self made vips personal development blog

Showing posts with label vip success stories. Show all posts

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Self-made millionaire at age 14

Saturday, September 13, 2008

Percy Julian - Forgotten Genius

Friday, May 30, 2008

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Monday, May 19, 2008

As the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources of Saudi Arabia, Ali al-Naimi pretty much controls the world's oil tap. It doesn't matter which nation's Oil Minister is the head of OPEC (currently it's Libya); Saudi Arabia has the biggest bat, and the Saudis have shown that they will use it to bring the others in line.

That's what makes al-Naimi, 73, the biggest hitter in oil, although at the moment he's not swinging hard. Why should he, with prices well north of $100 per bbl. and his own country benefiting? But Saudi Arabia is sitting on 1.5 million bbl. per day in spare capacity—its historical norm—and getting a lot of heat from the West to pump more. At the same time, OPEC hawks such as Venezuela and Iran wouldn't mind if oil crested $150 and the pain level increased.

Al-Naimi's predicament is that if he adds more oil supply to the market, the bubble will burst, and prices could go into a free fall. He has expressed his concern that oil prices are being driven by financial factors like speculators and not by supply and demand. My company refines oil into gasoline, and trust me, there's plenty of crude.

Al-Naimi is well regarded in the oil industry, a very articulate and thoughtful minister who is as concerned about Saudi Arabia's energy future as he is about the current situation. But he is walking a tightrope of petropolitics that has never been more difficult to balance.

Westfall is chief economist at Tesoro Corp., a large independent U.S. oil refiner

Rupert Murdoch

By Paul Steiger

Keith Rupert Murdoch is finally, at 77, what he has long dreamed of being: the world's most influential newspaper publisher. He is also much more than that: his $29 billion (revenue) News Corp. churns out films, video news and entertainment, books and Web content galore. While people think of Murdoch as rough-hewn and self-made, which in many ways he is, his background is gilded: he studied at Oxford and inherited his first newspaper.

Murdoch likes to place big bets and usually wins, although he teetered close to bankruptcy at least once, circa 1990. His genius flowed from seeing early that the revenue from then thriving newspapers could be leveraged to expand not only his original business but into other areas as well, most notably in acquiring a movie studio, building a fourth U.S. broadcast television network, driving forward satellite television with Sky, STAR and DirecTV and then boldly buying MySpace. His latest major purchase, Dow Jones, adds the Wall Street Journal to a newspaper collection that already included prestige nameplates in Britain (the Times) and his native Australia (the Australian) as well as the pulpier New York Post and Britain's News of the World and the Sun.

There is, to be sure, a darker side to Murdoch's influence and legacy. He has at times subordinated the journalism operations he controls to further his own business interests, undermining their credibility if not their long-term profitability. His own test of journalism sometimes seems to be what sells—no less but also no more. Yet Fox News, which many liberals decry as a conservative political pander by Murdoch, is actually best understood as a product designed to fill an untapped market niche in video news. It succeeded brilliantly.

A return to his roots and a victory lap of sorts, acquiring the Journal poses for Murdoch perhaps his greatest test as a publisher. He aspires to make money and extend the paper's reach while maintaining its prestige—a tall order, even for him.

Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, is editor in chief of ProPublica

Steve Jobs

By Barbara Kiviat

Steve Jobs is great at playing the countercultural icon. He's a college dropout who once backpacked around India looking for spiritual enlightenment, and he takes only $1 a year in salary. There are righteous battles to fight, and with Macs and iTunes and iPhones, Jobs fights them, taking on the entrenched megaliths that try to dictate our tastes in computers and music and mobile phones.

But don't let the black mock turtleneck and denim trousers fool you. More than anything else, Jobs is a canny CEO who knows how to sell product. Steve Wozniak was the technical genius behind the first Apple computer; Jobs saw the marketability. He now presides over a company with $24 billion in annual sales and 22,000 employees. Jobs, 53, is revered by tech and design geeks, but the world's business-school students may have the most to learn from him. Apple's stock has shot up more than 70% over the past year, thanks to Jobs' strategy of focusing on his most profitable customers and coming up with new things to sell them—the ultra-thin MacBook Air most recently—rather than just chasing more market share.

Jobs may be a celebrity CEO, but he doesn't jump out of airplanes or traipse around Africa with bundles of cash. He is always in character and always on message, so much so that when late-night TV parodies him, he's invariably rolling out some new iProduct . Jobs gets called mercurial, egomaniacal, a micromanager. If that sounds a little like a CEO doing his job, maybe that's because he is—and a mighty fine one.

Radiohead

By Edgar Bronfman Jr.

When the British rock band Radiohead announced that In Rainbows would be made available online directly to consumers at whatever price they wanted to pay, many said it signaled the end of the world's major music labels. As the CEO of one of them, I may surprise you by saying that in some ways, they were right. The traditional record-label business model—the one based on controlling access and distribution—is dead.

But Radiohead's innovation also indicated something more important: that new models are very much alive. Does this mean we view the future as a giant tip jar? Not exactly—and I suspect Radiohead doesn't either, particularly in light of the commercial success In Rainbows had after the "pay any price" offer ended.

In reality, the music industry is no longer defined by a single model but thousands of them. Consumers now access more music more conveniently than ever before. This empowerment has driven changes in the relationships between artists and music companies. As a result, artists today can establish relationships with labels that are best suited to their own music, commercial needs and artistic development. For example, while we had been Radiohead's longtime music publisher, we hadn't previously distributed the band's recorded music. But in the case of In Rainbows, we partnered with the band to create a unique digital-distribution venture to make the album available at online music stores.

If any band could extend its creativity and spirit to redefine an entire industry, it would be Radiohead. With a single bold experiment, it revealed a broad array of possibilities for experiencing and monetizing music in the future.

Bronfman is chairman and CEO of the Warner Music Group

John Chambers

By John Doerr

As chief executive of Cisco, John Chambers has made the Internet-systems company one of the best in the world. John, 58, has grown the firm from $1.2 billion in annual revenue when he took over as CEO in 1995 to its current run rate of $40 billion. But his true legacy will be molding it into one of the best for the world.

Videoconferencing fails to adequately describe Cisco's latest innovation, TelePresence. The lifelike virtual-meeting system is almost better than being there—especially when you consider the time, money and carbon emissions saved by cutting back on travel. The 500 units sold since 2006 are in 95 cities worldwide, and most multinationals will soon own one. And Cisco is serving more than global leaders and businesses—it is also connecting families and communities. TelePresence terminals have been set up at Wal-Marts and U.S. military bases in Iraq so American soldiers can speak to and see loved ones.

A consummate communicator, John talks most about education. Over the past decade, Cisco's Networking Academies have taught critical IT skills to more than 2.5 million students in 160 countries. These classes not only improve students' lives today but also prepare them to be the industry leaders of tomorrow. And when they are, they'll have the means to communicate too.

Doerr is a partner at the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Jeff Bezos

By Josh Quittner

Not content to simply reinvent shopping, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos believes that reading—the old-school, books- printed-on-paper kind—is sorely in need of a rethink. So he unveiled a paperback-size, battery-powered digital book reader dubbed the Kindle. It can store hundreds of titles and wirelessly downloads $10 books on demand.

The goal, says Bezos, is to create a device so seamless, book readers will enter a video-game-like "flow state" and "enter the author's world." The strategy, he adds, "is to make the device 'disappear.'" Mixed reviews notwithstanding, the $399 gadget certainly is flying off Amazon's shelves.

Nearly a decade after being anointed TIME's Person of the Year, Bezos, 44, is still leaving his mark on the future. A dotcom highflyer that came perilously close to crashing on Wall Street in 2001, Amazon is up once again—thanks to Bezos. The Seattle-based company had sales of $15 billion last year and controls 6% of the $136 billion online-retail market.

The tech world changes faster than a hummingbird flaps its wings. And Amazon's competitors change even faster. But Bezos' mantra has remained constant: Try to give your customers the biggest selection at the best prices, delivered cheaply and easily. That's a great, old-fashioned visionary.

Jay Adelson

By Lev Grossman

For a web company, there may be no better definition of total, unconditional victory than seeing your name become a verb. So far, that club includes Google and...nobody else. But if you had to predict the next tech brand to make the leap, Digg would be a good guess.

Digg.com, which gets about 26 million visitors a month (up from 16 million this time last year), is a website where readers rank news stories and other online content according to how interesting they are. The most popular ones bubble to the top. It's the ultimate Web 2.0 take on the ultimate Web 1.0 medium: Digg not only puts readers and editors on equal footing but also puts the Wall Street Journal on equal footing with Dwight Schrute's blog on the TV show The Office.

Jay Adelson, 37, is Digg's CEO. If somebody somewhere posts "The 11 Most Unintentionally Gay Rap Lyrics Ever," and you care about unintentionally gay rap lyrics, Adelson is the guy who makes sure you see that list. For someone who runs a human-powered media website, Adelson has a seriously crunchy background: he founded Equinix, a data-center company.

So if the people choose the news, what exactly does Digg's CEO do? He manages the community, grows the business and curates the arcane algorithms that translate votes into ranking and placement. Prime placement on Digg has become so valuable, people will do anything to get it, including cheat. Adelson makes sure nothing thwarts the will of the people. Not even Dwight Schrute.

The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Digg CEO Jay Adelson also founded the company. In fact Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg.

Steve Ballmer

By Guy Kawasaki

As Dan Quayle knows, a single event can define one's image. business execs have the same problem. Throwing a chair across the room when an employee tells you he's going to work for a competitor, dancing like a monkey at an employee meeting, screaming "Developers!" 14 times while drenched with sweat at a software conference—things like that are hard to live down. In Steve Ballmer's case, however, it's not a single event (he denies throwing the chair, but the dancing and screaming live on in viral video), nor does it unfairly define his image.

My interview with him onstage at a Microsoft conference in March wasn't exactly soft and lacy. For crying out loud, he threw my MacBook Air on the ground. The man is truly WYSIWYG—what you see is what you get—maybe more so than Microsoft's products. By contrast, Ballmer's title—chief executive officer—is a disguise. He is actually Microsoft's combative, take-no-prisoners chief warrior. If you want 95% of the wallets of every market that you're in, then you want this Steve. If you want 95% of the mind share of every market that you're in, then you need the other Steve (Jobs).

Ballmer, 52, is worth $15 billion, which makes him one of the world's 50 richest people, but he hasn't forgotten what got him there: sheer force of will. Many execs throw fits, dance like nuts and scream, but none deliver results the way Ballmer does. In the past two years, Microsoft profits have surged 20% and sales 28%. He has amassed a war chest, and he has never been shy about deploying it. Yahoo! is learning what it's like to be in his crosshairs. He also swears that he's going to smoke Google. Whether you like the company or not, give credit where credit is due: Steve Ballmer kicks ass.

Kawasaki is the co-founder of Alltop.com and Garage Technology Ventures and former chief evangelist of Apple

Jamie Dimon

By Michael Bloomberg

Shakespeare isn't usually associated with investment banking. But Jamie Dimon is quick to apply the Bard's insights on power and responsibility, intrigue and honor, to life on Wall Street.

He has certainly experienced as many spectacular reversals of fortune as any Shakespearean hero. Ten years ago, he was expected to be crowned head of his firm, Citigroup, as it merged with the Travelers Group. Instead he was abruptly pushed aside. But he returned in triumph when he sold Chicago's Bank One to JPMorgan Chase and quickly ascended to command of the House of Morgan himself.

In March the curtain went up on the most audacious plot twist yet. After three sleepless days of frantic negotiations involving the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank, JPMorgan Chase bought the reeling investment firm Bear Stearns, fending off a meltdown of the financial markets. It made Jamie, 52, a principal player in the biggest financial drama of our time. Putting the deal together was tough; making it work will be tougher still. If anyone can do it, he can.

Like Jamie, I've faced slings and arrows of outrageous Wall Street fortune; my own 15-year career at Salomon Brothers ended with a surprise boot out the door. But life has given better second and third acts to us both—in Jamie's case, a lead role in ending our winter of financial discontent.

Bloomberg is mayor of New York City and the founder of Bloomberg LP

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal

By Riz Khan

As people run around screaming about a clash of civilizations, it is reassuring to spend time with Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. He crosses boundaries in a unique way, proudly emphasizing his role as the largest individual foreign investor in the U.S. and mingling with power brokers from business, politics and even entertainment, in the East and the West. The Arab world needs people like him who show that good business can unite the most diverse of cultures and nations. In the mid-'90s, he bailed out Citibank when no one else would step in—including Americans. He has openly condemned terrorism and pushed for reform at home in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East—although he points out with a wry smile that modernization does not have to equal Westernization. The Arab world, he believes, can find a balance that moves it forward without compromising traditions and culture.

The Middle East is at a crossroads. On the one hand, there are forces pushing for a break from the West because of its intervention in places like Iraq and its inequity in the treatment of Israelis compared with Palestinians. On the other hand, prosperous Gulf nations such as the United Arab Emirates and Qatar encourage closer ties with America and Europe to help grow their mushrooming multicultural societies.

Prince Alwaleed, 53, has shown that the common goals of peace and stability can conquer ill-founded prejudices. He has charm, a wonderful sense of humor and the rare ability to answer tough questions with candid answers. With his example, it is possible the right path on that crossroads will be chosen.

Khan is a host on Al Jazeera English and the author of Alwaleed

Lou Jiwei

By Stephen S. Roach

Can one fund manager make a difference to China and the rest of the world? That question will be answered by Lou Jiwei, 57, China's former Vice Minister of Finance and one of the country's most seasoned financial operators. It is a daunting challenge: organizing the largest investment-fund start-up ever when the world could well be in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s.

In a relatively short period of time, China has amassed more than $1.6 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves, the largest such reservoir in history. While this cushions China from the vicissitudes of ever volatile financial markets, much of it is invested in low-yielding U.S. Treasury securities. So authorities earmarked $200 billion of this pool for a new sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corp. (CIC), which Lou now runs. The goal: generate higher returns through advanced asset-management techniques.

Lou must assemble a first-rate management team as well as develop an investment discipline aligned with China's longer-term return objectives. As if that were not enough, he has also been thrust into the heart of an intense geopolitical debate over the role governments should play in shaping cross-border investment. If successful, the CIC could receive billions more of investable capital—which could quickly turn Lou into one of the most powerful fund managers on the planet.

Roach is an economist and the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Neelie Kroes

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Were she alive today, the trailblazing american feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton would applaud Holland's Neelie Kroes. As a young woman, Neelie was overlooked to head her father's firm and had to resign from another job when she got pregnant. She moved on, became a politician and a businesswoman and is now the European Union's Commissioner for Competition. She can be as playful as a kitten, lighthearted and charming, but there's also a tigress in her. Microsoft underestimated her determination to fight for her convictions and lost a high-profile E.U. case.

It was Neelie, 66, who persuaded me to get into the Dutch parliament. She told me that having the liberty to choose as a woman not only opens the doors to power and money but also carries the responsibility to live with the consequences of those choices. These words, combined with her foresight that feminism's next challenge is to improve the position of Muslim women and other women from the unfree world, helped give me the courage for that fight.

Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Infidel

Jeffrey Immelt

By Conan O'Brien

When Jeff Immelt ordered me to write this tribute, I was honored. He then made it clear that there was a GE washer-dryer in it for me if I bumped it up to "deeply honored," and an MRI machine if I worked in a reference to his "catlike reflexes."

According to Wikipedia, Jeffrey Robert Immelt was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, played football at Dartmouth College and earned his M.B.A. at Harvard Business School. Wikipedia goes on to say that Mr. Immelt spent his early career guessing people's weight in an unlicensed South American carnival. Yes, there's nothing like the Internet when you need fast, reliable information.

Jeff Immelt is my boss. In fact, he's my boss's boss's boss. My Late Night program accounts for roughly 0.00000002% of GE's empire, yet I've actually gotten to know the man and his family. This is because Jeff genuinely wants to know and understand the people who work for him. As much as I want to reduce any CEO to The Simpsons' Mr. Burns—sinister and out of touch—Jeff Immelt, 52, defies the stereotype. He gives you the impression that he's equally at home at a research lab in Bangalore, a turbine factory in Schenectady, N.Y., and a dress rehearsal for Saturday Night Live. This is not a man in a bubble.

Two years ago, Jeff invited me to a small meeting to discuss the seismic shifts in network television. I remember the meeting for two reasons: 1) There were snacks. 2) At one point, someone asked Jeff a question about ad revenue and the movie business. What struck me was that Jeff simply said, "I don't know." No spin, no double-talk, no corporate-speak. I've met a lot of accomplished people, and I've always thought it's a sign of real intelligence when anyone with power and expertise admits he doesn't have all the answers.

Let's be honest: any attempt to humanize a $320 billion monolith like GE will probably be met with cynicism. It's easy for a CEO to pay lip service to "going green" or "corporate responsibility," but Jeff seems to genuinely care about finding the nexus between doing well and doing right. God knows, it's a job I wouldn't want, but I'm certainly glad he has it.

And as if all that weren't enough, the man has some serious catlike reflexes.

O'Brien is host of NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien

Karl Lagerfeld

By Zaha Hadid

Chanel has always symbolized elegance; the brand's identity has always been crystal-clear. It is how Karl Lagerfeld has pushed the boundaries of what is possible, reinventing classic Chanel pieces without compromising the integrity of Coco Chanel's original designs, that commands such respect. The initial context of his work demanded a kind of radicalism. Before Karl, we all looked to couture for inspiration and direction. Now, through his work, fashion originates from the street, the media—anywhere. This has resulted in exciting collections that are provocative and sensual. His unrelenting experimentation in fashion, art and photography offers us endless possibilities yet is always grounded and relevant.

Karl consistently reinvents the program with his own ideas and interpretations, which aren't tied to the form of an institution. Karl, 69, is a passionate connoisseur of architecture. He invited me to create the Mobile Art for Chanel, likening the value of my designs to that of great poetry. I could not resist the challenge. He allowed us the greatest degree of experimentation, and we used the latest technologies to create a woven topology of fluid spaces. Visitors are wrapped in a spatial complexity that simultaneously captures and liberates.

Mobile Art for Chanel illustrates how we both feel that fashion and architecture must constantly evolve. What's new in our generation is a greater level of social complexity—manifest in its architecture, art and fashion. There are no simple formulas, no global solutions and little repetition. Karl has spent a career showing us just this.

Hadid was the 2004 winner of the Pritzker Prize in architecture

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