Excellent advice from a billionaire business leader

books:


	• 1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire Sam Wyly Newmarket, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Excellent advice from a billionaire business leader

Sam Wyly's new book "1,000 Dollars and an Idea: From Entrepreneur to Billionaire" is a book sure to achieve classic status in the world of business memoirs. Few people in the business world changed an industry and then returned again and again to the marketplace to shake up not just companies but entire business models as well. The author went from working in sales at IBM to leading some of the largest and most innovative software companies in the history of the USA. During his career as an entrepreneur and investor, Wyly reinvigorated industries as diverse as telecommunications, restaurants, retail, and energy.

Throughout his adventures building and selling companies, Wyly encountered some of the biggest names in business. From Ross Perot to T Boone Pickens, Sam Wyly worked with the greatest business figures of the 1960's onward.

The book combines folk wisdom with informative hard-won lessons from the author's experience as an entrepreneur. On nearly every page there is a story and a lesson about life or business drawn from the outcome of that story. This is not only a businessman's autobiography, but also a helpful guide for business owners and managers.

Some of Wyly's advice may sound familiar to entrepreneurs, which validates the successful approaches in business taken by the author and other individuals who built great companies. Other advice, however, is drawn from the author's perspective or is counterintuitive at first glance and then turns out to be incredibly accurate.

I'm glad I read this book. For anyone with an interest in reading about business or management, "1,000 Dollars and an Idea" is an excellent pick.

for more information click here

Guide For Young Entrepreneurs

1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Entrepreneur to Billionaire by Sam Wyly, a self-made billionaire who grew up in Louisiana. You'll love the way this, one of the 1,000 richest people in the world, tells his story and his life lessons in a folksy, down-home, down-to-earth conversational tone. He shares the simple lessons he learned as a child listening to his father and friends talk in the barber shop about hedging their loans on their cotton crops to pay off the bank in the fall, and from his mother, who put a few dollars into a savings account for his future college funds and explained that if he added more dollars regularly the savings would grow because he was not spending his money and because the bank would pay him to leave his money with them for those years. Sam's family lost their home and had to move to a cabin with no water or electricity because of the crop failure, and from this childhood experienc, which became his finance lesson, Sam ultimately started the Maverick Capital and Ranger Capital Hedge Funds. He shares how to realize your dreams, overcome failures, and reach your full potential and at the same time build companies that are good for your employees and co-workers's success and happiness also. The book is Wyly's autobiography and also an inspiring business guide.

for more information click here

A Real GREEN Maverick

Hitting the shelves this week is a new book titled "1,000 Dollars & an Idea", an autobiography by billionaire entrepreneur Sam Wyly. Haven't heard of him? Neither had I, until I read the cover of the book. Here is a man who started with pretty-much nothing and went on to create computer, investment and software companies, build familiar brands like Bonanza Steakhouse, Michaels Stores and Green Mountain Energy and even fight to break up the AT&T monopoly.

Sam Wyly is often described as a maverick and the title fits him better than it fits John McCain. He's definitely his own man and he shys away from labels that paint him into a corner. Here is a man who made millions buying and selling companies (including oil companies) and now works to advance the alternative energy (Green Mountain Energy) and carbon offset (www.begreennow.com) industries. The same can be said about the company he keeps, from Ross Perot and George Bush to Bill Clinton.

Overall, Wyly does a great job of bringing the reader close to the tough decisions that he had to make in creating his own destiny as an entrepreneur. The narrative drifts, a bit, but it does have a certain "i'm a real guy and here's my story" charm. Fans of books about entrepreneurs or people looking for some inspiration as they develop their own business will find a lot to like in this book. As an owner of a green business, I learned a lot from Wyly and his honestly-portrayed struggles have given me a lot of hope as we figure out how to make our business bigger and stronger.

My only complaint, as an environmentalist, is that the section on Green Mountain Energy is just too short. It would have been interesting to read more about the author's struggles to make Wind, Solar and Geo-Thermal energy more affordable and accessible. Perhaps this leaves an opening for a sequel?

for more information click here

What a wonderful book!

Wyly's book is first the marvelous autobiography of a quintessential entrepreneur with many implicit lessons about what one must know and do to have a good chance of success, but more valuable is its service as a primer for what more it takes to be a world-class entrpreneur, as Wyly is.

Once you are smart, driven and knowledgeable about the intricasies of an opportunity, Wyly, in his story telling, shows that it takes an abundance of audacity and that male-defined acceptance of risk called "balls." Wyly has a set that could ring in the New Year, and his story telling is fast and first rate. I couldn't put it down.

Read it. Pass it on. It is that good, if you like a saga of intellectual application of entrprenuerial risk and impacable fortitude.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2

The rags-to-riches story of an amazing business wizard?from the Louisiana cotton fields to the worlds of computers, retailing, fast food, high finance, and green energy?life lessons from a man ahead of the pack and ahead of his time.

"My work is to create companies and build them," says the billionaire whom Fortune magazine, over thirty years ago, characterized_as "one of the most, if not the most, important entrepreneurs" of the century. This was even before Wyly contributed to nearly every great technological, service industry, and investment business breakthrough in the second half of the twentieth century.

Now, in his fast-paced, fascinating, and candid memoir, Wyly reveals the thought processes, relationships, and financial machinations behind the building of his diverse businesses over the last four decades.

Here's the story of how he worked his way through Louisiana Tech selling class rings and why, after his first job in which he broke sales records for IBM (along with Ross Perot, a fellow IBM salesman) and a brief stint at Honeywell, he decided to risk $1,000 of his savings to found the first "computer utility" company in the business world. This was in 1963. Two years later, he took his University Computing Company public and became an instant millionaire.

Never losing his entrepreneurial spirit, Wyly undertook one challenge after another, such as:
? Waging a successful anti-monopoly battle against AT&T, enabling him to build a "telephone highway" for computers
? Growing the modest Bonanza Steak House chain, which he "inherited" as the result of a bad debt, to a total of 600 outlets before selling it for a huge profit
? Creating a new systems software company, Sterling Software, which he eventually sold for $4 billion
? Dividending Sterling Commerce to public shareholders and selling to AT&T_for $4 billion in 2000
? Expanding the small arts-and-crafts chain Michaels Stores from 10 to 1,000 stores before selling it for $6 billion in 2006
? Founding Green Mountain Energy, which has become the largest and most profitable green business in the country.

Part autobiography and part inspirational self-help business guide, Wyly not only provides his homespun life lessons in the practice of starting and building businesses, but he also delivers refreshing new insights into how many American businesses operated from the 1950s to the present.

for more information click here

hot