What's the best use of your time....
If you look at the great entrepreneurs of our era — Kirk Kerkorian, Donald Trump, and Rupert Murdoch, to name but a few — the one thing they all have in common is that they are great dealmakers.
All of them hire others to handle their day-to-day operations, while they work on
identifying and closing lucrative deals.And so it is with many individuals in a wide variety of occupations, people who have used their dealmaking prowess to build empires.
Wolfgang Puck is undoubtedly a great chef, but probably no better than thousands of other great chefs. From what I know of his rise to the top, it is clearly because he is a dealmaker supreme, who found a way — make that many ways — to transform himself from a gourmet chef into a culinary empire.
Ditto Howard Schultz, the man who built Starbucks into a global phenomenon. Start a chain of coffee shops? Are you kidding me? What a terrible idea. Nevertheless, in the face of declining coffee sales in the U.S., Schultz had the audacity to charge $3 for a cup of the world’s dullest and most common drink — and served it in a paper cup, to boot!
And this came about at a time when the world appeared to be moving too fast for people to slow down, relax, and enjoy a cup of coffee, as they did in the good old days. Now, with $30 billion in sales, Schultz leaves the day-to-day management to CEO Jim McDonald, while he travels the world making deals to further expand Starbucks’ reach.
I could go on and on … with Steve Riggio, who built Barnes & Noble into a retail giant and, in the process, transformed the way bookstores do business … with Martha Stewart, who built an empire by teaching women how to excel at being good housewives … with George Lucas, who created a one-man industry based on a single story. The list of dealmaking, empire-building entrepreneurs is endless.
Extract from Robert Ringer's
Voice of Sanity