Continuous Productivity

Being Famous Helps

Romeo Miller is a 5-foot-10 point guard with a bad knee. He has never played a full season of high-school basketball. This season, he averaged 8.6 points a game for Beverly Hills High School, which finished last in its league.

But next fall, the 18-year-old will suit up for the University of Southern California, a program in the tough Pac-10 conference. And he will receive a full basketball scholarship valued at $44,400 a year.

Romeo Miller is Lil' Romeo, the son of music mogul Percy Miller better known as Master P.  The controversy behind the scholarship offer is that there are a limited number of scholarships a school can offer.  Given Romeo's (lack of) talent, some are concerned whether it is taking away from a more deserving (and underprivileged) athlete.

The reality is that there should be no controversy given the scholarship market.  It's such a limited supply with such a high demand that a kid that gets overlooked at USC will easily get a scholarship elsewhere.  That is, it's not really taking away from a deserving kid, but rather the argument can be made that USC is "wasting" a scholarship on a player that won't provide much "utility". 

Ah, but Tim Floyd, USC's coach, ever a savvy businessman, has already thought that through and will extract a different utility from Lil' Romeo:

Yet the school broke no rules, and Tim Floyd, USC's basketball coach, makes no apologies about Mr. Miller's potential to sell tickets. "We may have more 11- to 17-year-old girls in the stands than we've had in the past," he says.

Andreessen AND Obama

It has been a while since Marc Andreessen has posted.  So, this morning when my feeds indicated that my Andreessen folder had a new post, I clicked right away.

Marc was kind enough to recap a meeting he had with Barack Obama prior to the start of the campaign season in early 2007.  He recaps the meeting and his perceptions of Senator Obama.  Again, anyone who knows me well, knows how I feel about each of these gentlemen- as inspirations, as leaders, and most importantly as men that break molds.  So, I was excited as I have been in a while to read Marc's perception of Senator Obama.  The salient points:

First, this is a normal guy.

I've spent time with a lot of politicians in the last 15 years.  Most of them talk at you.  Listening is not their strong suit -- in fact, many of them aren't even very good at faking it.

Senator Obama, in contrast, comes across as a normal human being, with a normal interaction style, and a normal level of interest in the people he's with and the world around him.

Normal and Smart:

Second, this is a smart guy.

I bring this up for two reasons. One, Senator Obama's political opponents tend to try to paint him as some kind of lightweight, which he most definitely is not. Two, I think he's at or near the top of the scale of intelligence of anyone in political life today.

You can see how smart he is in his background -- for example, lecturer in constitutional law at University of Chicago; before that, president of the Harvard Law Review.

But it's also apparent when you interact with him that you're dealing with one of the intellectually smartest national politicians in recent times, at least since Bill Clinton. He's crisp, lucid, analytical, and clearly assimilates and synthesizes a very large amount of information -- smart.

Please go read the entire post, it will be well worth your time.

Rupert the Ruthless

Vintage Rupert Murdoch in this Portfolio profile.  He didn't seem to have a second thought about naming an aspiring opera singer to his board of directors at News Corp after the Dow Jones acquisition:

The appointment [of Natalie Bancroft to the News Corp. board] looked like a classic last-minute end run by Murdoch around the Bancrofts. The family had owned Dow Jones since 1928, when Hugh Bancroft, Natalie's great-grandfather, inherited the Journal from his father-in-law, Clarence Walker Barron. (The former Boston-based correspondent had bought the company from its founders in 1902.) Although Murdoch's bid represented a 65 percent premium over Dow Jones stock, the family spent months bickering and soul-searching before it agreed to sell. One factor that gave the Bancrofts comfort was Murdoch's offer to create a News Corp. board position for a family representative. The Bancrofts thought it would be a way to help them keep a hand in the business, and they believed that they would have a say in the board-selection process. Instead, Murdoch didn't even interview their nominees; he simply handed the job to Natalie. Not only did she lack support from her relatives, she had little history of involvement with Dow Jones and no business or professional journalism experience.

This wouldn't be the first time that Murdoch has been ruthless in his business decisions.  It just strikes me as ironic that the Bancroft family (assuming that they really wanted to keep a hand in the business) wouldn't include a clause about whom from the family could be named.  It's also quite amusing that Murdoch seems to have gone out of his way to name the least qualified Bancroft to the position:

"I know that me as a choice was kind of scandalous—this 27-year-old opera singer that no one knows anything about," Bancroft says. While bloggers and newspaper journalists were debating her qualifications, Bancroft, who lives in London, declined all interview requests. Now she wants to set the record straight. "There's been people saying, 'She's going to be a potted plant and a pushover.' The last thing I am is a pushover," she says. "I'm not just some idiotic girl in piggytails yodeling."

The irony of the follow-up quote can't be overlooked:

She also says she is multilingual and routinely reads foreign-language newspapers. Instead of being intimidated by the accomplished men who will be her colleagues, she says the prospect thrills her: "I have a much easier time understanding men. I was a tomboy. I love camping. I love sailing. I love doing boy stuff."

Is she planning to get an M.B.A. to help prepare for the position? "In journalism?" she asks.

How Rich is He?

Interesting New York Times profile on Sheldon Adelson, the third richest man in America.  What struck me was just how fast he became so wealthy:

The Las Vegas Sands went public in December 2004, and over the next two years his net worth soared by $17.5 billion. That works out to almost $1 million an hour, weekends, holidays and nights included. “He got richer faster than anyone else in history,” said Peter W. Bernstein, co-author of “All the Money in the World,” a book about the people on the Forbes 400 list.

Also, it's interesting to note, like many entrepreneurs, Adelson tried his hand at multiple businesses before finding one that paved the way to his current wealth:

Mr. Adelson started a business selling toiletry kits to motels, tried his hand at the mortgage broker business, and in the 1960s he joined Mr. Chafetz and another friend from the old neighborhood, Ted Cutler, in a charter tours start-up.

But it was not until he founded Comdex, the premier computer trade show through much of the 1980s and 1990s, that he hit on an idea that propelled him into the upper reaches of the wealthy.

Their growing trade show business led him into the casino business:

“The Sands had enough land to build a convention center,” Mr. Chafetz said. “That’s why we got into the casino business.” When it was completed, at the start of the 1990s, the Sands Expo and Convention Center stood as the largest privately owned exhibition center in the country.

In 1995, Mr. Adelson sold Comdex to Softbank of Japan for $862 million – giving him a personal payoff of just over $500 million. He and his partners were all in their 60s, but where the three other ‘‘boys” chose to semi-retire, Mr. Adelson made even bigger bets.

He demolished the Sands in a spectacular implosion (replete with an anticipatory fireworks show), borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars and in its place built the Venetian, which cost $1.5 billion and opened in 1999.