The latest examples of leadership and ambition.

大家看看FT最新评出的全球TOP25富豪身上有何等的ambition, determination, leadership. 全是我们申请MBA所熟悉的字眼。

When Sumner Redstone, chairman of the Viacom broadcasting empire, met reporters recently, somebody asked how rich he was. “Very, very rich,” he replied. “And very, very tough, too.”

Most of the super-rich today are like Redstone, self-made, and will have at least sensed the shadow of failure. They usually remain driven well into old age. Professor Nigel Nicholson of the London Business School, who makes a study of wealth gathering, suggests the only thing that makes them stop eventually “is the doctor’s warning”.

The medical profession should steel itself. The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans last year found that only 37 of those included inherited their billions, compared with about 200 in the 1980s.

Redstone, now 82 and with a $7bn stake in Viacom, remains intimately involved in managing his fortune and the corporate colossus that underpins it. Not that the two can be readily separated, as Viacom weathers corporate storms in the competitive world of high-technology media. His one concession to autumn arriving in his life is collecting rare tropical fish for his Beverly Hills home, itself a recent luxury, and occasionally working from there. He lived in a hotel for years.

Self-made fortunes are rarely smoothly acquired, either, but follow trajectories that can mean facing disaster.

Sometimes that disaster is personal. In 1979, Redstone survived a fire at the Boston Copley Plaza hotel by dangling from a window ledge and suffering 45 per cent body burns; his wrist was almost severed by flames before rescuers reached him. At this point many might have re-evaluated their lives, slowed the pace. But he did little of either, going on to make the biggest deals of his career, including the takeover of CBS television, one of America’s three main terrestrial channels. The story of his confrontation with mortality is a parable of single-minded tenacity, the sort that characterises those billionaires who stay their endless course. “Determination, physical or any other kind, is the key to survival,” Redstone, the world’s 42nd richest man, wrote in his autobiography, itself the detail of a life riven by rows and ferocious boardroom battles. War, not artfulness, appears to be his favoured analogy for business.

But where does such fierce determination to do battle come from? Don’t ask this son of once-poor eastern European immigrants. “I have always been that way,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I have an obsessive competitive spirit. I don’t know whether that’s genealogical or environmental. Who cares? That’s who I am.” Whatever it was drove him through scholarships to Harvard University, a law degree, inventing the multiplex cinema, Viacom and, not least, to cling for 15 minutes as his body burned. Subsidiaries of the Redstone empire now reach a worldwide audience of 780 million households, own two American networks - CBS and UPN - numerous cable channels, and the Simon Schuster publishing company.

Nicholson thinks parents, especially “adoring, pushy mothers”, are often the key. They instil a drive in childhood that keeps the world’s most successful people pushing onwards, even through physical pain. He admits, however, that this pattern is “not reliable enough to state as a science”, but more a hunch.

Other parameters, notably “a great deal of energy and a great deal of focus”, seem closer to explaining the phenomenon, and Britain’s clutch of self-starting super-rich illustrates them well.

A first glance would see little in common between Sir Alan Sugar, a tough tailor’s son from a council house in the East End of London, and Sir Richard Branson, whose polished upper-middle-class upbringing was its polar opposite. But a quick look under the bonnet shows the engine that drives them all, especially in adversity, to be the same: a perpetual-motion machine. Branson did not inherit his wealth, but started by selling mail order from home, which is more or less how Alan Sugar began his rise in home electronics.

Sugar had to break out of poverty, Branson out of social expectation. But they are two sides of a coin. Not many middle-class public-school boys become billionaires, says Nicholson, because they lack the drive and are often culturally hard-wired to be successful within conventional boundaries. Nobody could accuse Branson of being conventional, any more than you could say that of Sugar and Redstone. “It’s an obsessive desire to prove themselves in terms of achievement and position in society. In general, a key to making yourself a billionaire is to have a particularly fierce determination to succeed,” says Nicholson.

”The main thing is a desire to make money, not to spend it or necessarily to pass it on, but to view money as an emblem of your worth. Therefore you can never have enough; and therefore there is no reason to stop striving for greater riches, to keep going even when it gets very hard. The security you seek through money is a psychological security that money can never satisfy.”

His theory helps explains why billionaires don’t just walk away and live on a golf course when they have lots of money; and why so many eschew private jets and expensive cars. “There’s no way I can slow down, I just can’t do it,” Sugar once said, making it sound like a condition. He might have been Redstone.

Sugar was already a dollar billionaire when he bought Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in 1991, embarking on what he now describes as 10 wasted years. It was not that he lost money (in fact he actually made it, selling all but a small stake). But the time his indulgence needed - and a flaying from the fans - meant, by his own admission, that he took his eye off another ball: his company. Amstrad slumped badly, recording a £70m loss in the year after he bought the club.

There was a recovery, although Sugar has said the experience of allowing non-executive directors to appoint a chief executive was “like watching your mother-in-law drive your Ferrari off a cliff”. The company was split up, but is again profitable.

Branson, too, has faced crises, but has also never seen any company in his eclectic empire go bust, though it stretches through dozens of offshoots to include mobile phones, trains, airlines and - why not? - wedding dresses.

The most famous entrepreneur in Britain is now 55, but still game for eye-catching publicity (part of the key to the profile his companies enjoy) and the headline-grabbing idea, most recently to send tourists into space.

Sugar, who began by selling aerials and televisions, had his tumble after ignoring the golden rule: focus. Martin Fridson, a successful Wall Street investor and the author of How to Be a Billionaire, believes that full, obsessive attention is part of what distinguishes billionaires. “They have to be focused on risk,” he says. But that isn’t all. “The central thing is to get control of an asset, not necessarily cheaply. A lot of people are able to understand and work that formula of buying cheap and selling high. But the formula for the very rich is to get control of an asset and enhance its value. In terms of personality, it’s focus on the goal, much like somebody is focused on being an Olympic champion.”

Jeff Bezos, 41, founder of the online retailer Amazon, certainly meets the criteria. He started the company with $300,000 from his parents, much of their lifetime savings. They also let him use their garage to sell books over the internet.

Their gamble paid off spectacularly. Amazon floated in 1997, catching the dotcom bubble; in 1999, its shares were worth more than 70 times their original price, and Bezos was soon worth $10bn.

There was, of course, a wobble when the bubble burst. Amazon was scrutinised for signs of collapse as it shed 15 per cent of its workforce. None came, and the company is now in good health.

Bezos is bright and, by his own admission, “goofy”. Like Branson he is famous for unflappability and good humour, and tries new ways of selling and marketing. Not that anybody should be deceived. Bezos went to a school for gifted children and studied computer science and engineering at Princeton University.

Behind the raucous laugh and self-deprecation is a revealing back-story. Bezos had made a lot of money by his late twenties, becoming the youngest-ever vice-president of the Bankers Trust Company before moving to a company that specialised in complex financial transactions. It was there, in the early 1990s, that he noticed the internet, developed at that point by the military and handed to academics, but with little commercial application. He also noticed that its use was growing rapidly. Bookselling was a sleepy area of business ripe for shaking up. Here, then, is the focus and core idea that Fridson sees in the super-rich.

”The thing about inventing is that you have to be both stubborn and flexible, more or less simultaneously,” Bezos once said before roaring with laughter. “Of course, the hard part is figuring out when to be which!”

Fridson thinks we might be at the start of another bull run of billionaire creation. But he suspects that the task of becoming a titan is getting more difficult. One thing is certain, though: the new generation of self-made billionaires, like the current crop, will spot an edge and apply ceaseless energy to it long after the rest of us are on the golf course. Whether they laugh as much as Bezos and Branson remains to be seen.

再试试。

Burning ambition
By Toby Moore
Published: October 7 2005 16:16 | Last updated: October 7 2005 16:16

When Sumner Redstone, chairman of the Viacom broadcasting empire, met reporters recently, somebody asked how rich he was. “Very, very rich,” he replied. “And very, very tough, too.”

Most of the super-rich today are like Redstone, self-made, and will have at least sensed the shadow of failure. They usually remain driven well into old age. Professor Nigel Nicholson of the London Business School, who makes a study of wealth gathering, suggests the only thing that makes them stop eventually “is the doctor’s warning”.

The medical profession should steel itself. The Forbes 400 list of richest Americans last year found that only 37 of those included inherited their billions, compared with about 200 in the 1980s.

Redstone, now 82 and with a $7bn stake in Viacom, remains intimately involved in managing his fortune and the corporate colossus that underpins it. Not that the two can be readily separated, as Viacom weathers corporate storms in the competitive world of high-technology media. His one concession to autumn arriving in his life is collecting rare tropical fish for his Beverly Hills home, itself a recent luxury, and occasionally working from there. He lived in a hotel for years.

Self-made fortunes are rarely smoothly acquired, either, but follow trajectories that can mean facing disaster.

Sometimes that disaster is personal. In 1979, Redstone survived a fire at the Boston Copley Plaza hotel by dangling from a window ledge and suffering 45 per cent body burns; his wrist was almost severed by flames before rescuers reached him. At this point many might have re-evaluated their lives, slowed the pace. But he did little of either, going on to make the biggest deals of his career, including the takeover of CBS television, one of America’s three main terrestrial channels. The story of his confrontation with mortality is a parable of single-minded tenacity, the sort that characterises those billionaires who stay their endless course. “Determination, physical or any other kind, is the key to survival,” Redstone, the world’s 42nd richest man, wrote in his autobiography, itself the detail of a life riven by rows and ferocious boardroom battles. War, not artfulness, appears to be his favoured analogy for business.

But where does such fierce determination to do battle come from? Don’t ask this son of once-poor eastern European immigrants. “I have always been that way,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “I have an obsessive competitive spirit. I don’t know whether that’s genealogical or environmental. Who cares? That’s who I am.” Whatever it was drove him through scholarships to Harvard University, a law degree, inventing the multiplex cinema, Viacom and, not least, to cling for 15 minutes as his body burned. Subsidiaries of the Redstone empire now reach a worldwide audience of 780 million households, own two American networks - CBS and UPN - numerous cable channels, and the Simon Schuster publishing company.

Nicholson thinks parents, especially “adoring, pushy mothers”, are often the key. They instil a drive in childhood that keeps the world’s most successful people pushing onwards, even through physical pain. He admits, however, that this pattern is “not reliable enough to state as a science”, but more a hunch.

Other parameters, notably “a great deal of energy and a great deal of focus”, seem closer to explaining the phenomenon, and Britain’s clutch of self-starting super-rich illustrates them well.

A first glance would see little in common between Sir Alan Sugar, a tough tailor’s son from a council house in the East End of London, and Sir Richard Branson, whose polished upper-middle-class upbringing was its polar opposite. But a quick look under the bonnet shows the engine that drives them all, especially in adversity, to be the same: a perpetual-motion machine. Branson did not inherit his wealth, but started by selling mail order from home, which is more or less how Alan Sugar began his rise in home electronics.

Sugar had to break out of poverty, Branson out of social expectation. But they are two sides of a coin. Not many middle-class public-school boys become billionaires, says Nicholson, because they lack the drive and are often culturally hard-wired to be successful within conventional boundaries. Nobody could accuse Branson of being conventional, any more than you could say that of Sugar and Redstone. “It’s an obsessive desire to prove themselves in terms of achievement and position in society. In general, a key to making yourself a billionaire is to have a particularly fierce determination to succeed,” says Nicholson.

”The main thing is a desire to make money, not to spend it or necessarily to pass it on, but to view money as an emblem of your worth. Therefore you can never have enough; and therefore there is no reason to stop striving for greater riches, to keep going even when it gets very hard. The security you seek through money is a psychological security that money can never satisfy.”

His theory helps explains why billionaires don’t just walk away and live on a golf course when they have lots of money; and why so many eschew private jets and expensive cars. “There’s no way I can slow down, I just can’t do it,” Sugar once said, making it sound like a condition. He might have been Redstone.

Sugar was already a dollar billionaire when he bought Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in 1991, embarking on what he now describes as 10 wasted years. It was not that he lost money (in fact he actually made it, selling all but a small stake). But the time his indulgence needed - and a flaying from the fans - meant, by his own admission, that he took his eye off another ball: his company. Amstrad slumped badly, recording a £70m loss in the year after he bought the club.

There was a recovery, although Sugar has said the experience of allowing non-executive directors to appoint a chief executive was “like watching your mother-in-law drive your Ferrari off a cliff”. The company was split up, but is again profitable.

Branson, too, has faced crises, but has also never seen any company in his eclectic empire go bust, though it stretches through dozens of offshoots to include mobile phones, trains, airlines and - why not? - wedding dresses.

The most famous entrepreneur in Britain is now 55, but still game for eye-catching publicity (part of the key to the profile his companies enjoy) and the headline-grabbing idea, most recently to send tourists into space.

Sugar, who began by selling aerials and televisions, had his tumble after ignoring the golden rule: focus. Martin Fridson, a successful Wall Street investor and the author of How to Be a Billionaire, believes that full, obsessive attention is part of what distinguishes billionaires. “They have to be focused on risk,” he says. But that isn’t all. “The central thing is to get control of an asset, not necessarily cheaply. A lot of people are able to understand and work that formula of buying cheap and selling high. But the formula for the very rich is to get control of an asset and enhance its value. In terms of personality, it’s focus on the goal, much like somebody is focused on being an Olympic champion.”

Jeff Bezos, 41, founder of the online retailer Amazon, certainly meets the criteria. He started the company with $300,000 from his parents, much of their lifetime savings. They also let him use their garage to sell books over the internet.

Their gamble paid off spectacularly. Amazon floated in 1997, catching the dotcom bubble; in 1999, its shares were worth more than 70 times their original price, and Bezos was soon worth $10bn.

There was, of course, a wobble when the bubble burst. Amazon was scrutinised for signs of collapse as it shed 15 per cent of its workforce. None came, and the company is now in good health.

Bezos is bright and, by his own admission, “goofy”. Like Branson he is famous for unflappability and good humour, and tries new ways of selling and marketing. Not that anybody should be deceived. Bezos went to a school for gifted children and studied computer science and engineering at Princeton University.

Behind the raucous laugh and self-deprecation is a revealing back-story. Bezos had made a lot of money by his late twenties, becoming the youngest-ever vice-president of the Bankers Trust Company before moving to a company that specialised in complex financial transactions. It was there, in the early 1990s, that he noticed the internet, developed at that point by the military and handed to academics, but with little commercial application. He also noticed that its use was growing rapidly. Bookselling was a sleepy area of business ripe for shaking up. Here, then, is the focus and core idea that Fridson sees in the super-rich.

”The thing about inventing is that you have to be both stubborn and flexible, more or less simultaneously,” Bezos once said before roaring with laughter. “Of course, the hard part is figuring out when to be which!”

Fridson thinks we might be at the start of another bull run of billionaire creation. But he suspects that the task of becoming a titan is getting more difficult. One thing is certain, though: the new generation of self-made billionaires, like the current crop, will spot an edge and apply ceaseless energy to it long after the rest of us are on the golf course. Whether they laugh as much as Bezos and Branson remains to be seen.

如果不是申请MBA，也许我并不会去注意到这样的文章，也不会结合这些文章反省过去这二十多年

来自己走过的路，思考如何调整自己才会在将来的人生之旅中欣赏到更美丽的风景，领悟更完整的人生意义。从这个角度来说，不论申请成功与否，我们已经得到了很多。

谢谢楼主与我等分亨如此精彩文章!

Thanks!