No one has ever left a meeting with me wondering what I meant.
When I say something, it is clear, candid, and often blunt.
Am I being too subtle?
Is my punchline.
When I deliver a message that I consider obvious, I can seem gruff.
I know that.
And I can be impatient.
I have an embedded sense of urgency.
What I can't figure out is why so many other people don't have that.
But from an early age, I realized that I had a fundamentally different perspective from my peers, and I was willing to trade conformity for authenticity, even when that meant being an outlier, which it usually did, and even if it meant being on my own.
In this book, I share the story of how a restless, curious boy who grew up in Chicago made it to the Forbes 400.
I'll describe the risks that paid off and those that didn't, and I'll tell you what I learned in the process.
I'll take you inside my world of companies.
I'm probably best known for creating several of the largest companies in commercial real estate and for helping establish today's $1 trillion public real estate industry.
You could say that I'm an investor or an allocator of capital, but I really am is an entrepreneur.
That is an excerpt from the introduction of the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is, am I being too subtle?
Straight talk from a business rebel and is the autobiography of Sam Zell.
The introduction of this book is perfectly named because he named it no b's.
No one's going to read this book.
And then after be like, hey, I wonder what Sam Zell really thought.