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

by Sam Zell

No B.S.

No one has ever left a meeting with me wondering what I meant. When I say something it is clear, candid, and often blunt. “Am I being too subtle?” is my punch line when I deliver a message I consider obvious. I’ll occasionally add, “I can speak slower if you want,” to ensure my point is received. I can seem gruff. I know that. And I can be impatient. I have an embedded sense of urgency. What I can’t figure out is why so many other people don’t have it.

But what I really am is an entrepreneur.

You can’t play at this level without some pretty big highs and lows. Of course, they don’t usually happen within the same couple of years, but they did for me in 2007–2008 with our $39 billion sale of Equity Office, the company I built from scratch, and the $8 billion privatization of Tribune Company, which closed at the start of the Great Recession and went into bankruptcy a year later.

In real estate I’m known as the Grave Dancer.

I make a point of shutting out the noise—doing what makes sense to me. I want everyone’s opinion, because there is tremendous value in being a good listener.

When you’re a repeat player, when your world is your business and your business is your world, it’s all about long-term relationships. In any negotiation I believe in leaving a little bit on the table. And in any relationship I believe in sharing the stakes. I’ve been

doing deals with many of the same people for decades because the goal is for us to all come out ahead. And many of my employees have been with me for twenty or thirty years or more because if I do well, they do well.

He taught me simply how to be. He often told me that nothing was more important than a man’s honor—shem tov in the Jewish community: a good name.

Not that I’m a saint. I’ve been married three times, and I admit that when I was younger, my career competed with my role as a husband and father, and my career often won.

There’s a line from an old movie, Wheeler Dealers: “You don’t go wheeling and dealing for the money, you do it for fun. Money’s just a way of keeping score.” And that’s how I see

it. I’ve always been much more drawn to the experience.

And hopefully it’s contagious. Back in 1985, the Wall Street Journal did a front-page story on me and quoted me saying “If it ain’t fun, we don’t do it.”

The next day I walked into the office and all the mailroom guys were wearing T-shirts with that quote. I loved the fact that they thought to do it, that they felt they could, and that they made it happen. That epitomizes the culture at my investment firm, Equity Group Investments (EGI). One of the biggest raps about me is that I’ve been known to use profanity.

I’ll drop the f-bomb onstage at a conference. I simply don’t buy into many of the made-up rules of social convention. I think people often get distracted by these superficialities. For example, I’ve been wearing jeans to work since the 1960s, long before it was acceptable. And to this day, I’m usua...

The bottom li...

you’re really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be...

work out every morning at 4:45, I’m at the office by 6:30 a.m., and I don’t get home from work until 7:00 at night.

At thirty-four, he escaped his hometown in Poland on the last train out, just hours before the Luftwaffe bombed the tracks, and then led my mother and two-year-old sister on a twenty-one-month trek across two continents to safety.

As a result, I grew up believing that anything is possible. And when you’re not aware there are any limitations, nothing stops you from trying. My parents each grew up in middle-class homes in Polish towns close to the German

So he was very aware of the growing danger for Jews in Poland at a time when many of his more provincial friends and family dismissed the possibility of extreme scenarios.

take action. My mother, Rochelle, sewed jewelry into the lining of some of their clothes to use as currency in case they had to escape, but they knew they would need more funds than they could carry.

So my father took an enormous risk by making a clandestine transfer of money to a bank in Tel Aviv (then Palestine). To avoid detection, he requested that no confirmation of the deposit be sent.

After all, the Germans were civilized, cultured people. Certainly the prospect of leaving their entire families behind delayed my father’s decision to pull the trigger.

Then, on August 24, 1939, my father was traveling east on a business trip to Warsaw when his train made a stop at the halfway point. He saw a newsboy selling papers and stepped off to buy one. The headline read that Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a nonaggression pact.

So my parents and sister started out alone on a nearly two-year odyssey. The Germans invaded Poland at dawn. My father had caught the last train out of Sosnowiec before the Nazis bombed the railroad tracks.

wave of refugees to enter each city. Growing up, I heard many stories of the help my family received along the way—often from my father’s business associates, Jews and non-Jews alike.

For that reason he always impressed upon us the importance of tzedakah—righteousness, kindness, and giving to others. Tzedakah saved my parents’ lives.

His ultimate goal was either Palestine or the U.S., but first they had to get out of Europe, and for that they needed visas from a safe country that was willing to accept them. There were few consulates left in Vilnius, and most were from countries in Western Europe that were already at war or under German occupation. However, there was an honorary Dutch consul named Jan Zwartendijk who lived in nearby Kaunas, and the Dutch-controlled island of Curaçao, off the

part of the code of the samurai is benevolence and mercy, and appreciation and respect for life. Despite the risk to his career and his family, Sugihara ignored his direct orders and decided to do as much as he could.

For the next month, he and his wife barely stopped to eat or sleep as they wrote out thousands of transit visas. My family was among the six thousand Jews Sugihara saved—the Sugihara Survivors.

It wasn’t until 1985, when Sugihara was an old man, that his actions were officially recognized in Israel. He was revered as “the Japanese Schindler” and received Israel’s recognition as a Righteous Gentile by the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority.

My family traveled thousands of miles, through four countries, over the course of twenty-one months to safety, arriving in Seattle on May 18, 1941. My mother was pregnant with me at the time. They had spent almost everything they had except for about $600 they had sent ahead to the Manufacturers Trust Company bank in New York.

The evening after they landed, my parents took their first English class; they were eager to improve their language skills and to begin the process of becoming Americans.

My father couldn’t read English at the time, and apparently the sign outside the hotel had read “Men Only.”

The day after my father died in 1986, my mother gave me his pinky ring.

My parents imbued Julie, me and our younger sister, Leah, with their passionate and enduring gratitude for the United States. Every year for the rest of their lives, they celebrated the date of their arrival with a toast to America.

worked six days a week, at least thirteen hours a day. His business took him to eleven states.

I wasn’t being disrespectful and could retain an ounce of dignity. So when we disagreed, I simply clammed up and refused to speak to him. We sometimes

spent months not talking to each other. It made for some very long family dinners, and my mother hated it.

I remember an incident when my sister Julie was in high school. She was about fourteen, and she went to a school called Von Steuben. One afternoon, after Von Steuben had lost a big basketball game, Julie came home from school crying over her team’s defeat. My parents were completely beside themselves; they didn’t know what to do. They just couldn’t conceive that she was crying because of a high school basketball game. It was a totally foreign concept.

My parents never dumbed down the conversation for the kids. It was an environment of metaphors, a Talmudic approach, where lessons were always given from examples or stories. To this day I tell stories as a primary way of getting my point across.

I called her every day from wherever I was in the world,

“Hi, Mother,” I’d say. “Sammy, David’s son’s bris is next Thursday.” “I know,” I’d say, “but I’m scheduled to be out of town that day.” “Sammy, David’s son’s bris is next Thursday.” “I know,” I’d repeat. “But I’ve got an appointment out of town.” “Sammy, David’s son’s bris is next Thursday.” Sigh. “I’ll be there.”

Well, the third time this happened, I followed her and saw her getting on a bus outside Walgreens. Apparently, she didn’t want to put me out, and she just couldn’t stand the thought of spending $3 on a taxi when for 50 cents she could use her senior discount and take the bus home. She lived half a block from the bus stop and could just walk from there. For her, it was all about the value of a dollar. A refugee never forgets.

Another time at dinner, she asked my sister Leah how much an outfit she was wearing cost. When Leah told her it was about a thousand dollars, my mother went nuts. Just the idea of spending that kind of money on clothes was out of the question. Both of my sisters are very sophisticated and dress very well, and our mother’s excessive frugality

drove them crazy. So of course they stopped telling our mother ...

I have an insatiable curiosity, and as a kid I thrived on wandering around my Chicago neighborhood on my own. I felt born to live in the city.

But I loved the experience of going back into the city. My first day on the train, there were eight seventeen-year-old Catholic girls from Wilmette who attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest. After about a week, every time I got on the train, they’d be in the same car waiting for me, and we’d ride together for about a half hour. They adopted me as their mascot. I had a more serious approach to life than most twelve-year-old boys, and I think that helped me connect with them. But I was after all still a twelve-year-old boy, and as you can imagine, their company made getting to the yeshiva a lot more fun.

Where there is scarcity, price is no object. This basic tenet of supply and demand would later become a governing principle of my investment philosophy.