Amazon.co.uk Review
Review
Jeff Sagansky, CEO, Paxson Communications
Philip F. Anschutz, Chairman and CEO, The Anschutz Corporation
Spencer Hays, Founder, Tom James Company, Executive Chairman, Southwestern/Great American, Inc., Chairman, Athlon Publications
Product Description
–Gordon Bethune
Chairman of the Board and CEO
Continental Airlines
Self–made billionaires all have one thing in common: they excel at making money. But hard work, thrift, and focus are only part of the story–you hold the rest of it in your hands. How to Be a Billionaire is the first comprehensive picture of the real strategies and tactics that built the great business fortunes of modern times. Packed with engaging accounts of titans like Ross Perot, Richard Branson, Phil Anschutz, John D. Rockefeller, Wayne Huizenga, Bill Gates, J. Paul Getty, and Kirk Kerkorian, How to Be a Billionaire will show you principles that can increase your wealth and business acumen to the mogul level.
How to Be a Billionaire looks at the careers, the methods, and the minds of self–made billionaires to distill the common keys to titanic accumulations of wealth. Each chapter explores a specific strategy and brings it to life through extended profiles of past and present masters of the art of making money.
Do you think innovation is the best way to prosper in business? Sam Walton, founder of the Wal–Mart retail chain, would tell you otherwise. The key to Walton′s success was supreme devotion to copying the methods of other successful discounters.
What could be less complicated than buying low and selling high? But the ascent of
Warren Buffett, John Kluge, and Laurence Tisch to billionaire status depended on much more than an eye for good bargains. And if you′re looking to thrive by outmanaging the competition, look no further than Richard Branson. When the founder of Virgin Atlantic needed to reduce his staff by 400 people, 600 volunteered to take off a few months on sabbatical.
How to Be a Billionaire identifies the methods, beliefs, and behaviors every businessperson must understand and emulate to reach the pinnacle of riches. A manual for success that can benefit every aspiring tycoon, it is a fascinating read for anyone intrigued by wealth and how it′s gotten.
Praise for HOW TO BE A BILLIONAIRE
"How to Be a Billionaire offers fascinating insight into the subject of building wealth. As a result of his exhaustive research, Martin Fridson is able to explain the wealth–creation process from a unique perspective. As the reader will discover, there is no single formula for success, but there are certain categories into which these concepts can be placed. My personal advice is to remember the words of Winston Churchill who said, ′Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.′"
–Ross Perot
"Martin Fridson has created the ultimate roadmap to the American Dream. He comes as close to extracting a formula for the acquisition of wealth as any book I have ever read."
–Jeff Sagansky
CEO, Paxson Communications
"Martin Fridson′s book has a number of very insightful and thoughtful analyses, something you don′t pick up in many business schools."
–Philip F. Anschutz
Chairman and CEO, The Anschutz Corporation
"How to Be a Billionaire is a powerful arsenal of dead–on strategies for increasing your personal wealth and business acumen. Marty Fridson details the tactics of self–made billionaires with great intelligence and insight. I wish this book had been available when I was starting my career."
–Spencer Hays
Founder, Tom James Company
Executive Chairman, Southwestern/Great American, Inc.
Chairman, Athlon Publications
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
"A truly enlightening work filled with fundamental strategies that have worked for others. Martin Fridson documents the essential principles inherent in every billionaire’s success."–Gordon Bethune, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Continental Airlines
"Martin Fridson has created the ultimate road map to the American Dream. He comes as close to extracting a formula for the acquisition of wealth as any book I have ever read."–Jeff Sagansky, CEO, Paxson Communications
"Martin Fridson’s book has a number of very insightful and thoughtful analyses, something you don’t pick up in many business schools." –Philip F. Anschutz, Chairman and CEO, The Anschutz Corporation
How to Be a Billionaire is the first comprehensive picture of the real strategies and tactics that built the great business fortunes of modern times. Packed with engaging accounts of titans like Ross Perot, Richard Branson, and Phil Anschutz, it will show you principles that can increase your wealth and business acumen to the mogul level.
Martin Fridson looks at the careers, the methods, and the minds of self–made billionaires to distill the common keys to titanic accumulations of wealth. He identifies the methods, beliefs, and behaviors every businessperson must understand and emulate to reach the pinnacle of riches. How to Be a Billionaire is a manual for success that every aspiring tycoon will benefit from.
About the Author
Excerpted from How to Be a Billionaire by Martin S. Fridson. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There is pain in getting, care in keeping, and grief in losing riches.
-Thomas Draxe
Mapping the Territory
Congratulations!
Simply by opening up this copy of How to Be a Billionaire, you have taken an important step forward on the journey to extraordinary wealth. In fact, you are already far ahead of where the self-made billionaires stood when they began their careers. Unlike you, they had no road map. There was no manual that systematically and objectively analyzed the methods of the individuals who preceded them. As you will find when you read about their strategies, many of the greatest accumulators of wealth struggled for years before finding the paths that propelled them to the top of the heap in net worth. No one would seriously suggest that they could have gotten rich by reading alone, but the right sort of book could have saved them a great deal of wasted effort.
Most of the guides to self-enrichment that were available when today's billionaires began their careers were motivational books. This is not to say that they were without value. The self-help classics correctly emphasized that, just as in athletics or the arts, top-level achievement in the business world depended on exceptional internal motivation. A famous example of the genre, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, offered role models such as Charles Dickens and Helen Keller, who overcame adversity to achieve greatness. Hill taught his readers how to envision themselves in possession of a vast fortune. Write a clear statement of the amount of money you hope to accumulate, he advised, as well as your time limit for acquiring it. Then read the statement aloud twice a day. In general, the self-enrichment literature provided lots of inspiration, but little in the way of specific fortune-building techniques. One of the more practical books, One Thousand Ways to Make $1,000, was a childhood favorite of Warren Buffett's. It offered suggestions such as creating a business from selling homemade fudge.
To identify the actual tactics employed by the self-made billionaires, today's titans of wealth would have had to compile bits of information from scores of books and articles. In other words, they would have had to undertake the laborious process that How to Be a Billionaire conveniently spares you. If the seekers of wealth had actually gone through the exercise, they would have learned that there was considerably more to the story than hard work and big dreams.
For example, a lot of tough negotiating underlies the great fortunes of the past. This simple fact would not be apparent from the autobiographies of the champion amassers of wealth. Typically, they have portrayed their success as a fair reward for a lifetime of bargaining in good faith. They never needed anything more than a handshake to seal a deal and, if their recollections are to be taken at face value, both sides generally profited. In the real world, many business transactions turn out to be rather one-sided.
Clearly, the less-informed parties who wind up on the short end are not the ones who subsequently write autobiographies recounting their ascent to billionaire status. For that matter, those who do publish their memoirs tend to downplay their interest in wealth altogether. As H. L. Mencken observed, the businessman is the only sort of person who, when he obtains the object of his labors, namely, making a lot of money, tries to make it appear that it was not the object of his labors.
Billionaires' autobiographies have also misled their would-be successors on the relative importance of shrewd financial techniques. To most people, taking full advantage of the tax code or presenting a company to the stock market in the best possible light sounds less heroic than risking one's future on an unproven technology. The founders of the great fortunes understood the popular disdain for pencil pushers. Therefore, they did not emphasize tax and accounting intricacies in the stories they told of their rise to extraordinary wealth. Nevertheless, being financially astute is a must if you hope to become fabulously wealthy, and How to Be a Billionaire will teach you how.
This book is not a treasure trove of previously undisclosed facts about the lives of the billionaires. The surprises are the key aspects of the billionaires' careers that diverge from the images promoted in the financial media. For instance, journalists sell Warren Buffett short by portraying him merely as an investment wizard. In reality, he has done far more than make passive investments in underpriced companies and then wait patiently for the stock market to recognize the hidden value. Anyone who hopes to follow Buffett's model must be willing to take an active role, either as a corporate insider or by pushing companies from outside to exploit their assets more aggressively. It is also important to understand Buffett's reliance, throughout his career, on outright purchases of companies (especially insurance companies), as opposed to becoming a minority shareholder.
Plan of Attack
In setting out to write this book, I wanted to create a manual for future billionaires by analyzing the careers of past and present billionaires. I did not attempt to discuss every billionaire. Forbes lists 268 individuals with net worth of one billion dollars or more in the United States alone, as of 1999.
For readers interested in biographical sketches of the founders of great fortunes, books such as The Wealthy 100 provide a comprehensive treatment. In contrast, I have focused on a short list of individuals whose methods can be generalized into models for the billionaires of tomorrow. To round out the story in places, I have included pointers from a supporting cast of titans to whom I have not devoted full-blown profiles.
I have found that the best vehicle for communicating a broad concept is a highly specific case. For example, an abstract recommendation to keep abreast of changes in the competitive environment sounds like a mere platitude
