今天带来的这篇文章作者是Nathan Vardi，推荐了《商界局外人》这本书

When hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman hosted an event in April to promote

his backing of Valeant Pharmaceuticals ’ $46 billion bid,

he called his presentation “The Outsider.” “The name of the presentation

comes from a book which I highly recommend you read,” Ackman explained

to his audience. “I would say one of the most important investment books

I have ever read.”

“The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational

Blueprint for Success” tells the stories of eight successful chief

executives. Ackman’s overwhelming and very public endorsement of it was

even more interesting because one of the CEOs highlighted and praised by

the book is Bill Stiritz, who is currently one of Ackman’s key rivals

in the epic battle over Herbalife that has been raging on Wall

Street for over a year. The ideas and lessons of the book have resonated

so powerfully among CEOs and investors that they apparently can in some

ways bring them together. Ackman and Stiritz might not agree on whether

Herbalife is an illegal pyramid scheme, but both men seem to believe in

the extreme importance of smart capital allocation.

The Outsiders may not be a huge best seller, but it is the book that

appears to be influencing CEOs and big hedge fund and private

equity-type investors. William N. Thorndike, Jr., the author of the The

Outsiders, has been as surprised about the success of his book as

anyone. “The reaction to the book has dramatically exceeded any

expectations I had, not that I had any, I was a rookie author,” said

Thorndike in an interview. “I have had a lot of interactions with CEOs

and investors—lots. They seem to like the ideas and want to discuss

them.”

Despite hardly any promotional push, the book has become more than just a cult

hit. It has held its own in the highly competitive businessbook segment.

According to Harvard Business Review Press, which published it in late

October 2012, 75,000 copies of the book have sold, mostly in print, but

also including some in digital form. The Outsiders has also had a long

tail, with sales continuing steadily over time, aided by Warren

Buffett’s recommendation last year in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual

report. Buffett, who is featured in the book, called it “an outstanding

book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation.”

When Thorndike started the research that would lead to The Outsiders, he did

not expect it would become a book. The founder of Boston-based private

equity firm Housatonic Partners, which manages $1 billion, Thorndike was

only volunteering to lead a talk at a conference Housatonic Partners

holds biannually for the CEOs of his firm’s portfolio companies. For the

talk, Thorndike chose to focus on Henry Singleton, who built Teledyne

Technologies and had a reputation for being a master capital allocator.

Thorndike teamed up with Aleem Choudhry, then a Harvard Business School

student, and the duo spent Choudhry’s first semester doing a deep

analytical dive on Teledyne. During the second semester, they

interviewed everyone they could about Singleton, who died in 1999,

including venture capitalist Arthur Rock, hedge fund manager Leon

Cooperman and Berkshire Hathaway vice-chairman Charlie Munger.

For the next few years, Thorndike continued to team up with Harvard

Business School students to study CEOs. He had a day job so the research

took time—Thorndike says he would do research on the weekends or on

flights back and forth to San Francisco, where his firm has an office.

He researched one CEO a year. He had two tests each CEO had to meet to

warrant study: Their stocks had to better the performance relative to

the S&P 500 index of GE CEO Jack Welch during his tenure and

meaningfully outperform their peer group. “I was doing it out of

interest, I found it intellectually interesting to try to figure it

out,” Thorndike says.

After some four years, Thorndike started to think that he might be able to

turn the project into a book. At first, Thorndike figured the book could

be a group biography, modeled after “Profiles in Courage,” “The

American Political Tradition” or “The Money Masters.” But eventually

Thorndike saw a theme linking the CEOs. “After the sixth [CEO] it was

clear there was this very strong pattern, that was the biggest

surprise,” says Thorndike. “Over a long period of time, CEOs have to do

two things well, they have to manage the business to optimize the

profits and after that deploy the profits. Most of what separated these

guys from their peers is in that second activity, which has the unwieldy

name of capital allocation.”

Thorndike spent eight years working on the book and interviewed all the living

CEOs he studied. The CEOs he ended up profiling were Tom Murphy of

Capital Cities, Henry Singleton of Teledyne, Bill Anders of General

Dynamics, John Malone of TCI, Katharine Graham of The Washington Post

Co., Bill Stiritz of Ralston Purina, Dick Smith of General Cinema, and

Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. Thorndike basically concluded that

to achieve meaningful outperformance, CEOs need to do things

differently than the other CEOs running companies in their respective

industries. At the same time, however, Thorndike found the CEOs he

researched had quite a bit in common. “They were very different from the

standard conventional CEO personality, they were not charismatic

visionary types, they were pragmatic, flexible and opportunistic, frugal

and patient,” says Thorndike.

They also bought back a lot of their stock. Share repurchases that improve

corporate earnings per share have become a major part of any CEO’s

playbook these days. Some have criticized the practice as a financial

engineering ploy that comes at the expense of vital reinvestment and can

hurt a company’s long-term prospects. The successful CEOs Thorndike

studied helped usher in the share buyback era. But Thorndike discovered

that there was an important nuance to their buyback moves. They were not

just mindlessly repurchasing shares each quarter. They minimized their

dividends and, unlike many publicly-traded companies today, did not

announce a big stock buyback authorization and repurchase a systematic

amount of stock every quarter. Instead, Thorndike’s CEOs waited for long

periods of time without doing anything and then pounced when they

thought their stock was cheap, even buying large chunks of stock in a

single quarter. “They had the investor’s mind set,” says Thorndike.

“They viewed it as investment and when it had attractive returns they

did a lot of it.” Thorndike also documents how his eight successful CEOs

shrewdly deployed capital on selective acquisitions and worked

diligently to minimize taxes.

It’s interesting that both managers and investors have been drawn to The

Outsiders. The Wall Street Journal reported in February that activist

investors who agitate for change at companies have been particularly

fond of the book. Thorndike says investors who build concentrated

portfolios and hold their positions over long periods of time will find

the book more useful than fast-money traders. Says Thorndike: “The ideas

of the book have the most value over longer holding periods.”