Money is a burden. Some of us are willing to shoulder some burdens.
That’s typical of Malcolm Forbes, poking as much fun at himself as he does at others, and laughing all the way to the bank, but most of all refusing to feel guilty about his inherited fortune, which he used as the foundation to create a many-times-larger fortune. Malcolm Forbes is undoubtedly one of the wealthiest men in America. Asked how he did it, he reply: “Through sheer ability (spelled i-n-h-e-r-i-t-a-n-c-e.)”
Malcolm knows more corporation presidents than anybody else. Malcolm doesn’t talk to vice-presidents.
Forbes sees no paradox in that. Whether it’s business or pleasure, all he wants is the best of everything, and he gets it.
But I will say that it was a hell of a lot of fun being catered to in such high style — an exquisite luncheon on the way up, an exquisite dinner on the way back. Forbes had told me that he loved using his yacht for these football trips, because after spending 14 hours in such a relaxed environment with such a small group, you have a real feeling about almost everybody by the end of the day. And it was true. It was the perfect way for Forbes president to sell the virtues of his magazine as an advertising medium, and at least one way for editor in chief Forbes to size up the corporate leaders he reports on.
We are a capitalist tool. We are of use to people who want to succeed in a free-enterprise system. We praise success. We blow the whistle on failure. We are constantly needling.
There’s always factionalism and politics in corporations, and very often, you see a CEO who’s retiring pick a replacement who’s been satisfactory to him and for him, but being a good second man is different from being a good top man. It’s funny; sometimes the biggest failure of a CEO is in his choice of his successor. My father used to say that he never bought the stock of a company based on its balance sheet. He always bought management, based on this personal impression of the top man, the guy at the steering wheel. That’s the reason I make it a point to know all these guys.
I wish more top executives would stop hiding behind their PR departments and speak out publicly. We need more respected spokesmen for the free-enterprise system. The public and business suffer from chief executives’ timidity. I mean, there are guys who’ll knock in heads in board rooms, but they’re afraid to make public statements that might become controversial.
I think one of the stupidest things we did was to attempt to legislate our morality about bribery abroad. All it’s done is cost thousands of American jobs and add to the future imbalance of trade. In this country, we’re used to paying salesmen’s commissions. That’s the way it’s done. In the Arab countries and in Europe and in much of Asia particularly, you’re not dealing with a sales organization. There’s no middleman. You pay a commission to the fellow who orders your planes. The salesman is the buyer.
Carter hasn’t failed yet but he couldn’t get any legislation passed. He couldn’t get anything done. After a while, it looked as though he didn’t understand who he was and the Presidency was. I mean, a closed mind belongs in the pulpit, not the WH, and he had to open his mind. He found that hard to do because his values were absolute, as born-again Christians are apt to be. He had to learn to settle for part of the loaf, rather than all or none, because there are a lot of guys a President needs, like House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who wants part of that loaf, too.
I think Teddy Kennedy has a deep conviction that business is greedy, nefarious and undisciplined, that all business men are sons of bitches. It’s the kind of attitude that one so often finds in people who inherited a lot of money. They feel guilty about their inheritance, and you’ve got to remember that Joe Kennedy made much of his money in gambling, in liquor, in areas that kept him from gaining real social acceptance in the WASP world. The boys were of it, at Harvard and Palm Beach, but not yet in it, and there was always a Kennedy chip on the shoulder toward business, particularly big business. If he were in the White House, Teddy would probably succeed where Jack failed in passing punitive measures and taxes, and putting so many restrictions and regulations on the conduct of business that it would jeopardize the whole economy. I think he’s a dangerous man. Not by intention; he’s a warm human being and his sympathy for the have-nots is real. But I don’t think you accomplish their betterment by hamstringing business, and I do think Teddy Kennedy is motivated partly by some malice in his heart.
It was the first glimmer of a gut-felt reaction, whereas before, he didn’t know how to compromise. Either he gave in on everything or he tried to sweet-talk or cajole Congressmen. That works to a degree, but only when they realize you’ll give them a left hook sometimes. There’s a lot of power that he’s beginning to learn how to use.
I said to my son, “Isn’t it amazing how a man can delude himself? That’s sad, because the guy is sincere and passionate.” I warned my son that that was what can happen to you when you become obsessed by politics. I thought it was the perfect example of sincerity and futility marching hand in hand.
My concern for the poor is as real as anybody’s, if not more so, because when you have so much of this world’s goodies and have been blessed with so much of the best that this life has to offer, if you’re worth a damn, you’ll have heightened awareness of those who don’t have it so good.
During the 20s, when everybody, including the shoeshine boys, was making money in the stock market, businessmen were seen as magicians. Before that, when they were “robber barons,” everybody was in awe of them. What they accomplished. Senators were elected by legislators in many states, and they could buy seats for their favorites. Businessmen has the power. Then in 1929, all that collapsed because businessmen were largely blamed for unemployment, for the factories closing, for the policies — such as economic isolation — that contributed to the Depression. Businessmen never recovered from that plunge.
In the academic world, there was a great degree of mutual disrespect. A businessman was a grubby exploiter; the academician was the one who couldn’t earn a living, so he taught.
Traveling on a bike is invariably a delight. I love the exposure to the elements, being part of them instead of boxed off from them, the way you are in a car. It heightens every one of your senses. Your vision is better. Your concentration is better. You’re taking more in every moment. It’s terrifically invigorating. Your mind is working on a different beam — all your awareness are heightened in a way they aren’t in an office, at the desk, on the job. You’re like somebody skiing down a slope: totally turned on. I’ve done some of my best thinking on a motorbike. The one problem is that it’s rather difficult to jot down your thoughts on a notepad at 70 miles an hour, so the terrific new ideas you get are usually gone with the wind by the time you stop, but some of them stay.
The last thing I want to do is die; the next time around I can’t possibly have it as good as I do this time, so what the hell would I want to check out for? I’ve got the best this world has to offer.
Once I got into it, I wanted to do the things that hadn’t been done. It wasn’t just competitive zest. I thought that if you’re going to do it at all, you might as well mobilize your resources and have more fun doing what nobody else has done.
My God, the kids came in their school buses, the whole town came out to watch us launch.
Easy for a rich man to say.
Well, the variety might be greater for a rich man. The opulence might be greater. But my eyes can’t enjoy the view of my land in Colorado any more than the eyes of the guy who just bought 5 acres of it. It’s like the old saying: How much do you want to own?
Their motivations are so patent. They’re guilty about their money and they think that instead of giving it away, they’ll use it to change the system that gave them an inordinate amount of money.
Enjoying life is the only solvency, and in business as in life, the biggest risk is too much caution. That’s always the danger in business: when you stop charging. When you stop moving.
As soon as a business decides, this is how we used to do it and it worked so we’ll keep on without changing, that’s when it loses its momentum. Safety doesn’t lie in that. Stashing money is not safety. Keeping it is not safety. Moving it, putting it to work, is safety.
The world literally is energy.
Oh, they’ve been clumsy and inept, but business has discovered that when energy is expensive, they can save a lot of money by using it more efficiently. And what motivated them? Trying to make a buck, and that same motivation is going to lead us to new and exciting solutions to our energy problems.
In short, he helped — by banging the drum and leading us into a new and terribly important area — but by now, he’s lost some of his heft because of exaggeration as to who the villains are and underestimation of the cost of total purity.
I would say its worst excess right now is the large number of business people who are still trying to rip off the consumer, the employee or the stockholder. There are still a lot of guys out to grab the quick buck, and some of them get to pretty high positions, at least for a while. So I’d say capitalism’s worst excess is in the large number of crooks and tinhorns who get too much of the action.
Incidentally, that’s what brings on Federal overregulation and thus inflation: the sins of some committed under the mantle of free enterprise.
- Ted, you criticize us for being immoral people, but if you knew us, you’d know that many of us are very moral in our private lives. We may have some programs on that aren’t good, but we’re very nice family people.
- That’s exactly what the Gestapo and the people who ran the death camps said.
We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy — free mechanical energy, in this case. This information revolution is a revolution of free intellectual energy.
Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don’t have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.
The telephone allowed you to intone your words with meaning beyond the simple linguistics. The Macintosh lets you sing the way the telephone did. You don’t simply communicate words, you have special print styles and the ability to draw and add pictures to express yourself.
Making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.
People get stuck as they get older. Our minds are sort of electrochemical computers. Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. You are really etching chemical patterns. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It’s a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. It’s rare that you see an artist in his 30s or 40s able to really contribute something amazing.
Companies, as they grow to become multibillion-dollar entities, somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or a passion about the products. The creative people, who are the ones who care passionately, have to persuade 5 layers of management to do what they know is the right thing to do. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity.
Insisting that we need one standard now is like saying that they needed one standard for automobiles in 1920. There would have been no innovations such as the automatic transmission, power steering and independent suspension if they believed that. The last thing we want to do is freeze technology.
Japan’s very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined 2nd-generation version. That strategy works only when what they’re working with isn’t changing very much — the stereo industry and the automobile industry are 2 examples. When the target is moving quickly, they find it very difficult, because that reinvention cycle takes a few years.
None of the really bright people I knew in college went into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late 60s and 70s. All of them are in business now — which is funny, because they were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way or another to find some sort of truth about life.
In education we have close to a national embarrassment. In a society where information and innovation are going to be pivotal, there really is the possibility that America can become a 2nd-rate industrial nation if we lose the technical momentum and leadership we have now.
In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that’s the problem with most philanthropy — there’s no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.
The minute you have the means to take responsibility for your own dreams and can be held accountable for whether they come true or not, life is a lot tougher. It’s easy to have wonderful thoughts when the chance to implement them is remote.