Category: Nonfiction

Sum It Up

The Book of the Week is “Sum It Up” by Pat Summitt with Sally Jenkins, published in 2012. This ebook is the autobiography of a long-time coach of the women’s basketball team at the University of Tennessee; Olympian, Olympic coach, daughter, wife, mother, etc., etc.

Summitt’s childhood consisted of doing hard labor on her family’s Tennessee farm, drag racing and playing aggressive basketball with her three older brothers. Her father was a gruff, hard worker who refrained completely from showing affection toward his family. Nevertheless, he had a passion for basketball. Therefore, in the mid 1960’s, he had the family move to a fixer-upper residence so that his daughter could play high school basketball on a very good team.

Unfortunately, the team was part of a pathetic interscholastic program that existed for girls at the time. There were many inequalities between male and female sports programs in Summitt’s generation. For one, she had to pay full college tuition, because “…athletic scholarships for women simply didn’t exist in 1970.”

At 22 years old in 1974, even when she was named head coach of the women’s basketball team at her alma mater, she was given a budget that was a fraction of the men’s team’s budget. Also, unlike a male coach, she had to play many roles in addition to coaching, such as serving as driver, laundress, ankle-taper, gym-floor cleaner, and bench assembler. Her office was at the top of five flights of stairs in a hot attic with no elevator and no air conditioning. At the same time, she was taking four master’s degree classes and was required to teach undergraduate classes.

Finally, in 1975, Title IX– which was supposed to “even the playing field” for male and female athletes– was signed into law by President Gerald Ford (according to the book). Summitt started to benefit from progress, but even in the late 1970’s, the men’s sports teams still had bigger marketing budgets and staffs than the women’s teams; plus the men traveled by airplane while the women had to drive hours and hours.

Summitt also discusses basketball as a metaphor for other aspects of life. She writes, “The point guard position in basketball is one of the great tutorials on leadership… they only follow you if they find you consistently credible… If there is a single ingredient in leadership, it’s emotional maturity.”

Read the book to learn about the coaching-career teams, victories, setbacks, comebacks and defeats; and family, health and retirement issues in the life of this overachiever.

My Guy Barbaro – Bonus Post

In honor of the Kentucky Derby, this blogger would like to report on “My Guy Barbaro” by Edgar Prado with John Eisenberg, published in 2008. This ebook tells the story of a horse named Barbaro, ridden by the author, a jockey.

Prado grew up in Lima, Peru in a poor household with seven brothers, three sisters, his mother, and a father who was a horse groomer. Two of his older brothers became jockeys. He had a natural rapport with horses, and became a licensed jockey at fifteen and a half. He graduated high school, and at eighteen, moved to Miami, Florida in 1986 for more challenging racing.

Prado rides on different horses in various states in races throughout the year. The Triple Crown is a trio of races very difficult to win. It consists of the Belmont Stakes on Long Island in New York State, the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, and the Preakness Stakes in Maryland. Up until 2008, race tracks in that third state suffered financially in the past decade, unlike those in Delaware and West Virginia, as it declined to allow cash-cow slot machines at its race tracks.

In the 2006 Kentucky Derby, Prado had the privilege of riding Barbaro, a horse that was a racing prodigy, owned by the late pop star Michael Jackson. Read the book to learn of Barbaro’s fate.

The Other Side of Me

The Book of the Week is “The Other Side of Me” by Sidney Sheldon, published in 2005. This ebook is Sheldon’s autobiography.

Born Sidney Schechtel in 1917, Sheldon showed a talent for writing at an early age. However, during the Depression, he was forced to work day and night at a series of dead-end, soul-killing jobs, such as courier in a gear factory and coat-check clerk at a hotel. Sheldon was unafraid to approach strangers, and at that time, low-skilled jobs could be obtained in a simple five-minute conversation.

One day, he went to a Chicago radio station to inquire about an amateur talent contest sponsored by a band leader, and by chance, was asked to be the show’s announcer. It was then that he changed his last name to Sheldon, thinking it sounded more show business-y. His excessive talking caused the show to go fifteen seconds overtime, so he was not asked back, but from that experience, he thought he wanted to become a radio announcer.

On another day, he wrote a song with the help of his family’s spinet piano. He went to a hotel to try to sell the song. “In that year, 1936, the major hotels in the country had orchestras in their ballrooms that broadcast [on radio] coast to coast.” He was introduced to a manager at a big-name music publisher who directed him to another hotel with a better-known band leader. Perhaps naively, he never signed a written contract. His song was played and aired, but was never published. He therefore never received a penny in royalties.

Sheldon encountered many more episodes similar to the above, in which he was at the mercy of powerful people who made arbitrary decisions on the use of his creative works– Broadway musicals, screenplays and TV scripts and novels. Read the book to learn more about his bipolar disorder that had a hand in his self-doubt and despair, baseless optimism and persistence, missed opportunities, failures and successes.

A Champion’s Mind – Bonus Post

Besides Andre Agassi’s ebook, there is Pete Sampras’: “A Champion’s Mind,” published in 2008.  This ebook’s author tends to be a bit narcissistic, as is evident from the title, and the fact that the passages describing the matches he won, outnumber those he lost, by a few.

Nevertheless, Sampras racked up bragging rights through becoming the number one ranked tennis player in the world for six years. He won fourteen Grand Slams. He overcame various problems, including the stress from unfortunate occurrences concerning a fellow pro tennis player and two of his coaches (deaths and crime), his illnesses and injuries, plus meeting the psychological challenges of playing many finals matches in major tournaments against Andre Agassi, a formidable rival, beating him more often than not.

Read the book to learn the details.

Open

The Book of the Week is “Open” by Andre Agassi published in 2009. This engaging ebook tells the life story (up until his mid-thirties) of a famous American tennis player.

The author’s traumatic childhood invites the reader’s sympathy and the entertaining writing keeps the reader enthralled. Although this is a first-person account and the book is all about him, he does not come off as narcissistic. He has bragging rights as a world-class tennis player, and has done some serious introspection– he shares with the reader his emotional states while recounting his life lessons.

Agassi’s childhood was tennis-obsessed, as his father ordained that he was going to grow up to be a professional tennis player. As a powerless child, he could not argue. Besides, he told himself that he loved his father, wanted his approval, didn’t want to make him mad. His father became even more tyrannical than usual when angry. So his tennis career became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fortunately, during his journey to the top, Agassi met friends, mentors, lovers and even opponents, who helped him to become a better athlete and a better person. When he got his first taste of celebrity, Agassi writes, “Wimbledon has legitimized me, broadened and deepened my appeal, at least according to the agents and managers and marketing experts with whom I now regularly meet.”

Grateful for his fame and fortune, the author decided to give back. He wanted to create “… something to play for that’s larger than myself and yet still closely connected to me… but isn’t about me.” He co-founded a charter school called Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, located in Nevada.

Agassi proudly describes the school; a few aspects with which this blogger takes issue. He claims that pouring money into the school would make it a better school. He says Nevada is a state that spends less money per student on education than most other states. At least one study has shown that spending is not a factor in improving education quality.

Agassi also supplied the 26,000 square foot education complex with “everything the kids could want”– the very best entertainment and computer centers, athletic facilities, etc. On any given day, a famous politician, athlete or musician might drop by to teach the kids.

The author boasts, “Our educators are the best, plain and simple.” Yet, he goes on to write, because the school “… has a longer school day and a longer school year than other schools, our staff might earn less per hour than staffs elsewhere. But they have more resources at their fingertips and so they enjoy greater freedom to excel and make a difference in children’s lives.”

In other words, Agassi’s take on education is misguided in various ways. It seems he thinks kids will get a better education with quantity over quality when it comes to money and time. True, passionate teachers do not work solely for the money, but they value student enlightenment and recognition more than sparkling new classrooms. Admittedly, the author is a man of contradictions. Read the book to learn more about them.

How the Mighty Fall – Bonus Post

A short ebook, “How the Mighty Fall” by Jim Collins, published in 2010, presents an analysis of big, public, reputable American companies that have gone out of business, or made a major fumble but recovered.

The author and his colleague conducted extensive, comprehensive research on the reasons, across a range of dimensions. Collins writes, “We learn more by examining why a great company fell into mediocrity” than the opposite.

So as to avoid bias in how he viewed a company after its failure or recovery, Collins pored over documents in chronological order (thus remaining unaware of how a company ultimately fared until he reached the information in due time), starting well before the crisis.

Companies do need continual creative re-invention. However, “companies that change constantly but without any consistent rationale will collapse just as surely as those that change not at all.”

Collins developed a theory that there are five stages companies go through when heading for bankruptcy. The author provides examples in the histories of real-life businesses when they were being led by particular CEOs.

The difference between Wal-Mart and Ames (a competing department store chain that disappeared in 2002) is that in the late 1980’s, the former had a humble CEO who was always eager to learn. Unlike his narrow-minded peers, he met with Brazilian investors to find out about their retail culture. “Wal-Mart does not exist for the aggrandizement of its leaders.”

Collins’ data indicated a counterintuitive notion: many companies that fell were actually not resting on their laurels. They fell not because they failed to take bold action, but because they exceeded the limits of their resources in doing so. This blogger remembers Woolworth as one of those.

Another point the author conveys is that businesses that delivered cumulative returns to investors in the long term as opposed to focusing on unsustainable short-term growth to put on a show for Wall Street, became great businesses.

The author contends that another element of success is staffing a company with “the right people who accept responsibility” rather than building a bureaucratic hierarchy whose bureaucracy breeds more bureaucracy. The former bestows individual credit and blame.

Read the book to learn:

  • the stages of decline;
  • warning signs;
  • different ways management reacts to them;
  • why IBM was able to right itself by the late 1990’s from its low in 1993, while HP’s pain, starting in the late 1990’s, persisted much longer;
  • why Texas Instruments got its mojo back but Motorola did not; and
  • much more.

King of Capital

The Book of the Week is “King of Capital” by David Carey and John E. Morris, published in 2012.  This ebook recounts the history of leveraged buyout (“LBO” or  “private equity”) firms, mostly Blackstone Group, from the 1980’s through the first decade of the 21st century. This ebook attempts to debunk the stereotype of greedy Wall Streeters.

Back in the 1980’s, one kind of transaction or “deal” the LBO firm did, was buy out companies that were publicly traded, taking them private. It risked only a tiny amount of its own money to take ownership and take over the management, usually 5-15% of the total price. The role of the firm was to arrange financing. The management of the company (client) being bought out, was the party risking the most, and doing the buying out– borrowing a large percentage of the purchase price (leveraging) — in essence, “robbing Peter to pay Paul” with the monies raised by the LBO firm from various financial institutions.

This was where “junk bonds” came in– very risky debt instruments that carried extremely high interest rates, as much as 19%. The reason for the risk and high return, was that, in the event that the client went bankrupt, bank loans were repaid to creditors first, and if there was any money left, then much later, the junk bonds would be repaid.

According to Carey and Morris, the goal of LBO firms that were “corporate raiders” was to capitalize on the hidden value of a target’s assets that was not being reflected in its stock price. The value was there but the directors and officers of the target were too busy looting their company by throwing lavish parties at their mansions and on their yachts, and zipping around in their corporate jets.

The raiders had no interest in owning the target, but wanted to make it leaner and meaner by firing the greedy CEO’s. Then they would cash out at a profit of several times their initial investment. Over time, the targets developed strategies, such as the “poison pill” to counter the raiders. Unfortunately, “For all their talk of overhauling badly run companies, the raiders seldom demonstrated much aptitude for improving companies.” Pox on both the houses of the raiders and targets.

Buyout firms that were not corporate raiders truly wanted to own the target. “…buyout investors look for companies that produce enough cash to cover the interest on the debt needed to buy them and which also are likely to increase in value.” A major part of the job of LBO firms is to identify possible deals through extensive financial research, and then decide whether to invest in the ones predicted to succeed.

The year 1981 was a great year for LBO’s because interest rates peaked, there was an economic downturn, and stocks were down. In the autumn of 1985, two partners, Steve Schwarzman and Pete Peterson started Blackstone Group. Schwarzman said that his partnership would not be able to compete with the older, more experienced LBO firms, unless it “…brought efficiencies to a company by way of cost improvements or revenue synergies.”

The early 2000’s became a rerun of the 1980’s as financial institutions took on excessive debt loads. Fall of 2008 saw the U.S. Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank raise funds to try to bail out Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and AIG by calling on private equity firms like Blackstone Group to help.

Read the book to learn more about the redistribution of wealth among the wealthy over the course of three decades, and the turnover, and victories and defeats of the partners at Blackstone Group.