Sublime

The architects found themselves handed off to Nishad Singh’s girlfriend, Claire Watanabe—who had assumed Ryan’s role as spender of money and manager of support staff in the Bahamas.

For Skilling himself, says a former aide, “the stock price was his report card.” When it rose, he was exultant; when it dropped, he was glum. Whenever he was on the road, Skilling would call several times a day just to check on how the stock was performing. Lots of corporate executives were fixated on their companies’ stock price during the bull

The great management consultant Peter Drucker once wrote that profits were not the rationale of business decisions, but rather the test of their efficacy.32 What Drucker meant was that if a company does its job well, delivering goods or services to customers at competitive prices, then profits should be forthcoming. From the early 1980s onwards,

Murphy was a highly disciplined buyer who had strict return requirements and did not stretch for acquisitions—once missing a very large newspaper transaction involving three Texas properties over a $5 million difference in price. Like others in this book, he relied on simple but powerful rules in evaluating transactions. For Murphy, that benchmark

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such alumni are often the source of future business for the firm when they recommend to their corporate employers hiring their old firm

“Frankly, Joe was disruptive,” says board member Tom Alberg. “What Joe wanted was to be CEO, but he wasn’t hired to do that.”