Philip Green’s Growth Strategy
Philip Green, owner of, amongst much else, British Home Stores, reached billionaire status faster than anyone else in British history. Today he is worth GBP 3.6 billion and is reckoned to be the country’s fourth richest citizen.
This is the first biography of a man whose aggressive business tactics and brash lifestyle have transformed the staid image of British retailing, and who is likely to remain in the headlines for as Topman long as his ultimate prize, Marks and Spencer, continues to elude his grasp. A middle-class Jewish boy from North London who left school at fifteen, Green started and failed with four businesses before he made it with his fifth venture, Jean Jeannie, which he sold to Lee Cooper for an enormous profit that set him on the road to fame and fortune.
Self-made New York billionaire John Catsimatidis explains how he started his grocery empire.
The summer after completing high school his mother got him a job at a local supermarket where he continued working while attending NYU. After a few short years, one of the owners, Tony, sold John his stake in the store. The financing was simple. As John describes it, “He sold me half the business for ten thousand dollars in notes and said, ‘pay me whenever you have it.'”
Within four years Catsimatidis had opened up ten more stores, paid off Tony, and made his first million. Which just goes to show that a dynamic ambitious person can take the smallest and sleepiest of businesses and turn them into something substantial over time.
Takeover tycoon Carl Icahn on 60 Minutes
This interview with Carl Ichan aired in late 2012. As one would expect from 60 Minutes, it’s very insightful. You gain some interesting insights about both the man and how he makes money.
Be sure not to miss the shots of his office overlooking Central Park.
The Eccentric Billionaire: John D. MacArthur — Empire Builder, Reluctant Philanthropist, Relentless Adversary by Nancy Kriplen
The following mini-review is from Barnes & Noble:
“He was hated, feared, and admired. The country’s second-richest man at the time of his death, John D. MacArthur (1897-1978) also became one of its great benefactors. Every year, some two dozen American writers, artists, intellectuals, and scientists receive as much as a half million dollars in grants known as the “genius awards” from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. But MacArthur was not the benevolent figure you might expect. Stingier than J. Paul Getty, as money-obsessed as Howard Hughes, and as ruthless as Cornelius Vanderbilt, MacArthur was one of the most multi-layered men in business history. Now, in this first full biography of John D. MacArthur as he really was, Nancy Kriplen reveals the man behind the myth — the often vulgar, sometimes unethical, always ambitious rogue who would become one of America’s wealthiest men.
Just stumbled across a book review by one of my favorite business writers, Michael Lewis, on the Warren Buffett biography: The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. If you don’t have the time for a 960 page tome, check out the review. It makes for an interesting read.
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