Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel

by Sam Zell

There’s a baseline IQ level needed to work at my firm, but I don’t need rocket scientists. After that, what best predicts your success in my world is drive, energy, attitude, judgment, conviction, and passion. And an ability to cut to the center of an issue. I’d trade another twenty IQ points for those qualities any day. I’ve had a number of brilliant people working for me who didn’t make it because they couldn’t grasp how to think about a deal. I remember walking into the office one night around 8:00 p.m. to find a guy working on a ten-year projection for a real estate project we were considering buying. I looked at what he was doing and I realized how many hours he’d spent laboring over his calculations. His approach was ass-backward. I said, “You’ve got to be able to look at the deal and know what it hinges on to know whether it works or not. If you realize that the key component works, then you use the numbers to test it. You don’t do the numbers to find out eight hours later whether it was worth starting.” I’m sure his IQ was higher than mine. But that isn’t how we operate. You have to be able to effectively assess the initial picture and see where the greatest risk is most likely to be, or you’ll spend your life doing numbers just to find out if a deal will work. And all that time lost is time you could have been looking at other opportunities.