Review – Repeatability (#strategy, #business, @HarvardBiz)

Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change (buy on Amazon.com)

by Chris Zook, James Allen, published 2012

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer. Find more reviews by visiting the Virtual Library. Please note, I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, Harvard Business Review Press, on a complimentary basis.

What’s this book about?

I finished reading this book over three weeks ago. Since then, I have struggled to get myself to sit down and write a review. The primary reason I’ve struggled is because I am not sure I can say with confidence what this book is about, or to which genre it belongs. Is it about strategy? Business management? Business planning? Organizational theory? Something else?

“Repeatability” chants about simplicity, but it’s full of so many buzzwords, different-but-related ideas and proprietary-sounding business catchphrases that it’s hard at times to keep up. And perhaps I’ve dropped into the late middle of an earlier conversation, as the book references a “focus-expand-redefine” growth cycle elaborated upon in three earlier works known as “the trilogy”.

A more charitable explanation of my confusion might place the blame with the authors themselves. Take the way in which they describe the main shifts in strategy they say they are witnessing, which led them to write the book:

1. less about a detailed plan and more about general direction and critical initiatives
2. less about anticipating how change will occur, more about having rapid testing and learning processes to accelerate adaptation to change
3. effective strategy increasingly indistinguishable from effective organization

The central insight from their research, the authors claim, is that,

complexity has become the silent killer of growth strategies

Why? The authors don’t take pains to explain or justify the assumption that the world is more complex and that “traditional” strategic notions no longer work in this new world order. They just accept it as common wisdom and run with solutions for responding to it.

Building “Great Repeatable Models”

The next several chapters detail what Zook and Allen call “Great Repeatable Models”, which are businesses defined by the following three principles:

1. a strong, well-differentiated core
2. clear nonnegotiables
3. systems for closed-loop learning

According to the authors, GRMs (germs?) were

sharply, almost obviously, differentiated relative to competitors along a dimension that also allowed for differential profitability

which I think is another way of saying they have a lucrative competitive advantage.

Similarly, the authors suggest that nonnegotiables are a company’s

core values and the key criteria used to make trade-offs in decision making

while systems for closed-loop learning enabled GRMs to

drive continuous improvement across the business, leveraging transparency and consistency of their repeatable model

which I understood to mean that the businesses had a culture and process for improving their practices over time.

The Cult of the CEO

Chapter 5 of “Repeatability” seeks to demonstrate how the CEO is the guardian of the three principles of GRMs. While it clearly makes sense that the CEO, as the chief strategiest and top of the organizational pyramid would have a role in implementing and enforcing a GRM, the authors offer little here to help other than numerous examples of success and failure in following the three principles followed by a hopeful conclusion that the “right leadership” will be in place to manage the delicate balancing act they specify as ideal. It seems to place the book in the Cult of the CEO genre (idealizing the role and superhuman nature of corporate chief executives) while simultaneously causing much of their writing up to that point to seem extemporaneous.

It’s almost as if the presence of the “right leadership” implies the presence of a GRM, and the absence of a GRM implies the absence of the “right leadership.” The book suffers from hindsight bias and tautological reasoning like this in numerous areas.

My own simple interpretation

The central tenets of this book are confusing, poorly defined and at times self-contradictory. Its research methodology (inductive empirical study to explain complex social phenomena) is frowned on by this Austrian economist. Ironically, it is the occasional element touched upon at the periphery of the book’s argument, rather than its core, where the authors manage to share something meaningful to solving the dilemmas of business people.

Unfortunately, the encouragement to keep the distance between the CEO and the customer minimal and to articulate a simple vision that even lower-level employees can grasp and rally behind, for example, is rather intuitive and obvious. Why would adding layers of bureaucracy and arbitrary decision-making, or creating a business plan so elaborate your employees don’t understand it, ever be a sound practice?

There’s a lot here including many case studies and other reference materials, but not all of it is useful or makes sense when viewed through the prism of the Great Repeatable Model. For some the digging required to find the occasional nugget of wisdom may be worth it but I can’t recommend such exertion for everybody.

Review – How To Read A Book (#reading, #understanding, #philosophy, #education)

How To Read A Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (buy on Amazon.com)

by Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren, published 1972

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer. Find more reviews by visiting the Virtual Library.

“Literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well”

HTRAB seeks to be a remedy for those described above who have read many books but understood little of any of them. As the authors define it, good reading is active reading, that is, it involves note-taking and and highlighting (write in your books to make them truly yours) and question-asking, with the ultimate question being, “What has the author tried to communicate to me and, assuming I’ve understood him, what do I think of what he has said?” A book is an absent teacher– it is ultimately your responsibility to answer on your own and for yourself the questions you might pose to it.

The 4 levels of reading

The authors set out four levels of reading, which are hierarchical in terms of complexity and skill required, and cumulative, in the sense that each level includes the skills and complexity of those below it while adding unique qualities of its own. The levels are:

1. Elementary
2. Inspectional
3. Analytical
4. Syntopical

Elementary reading is exactly what it sounds like, the most basic level of reading that all people learning to read initially experience. At this level of reading, one begins to comprehend the letters and words they form as being connected to or representative of concepts, actions, etc. Unfortunately, at this level of reading, comprehension doesn’t go much beyond this and even more tragically, few readers ever seem to graduate beyond this level, even during and after time spent in college. For elementary readers, books are full of words one must step and stumble over, but little meaning is ever found in them.

Inspectional reading is the beginning of true “reading for understanding”, which is the kind of reading HTRAB is primarily focused on. Inspectional reading is both a level of sophistication and a specific tool that can be used to heighten overall understanding and reading skill for one who “reads well.” It is a skill in the sense that an inspectional reader is able to draw out of a book its essential meaning and something about the way in which the author goes about it (as opposed to an elementary reader, who never quite gets that far, missing the meaning forest for the crowd of symbolic trees). It is a specific tool in that inspectional reading entails a deliberate process by which a reader examines the preface and introductory material of the book (or the first few pages) and the conclusion or epilogue (or last few pages) in detail, surveys the table of contents (if available) and index to get a feel for the overall structure, order and topics covered in the book and then jumps around at random through the middle of the book reading passages and pages of interest that appear to be central to the author’s theme and argument. In this way, an inspectional reader quickly learns what the book is about, how the author goes about elaborating upon it and, perhaps most importantly, whether or not it’s a message and artifice worthy of the readers attention and time.

Without this process, or at a minimum, familiarizing oneself with the table of contents, a reader who starts at the first page and tries to plow through is only making his reading more challenging because he is attempting to learn what he is attempting to understand (the topic and structure), at the same time that he is trying to understand it.

The three primary questions answered by an inspectional (summary) reading are:

1. What kind of book is it?
2. What is it about as a whole?
3. What is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?

Tools to prepare you for reading well

The authors suggest four essential questions to be asked by an active reader:

1. What is the book about as a whole?
2. What is being said in detail, and how?
3. Is the book true, in whole or in part?
4. What of it?

These are questions the reader should have always in the back of his mind as he reads, and which he should be able to answer confidently by the time he finishes.

The authors also recommend several techniques for “making a book your own”:

• Underline major points and forceful statements
• Make vertical lines in the margins for passages worthy of quoting at length
• Stars, asterisks or other markings in the margins where the ten or twelve most critical points are made throughout the book
• Numbers in the margin to catalog the points of an argument being made sequentially
• Numbers of other pages in the margin indicating where in the text an idea is revisited or referenced
• Circling of key words or phrases, similar to underlining
• Writing in the margin or top or bottom of the page or at the end of a chapter as endnotes, to record questions (and answers), a simplified thesis of what you have read or to catalog a sequential argument in concentrated form

Several other techniques and methods are discussed in HTRAB which are critical to reading well. One is to study the title of the book and learn what you can from it. Authors usually take care in naming their books and the titles give significant clues about what the book is and is not about. Another is to practice stating the unity of the book– in a sentence or a paragraph at most, explain what kind of book it is, what it is about and list the devices the author employs to explore that theme. A final tool is to keep in mind the author’s intentions at all times– every book is written ostensibly to solve a problem, which the book is supposed to be a solution for, which begs the questions, “What is the problem the author wanted to solve by writing his book?” and “What solution does he offer to the problem in writing his book?”

The process of analytical reading

The third level of reading, and the most critical for all who wish to learn to read well, is the analytical level. At the analytical level, the primary intention of the reader is to be thorough, complete and to read for understanding. Some of the tools previously discussed are, in fact, part of the analytical reading toolkit. In total, the process or “rules” for analytical reading are:

1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter
2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity
3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole
4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve
5. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words
6. Grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences
7. Know the author’s arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences
8. Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not; and as to the latter, decide which the author knew he had failed
9. Do not begin criticism until you have completed your outline and interpretation of the book (do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say, “I understand.”)
10. Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously
11. Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make
12. For criticism, special criteria apply such as: show wherein the author is misinformed, uninformed, illogical or incomplete

I made a note of some other helpful tips for reading well analytically:

• the important words (in the sense of being critical to the author’s argument) are the one’s that give you the most trouble
• one clue to an important word is that the author quarrels with other writers about it
• if you never ask yourself any questions about a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you insights you did not already possess
• it is best to do all you can without outside help because if you act on this principle consistently you will find you need less and less of it (and take more and more from your reading)

Bringing it all together: syntopical reading

Syntopical reading is the reading of multiple books, with similar topics, in order to synthesize a “conversation” amongst and between the authors. The beauty of this method of reading is it allows one to pit perspectives and arguments from differing backgrounds and even differing time periods into one intellectual commons. It also allows the reader to get a “full measure” of the literary world’s treatment of a given subject. It can be performed by either multi-inspectional reading of various titles, or multi-analytical reading of those same titles.

The steps of a successful syntopical reading are:

1. Creative a tentative bibliography of your subject
2. Inspect all of the books in the bibliography to ensure they’re germane and to get a clearer perspective of the subject itself
3. Inspect the books amassed to find the most relevant passages to the subject matter
4. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology that all authors can be assumed to agree with, even if they didn’t employ such terminology themselves
5. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted to have provided answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not
6. Define the issues, major and minor, by lining up the authors’ respective viewpoints on one side or another
7. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues so as to throw maximum light on the subject

An afterword

Despite my efforts at being analytical, this review was something of an inspectional survey itself. One thing I took away from my reading is that I do a lot of the things mentioned in the analytical reading process, although I actually neglect a lot of the inspectional reading elements and now realize their value. The reading also confirmed some of my biases by throwing into stark relief the inadequacies of many other people’s reading efforts I am aware of, either from direct personal experience or via interaction with their “interpretations” of ideas gleaned from things they have read. It is somewhat dismaying to realize how few intellectual opponents would qualify as “well read” analytical book users, and how inadequate their attempts at criticism are in light of this. One would be more satisfied to think one’s opponents were both more competent, and more honest, than that.

At the end of HTRAB, the authors provide a number of special tips for the reading of specific kinds of works (poems and plays, history, social science, hard science and math, etc.), as well as a bibliography of “great books” (similar to that found here) and a short essay on what reading well can do for an individual. Aside from the hopefully true suggestion that the mind-exercise provided by reading well can actually help one sustain the vitality and quality of their life even into old age, the discussion of the growing relationship one can develop with truly “great” books is comforting, as well. I think for me personally this passage resonated because of my own experiences reading what I refer to as “acts of philosophy” even when their subject matter is not philosophy per se (endlessly re-readable books like Security Analysis and Human Action which seem to give up new secrets and ideas with each new pass through).

Despite my epistemological misgivings about HTRAB (for example, could HTRAB, in and of itself, assist a person currently capable of nothing more than elementary reading to rise above themselves?), I do believe it itself is a title worth revisiting in the future. My first foray amongst its pages was admittedly quick and inspectional, and there were many passages I will admit I skipped just so I could get to the end and get this up on my blog. It may or may not be a “great” book (I believe I will suspend judgment on that for now), it is undoubtedly a “good” book with much to recommend it and I would encourage anyone who is interested, as well as my future self, to pick it up and give it a read.

Review – How To Get Rich (@FelixDennis, #wealth, #entrepreneurialism)

How To Get Rich: The Distilled Wisdom of One of Britain’s Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs (buy on Amazon.com)

by Felix Dennis, published 2009

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer. Find more reviews by visiting the Virtual Library.

This will likely be one of the shortest reviews on record here. One reason is because I don’t want to spoil too much of this book for anyone else who might be interested in it; I do think it has to be fully read by oneself for it’s message to be understood.

Another reason is that I am not rich myself, so I don’t know how valuable my critical impressions of Dennis’s logic and experience will be and I don’t have any real opportunity to run a controlled experiment and find out. I’m going to take his thesis into mind and live my life as I see fit and maybe I’ll end up rich, or at least quite wealthy.

When Dennis says “rich” he means “filthy” rich. As in, it’d take several generations of slouches to piss through it all. This is the kind of rich he’s talking about. He’s not talking about retiring with a pension. And this book is psychological in that Dennis spends a lot of time detailing the mindset and motivations of people who are rich, not just particular strategies or actions to achieve this level of wealth (though he discusses that, too).

Besides the survey of rich life and rich worldviews, the book provides numerous general lessons on business, business management and entrepreneurial practices which are all valuable in their own right even if one doesn’t want to be rich, but doesn’t feel like being poor, either.

This book’s strongest point is honesty. And now, Felix Dennis’s “Eight Secrets to Getting Rich”:

1. Analyze your need. Desire is insufficient. Compulsion is mandatory.
2. Cut loose from negative influences. Never give in. Stay the course.
3. Ignore ‘great ideas’. Concentrate on great execution.
4. Focus. Keep your eye on the ball marked ‘The Money Is Here’/
5. Hire talent smarter than you. Delegate. Share the annual pie.
6. Ownership is the real ‘secret’. Hold on to every percentage point you can.
7. Sell before you need to, or when bored. Empty your mind when negotiating.
8. Fear nothing and no one. Get rich. Remember to give it all away.

Review – The Outsiders (#management, #capital, #business, @HarvardBiz)

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success (buy on Amazon.com)

by William N. Thorndike, Jr., published 2012

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer. Find more reviews by visiting the Virtual Library. Please note, I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, Harvard Business Review Press, on a complimentary basis.

Capital allocation uber alles

“The Outsiders” rests on a premise, that the increase in a public company’s per share value is the best metric for measuring the success of a given CEO, which lends itself to the book’s major thesis: that superior capital allocation is what sets apart the best CEOs from the rest, and that most modern CEOs seem to be only partially aware, if at all, of its critical performance to their companies long-term business success.

Notice! This book is examining the efforts and measurements of CEOs of public companies, not all businesses (public and private), so as a result in comes up a bit short in the “universal application” department. Yes, capital allocation is still critical even in a private business, but you can not measure a private business’s per share value (because there isn’t a marketable security price to reference) and the CEO of a private company is missing one of the most powerful capital allocation tools available to public CEOs, the share buyback (because there is no free float for them to get their hands on at periodically irrational prices).

The CEO capital allocation toolkit

Thorndike describes five capital allocation choices CEOs have:

1. invest in existing operations
2. acquire other businesses
3. issue dividends
4. pay down debt
5. repurchase stock

Along with this, they have three means of generating capital:

1. internal/operational cash flow
2. debt issuance
3. equity issuance

With this framework, Thorndike proceeds to review the business decisions of 8 different “outsider” CEOs, so labeled because they tended to use these tools in a contrary fashion to the mainstream wisdom of their time and to much improved effect as per comparison to their benchmarks. Some of the CEOs are well known and oft mentioned and studied (Warren Buffett, John Malone, Kay Graham, Tom Murphy) and a few are known to the value cognoscenti but may have managed to escape notice of the wider public, academic or otherwise (Henry Singleton, Bill Anders, Bill Stirlitz and Dick Smith).

The author tries to tie together the various common threads, such as how,

All were first-time CEOs, most with very little prior management experience

and many of which (such as Singleton, Buffett and Graham) were large or majority equity holders in their companies, making them part of the vaunted owner-operator club with its resulting beneficial incentives.

Thorndike also tries to use the hedgehog vs. fox metaphor, claiming,

They had familiarity with other companies and industries and disciplines, and this ranginess translated into new perspectives, which in turn helped them to develop new approaches that eventually translated into exceptional results

Interestingly, the share buyback stands out as a particularly effective capital allocation tool for all and the author claims that during the difficult inflationary conditions and market depression of the 1974-1982 period,

every single one [emphasis in the original] was engaged in either a significant share repurchase program or a series of large acquisitions

In broad strokes, Thorndike’s efforts to paint these CEOs with a common brush works, but there are numerous times where his attempt to establish commonality  in genius comes across as forced and unworkable. Often, one of these CEOs will operate in a way inconsistent with Thorndike’s major thesis and yet he’ll end up praising the CEO anyway. In poker, we’d call this the “won, didn’t it?” fallacy– judging a process by the specific, short-term result accomplished rather than examining the long-term result of multiple iterations of the process over time.

Some quibbles

This is actually one of the things that rubbed me rather raw as I read the book. In every chapter, Thorndike manages to strike a rather breathless, hagiographic tone where these CEOs can do no wrong and everything they do is “great”, “fantastic,” etc. Unfortunately, this kind of hyperbolic language gets used over and over without any variety to the point it’s quite noticeable how lacking in detail and critical analysis Thorndike’s approach is at points.

Eventually, I reached a point where I almost wanted to set the book down, take a deep breath and say, “Okay… I get it, this guy is absolutely amazing… can we move on now?”

The editing seemed a bit sloppy, too. Thorndike is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard and runs his own financial advisory. He’s obviously an accomplished, intellectual person. Yet his prose often reads like an immature blog post. It’s too familiar and casual for the subject matter and the credentials of the author. I’m surprised they left those parts in during the editing process. I think it makes Thorndike’s thesis harder to take seriously when, in all likelihood, it’d probably be quite convincing if you happened to chat with the author on an airplane.

From vice to virtue

Something I liked about “The Outsiders” was the fact that there were 8 profiles, rather than one. It was reinforcing to see that the same principles and attitudes toward business and management were carried out by many different individuals who didn’t all know each other (though some did) and ALL had huge outperformance compared to their benchmark.

And I think for someone who is just jumping into the investing, management and agency problem literature, “The Outsiders” is a good place to start to get a broad outline of the major thesis which is that companies that are run by owner-operators, or by people who think like them, where the top management focuses on intelligently allocating capital to its highest use (which, oftentimes when the company’s stock remains stubbornly low compared to its estimated intrinsic value, makes buybacks in the public market the most intelligent option versus low margin growth) consistently outperform their peers and their benchmarks on a financial basis.

I think if this was one of the first books I had read on this theme, I would’ve found it quite illuminating and exciting, a real eye-opener experience. As it were, I read this book after reading a long train of other, often times significantly more comprehensive and detailed literature, so my personal experience was rather flat– I came away thinking I hadn’t learned much.

More to the story

There’s more to this story in two senses.

In the first sense, I actually highlighted many little comments or ideas throughout the book that are either helpful reminders or concepts I hadn’t fully considered myself yet, pertaining to best operational and management practices for businesses and the people who invest in them. In other words, the book is a little deeper than I bothered to share here. As a collection of anecdotes and principles for mastering the concept of capital allocation, it’s a good resource.

In the second sense, I think there’s a lot more to the success of the businessmen and their companies profiled (along with many others) than just good capital allocation. The text alludes to this with quotes from various figures about how they operated their businesses and managed people aside from the specific challenges of capital allocation. But it never goes into it because that isn’t in focus.

And as a business person myself, I know from my own reading, thinking and personal experience that capital allocation IS a critical factor in successfully managing and growing a business over the long-term — after all, if you can’t find good places to put your cash, you’ll inevitably end up wasting a lot of it — but you won’t have capital to allocate if you aren’t operating your business and managing your relationships with employees and customers well, in addition. The book just doesn’t do much in the way of explaining how it was that Ralston Purina, or General Dynamics or Teledyne or what have you, had so much capital to allocate in the first place.

Review – Professional Investor Rules (#investing, @harrimanhouse, #WallSt)

Professional Investor Rules: Top Investors Reveal The Secrets of Their Success (buy on Amazon.com)

by various, introduction by Jonathan Davis, published 2013

A “valueprax” review always serves two purposes: to inform the reader, and to remind the writer. Find more reviews by visiting the Virtual Library. Please note, I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher, Harriman House, on a complimentary basis.

The many faces of money management

A 1948 Academy Award-winning film popularized the slogan “There are eight million stories in the Naked City”, and after reading the eclectic “Professional Investor Rules”, I’m beginning to think there are almost as many stories about how to manage money properly.

Value and growth, momentum and macro-geography, market-timing and voodoo superstition; all these major investment strategies and themes are on display, and many more to boot, and all come bearing their own often-tortured metaphors to convey their point.

What’s more, it seems the pacing and style of the book change along with the advice-giver: while some of the entries follow the books eponymous “rule” format for organizing their thoughts, others involve myths, lengthy prose paragraph-laden essays and headings with sub-headings. Some have charts, and some do not.

One things consistent, at least– all the advisors profiled contradict one another at some point or other, and some even manage to contradict themselves in their own sections.

But it’s got this going for it, which is nice

Those are some of the glaring cons to the book. It’s not entirely without it’s pros, however.

One of the things I liked about the book is, ironically, also one of its flaws– the great variety of personas. They run the gamut from the known to the unknown, the mainstream to the contrarian, the sell-side to the buy-side. This book is published by a UK outfit (Harriman House), which means many of the professional soothsayers will be unfamiliar to US audiences, but it also means you get a selection of icons from the Commonwealth and former British territories (such as Hong Kong and other Asia-based managers) that you’d likely never hear about on CNBC or other American publishing sources.

Following this contrarian inversion theme, I liked that all the phony  fuzzy thinkers were right there next to the sharper pencils because it made their baloney that much more rotten. I think this is a great service for an uninformed investor picking up this book. If they had come across some of the more foppish money dandies on their own, elsewhere, they’d be liable to get taken in and swindled like the thousands of others who sustain such frauds. But at least in this case you’ve got a go-go glamour guy saying no price is too high for a growing company right next to a value guy warning that that way lies the path to certain, eventual doom.

And maybe this isn’t a big deal to others but I like the packaging on this hardcover edition I’ve got– it’s truly a HANDy size, the fonts and color scheme are modern and eye-catching and the anecdotal organization of the book makes it easy to pick up and put down without feeling too upset over whether or not you’ve got the time to commit to a serious read right then.

Fave five

Here are five of my favorite ideas from the book, along with the person(s) who said it:

1. At any one time, a few parts of your portfolio will be doing terribly… focus on the performance of the portfolio as a whole (William Bernstein, Efficient Frontier Advisors)
2. Far more companies have failed than succeeded (Marc Faber, The Gloom, Boom and Doom Report)
3. Fight the consensus, not the fundamentals (Max King, Investec Asset Management)
4. When someone says ‘it’s not about the money,’ it’s about the money (H.L. Mencken… consequently not actually a money manager and not alive, but it was quoted in one of the in-betweens spacing out the chapters)
5. Academics never rescind papers and never get fired (Robin Pabrook and Lee King Fuei, Schroeders Fund, Asia)

Conclusion

Who is this book for? Accomplished, well-read pro-am investors will find nothing new here and much they disagree with, so I’d recommend such readers stay away. Someone completely new to investing and the money management industry might find the book valuable as a current snapshot of the gamut of strategic strains present in the money management industry.

Overall, while “Professional Investor Rules” has its moments, overall I came away less enthused than I did with Harriman House’s earlier offering, Free Capital. For anyone looking to learn investing techniques from accomplished, self-made millionaires, that’s the book I’d point them to– the advice therein is worth multiples of that being given by the mass of asset gathering managers of OPM contained in this one.