"What am I supposed to do, come in in my BVDs or some kind of cowboy suit?" -- T. Boone Pickens
T. Boone Pickens, chairman and president of Mesa Petroleum Co., has gained fame or notoriety, depending on your perspective, for his attempts to take over Phillips Petroleum Co., Unocal Corp., and other oil giants.
You see remarks that people are surprised about me: "This guy wears a gray suit with a red striped tie." Well, what am I supposed to do, come in in my BVDs or some kind of a cowboy suit? They act like if you're from Amarillo, Tex., and you're involved in some of these deals, there's got to be something strange. I frequently read, "He wears button-down collars and looks like he came from Wall Street." Well, I do wear button-down collars, and I don't have any trouble fitting in on Wall Street, or in Amarillo, or San Francisco. I consider myself to be an average American man. If I ever go to a sale to buy clothes, all my sizes are gone.
People call me a raider, preying on a vulnerable company. But why is it vulnerable? Because of weak management. Any time that the managers are doing a good job for the stockholders, keeping the stock value up, everything will be just fine. And this is the old raider who came in and put $3 billion in value in about 250,000 stockholders' pockets.
I've been speaking on college campuses for 20 years, and in the '60s I wouldn't have 2 people coming up to say, "How can I do what you did?" They didn't give a damn what I did; they were probably turned off by it. In '84 I made 11 talks on campuses to 28,000 students, and I can tell you this: Today they'll stand in line to come up and ask me a question. Generally, the question is, "How can I get out and do what you did?"
"You've got speculative entrepreneurialism today -- if I become Pet Rock Inc., I'm golden." - Kevin Phillips
Kevin Phillips, a member of former President Nixon's brain trust, is the author of The Emerging Republican Majority and Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy. He currently heads American Political Research Corp.
We've had comparable periods glorifying the entrepreneur/businessman in American history. The industries are different today than in the late nineteenth century and the 1920s, but the phenomenon is not new. And both those periods, in turn, lead to a regulatory period bringing everything back in line.
The scary part is the parallels in the international financial context between 1985 and 1929-30. Fly-by-might commodity firms, government securities operations, hustlers with every type of index and call option imaginable; Canadian banks, Texas banks, Ohio S&Ls, insurance firms, medical malpractice firms -- a whole infrastructure of fast and loose financial services and speculative development. I won't say it's teetering, but it's certainly not solid. Boy, is that going to be regulated. It's just a couple of years way.
Entrepreneurial politics gets caught up in gimmicks. Now the President's got the idea that all these poor clowns in the Allegheny Valley can be retrained to be computer technicians. Obviously, that's not even remotely true. Entrepreneurialism involves major hardship for these segments of the economy. Entrepreneurs are always thinking in terms of the cutting edge, but they're not paying attention to the slag heap. What new business can you start in a small town in Iowa when the whole place is crumbling, or in some mill town in South Carolina?
People are trying to get themselves a piece of some stock offering or some start-up or some gimmick before it's too late. It will be interesting to see which of these new companies are still around five years hence. You've got speculative entrepreneurialism today: If I go out and I become Pet Rock Inc., I'm golden. Everyone's trying to grab a piece of what's perceived to be a great way to make a buck.
"There's no point in bemoaning the fact that some people are taking advantage of the system." -- Ian MacMillan
Ian MacMillan is director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at New York University Graduate School of Business Administration.
Obviously, when something is going strongly, people are going to try and jump on the bandwagon. Some of them may be dishonest, and others may be rip-off artists. That's certainly a shame -- but it would be a terrible shame if there were no bandwagon for anyone to jump on.There's no point in bemoaning the fact that some people are going to take advantage of the system.
This wave of entrepreneurs is different from those in the past, particularly in terms of composition. You have many more women, more blacks, more members of all the minorities. What's important is that this is the route to building social and economic wealth; the more people we can get into that kind of mainstream, nation-building activity, the more healthy we will be.
I am seriously concerned about a couple of things. We're going to see more failures. That's sad, but it's just a fact of life. What I'm really worried about, particularly since we've seen pension-fund money flowing into venture capital, is that some mindless do-gooder is going to rush in and say, "Now we need regulation." As soon as people start regulating rather than letting free markets operate, we will swamp all initiative and creativity.
My other concern is the rapid rate at which we're replacing people we need. You can't stop progress. But once we've created all the subsidiary service activities that go with the creation of new businesses, how many people are going to be left over who need retraining because their jobs have become obsolete? I think that's the challenge.
