saying sorry that a business didn’t work out. It means not having to spend weeks and weeks trying to persuade your partners that a certain course of action is necessary.
Time is the only thing we cannot replace, apart from our health and our lives. I resent wasting a moment of it.
If I was the majority shareholder, I would never permit the shootout to appear in the Articles of Association. If I was a minority shareholder, I might not invest without it being there.
In summary, unless you already own a successful business outright, then I do not recommend you enter into a partnership of any kind if you can avoid it.
It’s time-consuming and distracting. If you have any choice whatever in the matter, walk your narrow, lonely road to riches all on your little ownsome.
Entrepreneurs are always bullshitting each other about how great business is; it’s virtually an epidemic disease with us.
private company could never have operated in the way Peter was required to run MicroWarehouse. A private company lives on profits and reserves. There has to be a balance between investment and profit-taking.
Delegation for many, then, will only stretch so far. But for most of us with a desire to get rich, it will take us further than the inexperienced could believe.
Bossy people and glory hounds are mostly interested in building a power base so they can have yet more people to boss about.
“the Devil can quote scripture for his own purpose.”
They increase the number of "sick days” in a department—which is often a good indication that a toad is in charge and needs to be winkled out of its hole.
you must always be alert for the telltale signs that here is a candidate for promotion and delegation. They are smart. Perhaps smarter than you are. They work hard and they appear to love the work they do. They ask intelligent questions and don’t waste time gossiping and mucking about. They listen and correct their errors, and don’t repeat them. They want your job.
Do not seek a replica of yourself to delegate to, or to promote. Watch out for this, it is a common error with people setting out to build a company.
By setting an example early on with a program of carefully tailored delegation and well-deserved promotion, you will create an atmosphere of loyalty, efficiency and camaraderie that feeds upon itself.
Nonetheless, good morale, a pervasive feeling of “us against the world,” combined with the promise of responsible delegation and promotion based on achievement, can move mountains.
Month after month, in those early days, I battered myself and my staff into setting world records for stamina and effort. Did it make me rich? No. It made me tired, bad-tempered and arrogant. It led me to make errors of judgment which I would have avoided had I gone about it a smarter way.
I only started to get rich when I began to delegate and to ease up on my work schedule.
Then again, there are a lot more entrepreneurial role models, like Richard Branson, or the Google founders, to learn from these days. There weren’t so many back in the early 1970s, or at least it didn’t seem as if there were.
These are not people I would ask into the room to negotiate the sale of a large asset. They have too much empathy with the other side.
obsessive micromanagement scares away talent.
I’m not saying mine is the greatest system ever devised, and I am sure you will devise your own. You need great senior managers to keep my particular way sweet.
I am something of a Luddite when it comes to e-mails and texting and BlackBerries and downloads and mobile phones.
Not only is it bad manners, such interruptions break the flow and concentration necessary for real decision-making.
If you want to get rich, then learn to delegate.
Don’t learn to pretend to delegate. Delegation is not only a powerful tool, it is the only way to maximize and truly incentivize your most precious asset—the people who work for you.
One of the ways of making it grow is to carefully craft bonuses for those who work for you to achieve margin, cost and revenue targets.
Handing over to employees a substantial portion of the proceeds from the sale of an asset makes no logical sense.
generosity should be tempered with the facts set out above concerning risks and rewards. And they are facts, you know.
We must be very careful not to load our own sins on the shoulders of the innocents described in the last paragraph.
Praise, the ability to discern when a good job has been done and the courtesy to say so, fairness, integrity and camaraderie should be employed instead.
It takes more trouble than mere bribery, but it produces wonderful results.
Sooner or later someone is going to try to steal your pie.
My advice on competition is always to ensure that you want to fight, and ought to fight on a larger competitor’s ground.
If your competitor is smaller, try to hire him or buy him or join with him. If he won’t budge, take drastic action and smash him. If that won’t work, then learn to be friends and collude against the woolly mammoths together.
lives are “what happen while we’re busy making other plans.” And that is precisely what happened to me and a great many other people I know. We forgot we were supposed to concentrate on getting rich and concentrated, instead, upon excelling in the first sphere we succeeded in.
to keep my eye on the ball. The ball was to get rich. Instead, I decided to become one of the world’s best magazine publishers. Not smart.
