今天带来的这篇文章作者是Nathan Vardi，推荐了《商界局外人》这本书
When hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman hosted an event in April to promote
his backing of Valeant Pharmaceuticals ’ $46 billion bid,
he called his presentation “The Outsider.” “The name of the presentation
comes from a book which I highly recommend you read,” Ackman explained
to his audience. “I would say one of the most important investment books
I have ever read.”
“The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational
Blueprint for Success” tells the stories of eight successful chief
executives. Ackman’s overwhelming and very public endorsement of it was
even more interesting because one of the CEOs highlighted and praised by
the book is Bill Stiritz, who is currently one of Ackman’s key rivals
in the epic battle over Herbalife that has been raging on Wall
Street for over a year. The ideas and lessons of the book have resonated
so powerfully among CEOs and investors that they apparently can in some
ways bring them together. Ackman and Stiritz might not agree on whether
Herbalife is an illegal pyramid scheme, but both men seem to believe in
the extreme importance of smart capital allocation.
The Outsiders may not be a huge best seller, but it is the book that
appears to be influencing CEOs and big hedge fund and private
equity-type investors. William N. Thorndike, Jr., the author of the The
Outsiders, has been as surprised about the success of his book as
anyone. “The reaction to the book has dramatically exceeded any
expectations I had, not that I had any, I was a rookie author,” said
Thorndike in an interview. “I have had a lot of interactions with CEOs
and investors—lots. They seem to like the ideas and want to discuss
them.”
Despite hardly any promotional push, the book has become more than just a cult
hit. It has held its own in the highly competitive businessbook segment.
According to Harvard Business Review Press, which published it in late
October 2012, 75,000 copies of the book have sold, mostly in print, but
also including some in digital form. The Outsiders has also had a long
tail, with sales continuing steadily over time, aided by Warren
Buffett’s recommendation last year in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual
report. Buffett, who is featured in the book, called it “an outstanding
book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation.”
When Thorndike started the research that would lead to The Outsiders, he did
not expect it would become a book. The founder of Boston-based private
equity firm Housatonic Partners, which manages $1 billion, Thorndike was
only volunteering to lead a talk at a conference Housatonic Partners
holds biannually for the CEOs of his firm’s portfolio companies. For the
talk, Thorndike chose to focus on Henry Singleton, who built Teledyne
Technologies and had a reputation for being a master capital allocator.
Thorndike teamed up with Aleem Choudhry, then a Harvard Business School
student, and the duo spent Choudhry’s first semester doing a deep
analytical dive on Teledyne. During the second semester, they
interviewed everyone they could about Singleton, who died in 1999,
including venture capitalist Arthur Rock, hedge fund manager Leon
Cooperman and Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Charlie Munger.
For the next few years, Thorndike continued to team up with Harvard
Business School students to study CEOs. He had a day job so the research
took time—Thorndike says he would do research on the weekends or on
flights back and forth to San Francisco, where his firm has an office.
He researched one CEO a year. He had two tests each CEO had to meet to
warrant study: Their stocks had to better the performance relative to
the S&P 500 index of GE CEO Jack Welch during his tenure and
meaningfully outperform their peer group. “I was doing it out of
interest, I found it intellectually interesting to try to figure it
out,” Thorndike says.
After some four years, Thorndike started to think that he might be able to
turn the project into a book. At first, Thorndike figured the book could
be a group biography, modeled after “Profiles in Courage,” “The
American Political Tradition” or “The Money Masters.” But eventually
Thorndike saw a theme linking the CEOs. “After the sixth [CEO] it was
clear there was this very strong pattern, that was the biggest
surprise,” says Thorndike. “Over a long period of time, CEOs have to do
two things well, they have to manage the business to optimize the
profits and after that deploy the profits. Most of what separated these
guys from their peers is in that second activity, which has the unwieldy
name of capital allocation.”
Thorndike spent eight years working on the book and interviewed all the living
CEOs he studied. The CEOs he ended up profiling were Tom Murphy of
Capital Cities, Henry Singleton of Teledyne, Bill Anders of General
Dynamics, John Malone of TCI, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post
Co., Bill Stiritz of Ralston Purina, Dick Smith of General Cinema, and
Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. Thorndike basically concluded that
to achieve meaningful outperformance, CEOs need to do things
differently than the other CEOs running companies in their respective
industries. At the same time, however, Thorndike found the CEOs he
researched had quite a bit in common. “They were very different from the
standard conventional CEO personality, they were not charismatic
visionary types, they were pragmatic, flexible and opportunistic, frugal
and patient,” says Thorndike.
They also bought back a lot of their stock. Share repurchases that improve
corporate earnings per share have become a major part of any CEO’s
playbook these days. Some have criticized the practice as a financial
engineering ploy that comes at the expense of vital reinvestment and can
hurt a company’s long-term prospects. The successful CEOs Thorndike
studied helped usher in the share buyback era. But Thorndike discovered
that there was an important nuance to their buyback moves. They were not
just mindlessly repurchasing shares each quarter. They minimized their
dividends and, unlike many publicly-traded companies today, did not
announce a big stock buyback authorization and repurchase a systematic
amount of stock every quarter. Instead, Thorndike’s CEOs waited for long
periods of time without doing anything and then pounced when they
thought their stock was cheap, even buying large chunks of stock in a
single quarter. “They had the investor’s mind set,” says Thorndike.
“They viewed it as investment and when it had attractive returns they
did a lot of it.” Thorndike also documents how his eight successful CEOs
shrewdly deployed capital on selective acquisitions and worked
diligently to minimize taxes.
It’s interesting that both managers and investors have been drawn to The
Outsiders. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that activist
investors who agitate for change at companies have been particularly
fond of the book. Thorndike says investors who build concentrated
portfolios and hold their positions over long periods of time will find
the book more useful than fast-money traders. Says Thorndike: “The ideas
of the book have the most value over longer holding periods.”
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