The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success

There were two basic sources of this astonishing influx: a remarkable tightening of operations and the sale of businesses deemed noncore by Anders’s strategic framework.

only purchase companies if the price translated into a maximum multiple of five times cash flow after the easily quantifiable benefits from programming discounts and overhead elimination had been realized. This analysis could be done on a single sheet of paper (or if necessary, the back of a napkin). It did not require extensive modeling or project

cable television business, the more he liked it. Three things in particular caught his attention: the highly predictable, utility-like revenues; the favorable tax characteristics; and the fact that it was growing like a weed.

“Computers require an immense amount of detail . . . I’m a mathematician, not a programmer. I may be accurate, but I’m not precise.”

As Burke said in describing his early years in Albany, “Murphy delegates to the point of anarchy.”7