股神巴菲特：美國要聆聽皮肯斯對能源現況的分析意見
投資大師羅傑斯：皮肯斯有許多東西可以教我們，即便是他犯過的錯誤──雖然這不常發生。
富比世總裁：皮肯斯過去的非凡成就，不過是他新事業的暖身罷了
石油世紀最具影響力的人物
26歲以 2,500美元大膽創業；40歲不到，併購規模比自己大30倍的哈葛頓石油，
掀起80年代企業購併狂潮，造就出全美最大獨立石油公司，深刻影響公司治理發展。
68歲瀕臨破產，遭好友設計掃地出門，自我放逐、遠離石油產業，失婚、罹病；
三次應試，終於考上期貨基金操盤人，力拚二次創業。
77歲東山再起，成為全球年薪第2高基金經理人；對油價預測神準，受封「油神」，並重回富比世富豪榜；80歲上書歐巴馬「皮肯斯計畫」，針砭美國能源規畫；砸100億美元，構築新能源夢，影響全球能源投資動向。
處於劣勢最棒了！
大家愈是不把我看在眼裡，我對自己就愈有信心。
我不喜歡太早就亮出所有底牌，這給了我兩項獨特的優勢：
1、對手常常對我做出錯誤解讀
2、我會更用力鞭策自己
我希望自己活了八十歲學到的事，能透過30個梟雄法則，帶給你全新的體悟──
＃2 執行長自己的持股如果很少，對待股東的態度不會比對待非洲的狒狒好到哪裡去。
當年我出手併購，比自己規模大30倍的對手哈葛頓石油時，為打破僵局，在爭取到獲准列席對方的董事會後，以凌厲的攻勢，在會中強力質疑其主要董事個人持股過低，根本對自家公司的股票沒信心。雖然此舉為我樹立了敵人，但也爭取到部分董事的支持。最後成功拿下哈葛頓。
＃15 不要「遲遲扣不下扳機」，你必須願意開槍（做決策）。
天然氣市場並不是完全取決於機會的遊戲，而是一門可預測的科學，要進入這門科學，得靠實實在在的基本面供需，必須勤奮、不斷分析、願意扣下扳機、不因一時的漲跌而搖擺不定，而且天氣驟變也不會有什麼損失。
＃26 獵大象時，別為追兔子分心。
我總是匆匆忙忙。我知道自己在和時間賽跑。你必須保持追逐，無論是交易、美式足球賽或舉重次數。我和每個人競賽，包括我自己。我從來不和人做對，只和人競賽。人們說，年紀大了就會變得保守、自以為是和倦怠。在我看來，會或不會取決於你自己。然而，人生的最後四分之一就像比賽的最後幾分鐘，是人最受試煉的時期。一旦你慢下來，就很難東山再起了。
1928年出生，現年81歲的皮肯斯，是商業界的傳奇人物。他能神準地預測燃料價格走向，因而被稱為「油神」，他26歲時，投資2,500美元創建的美薩石油（Mesa Petroleum），後來成為美國最大的獨立石油公司之一。
1980年代皮肯斯主動出擊，40歲不到，購併規模是美薩石油30倍的「哈葛頓石油公司」，使美薩石油的市值從7,000多萬美元飆至1.37億美元的歷史高點。在連續出價收購多家價值低估的石油公司，其眼光獨到的購併行動和強調企業績效的管理手法，更改寫了股東權利的觀念，促使企業開始注重公司治理，自此成為家喻戶曉的人物。
美薩石油在1981年成了世界上規模最大的獨立石油公司，皮肯斯一度打算參與1988年的總統大選。即使是他的失敗經驗，也成功迫使規避風險的經理人們，重新思考做生意的方式。
皮肯斯在68歲時，因美薩獲利急轉直下而被迫離開公司，很多人以為他從此將退隱山林。確實，接下來他接連經歷痛苦的離婚、被診斷出憂鬱症、對能源價格走勢預測又一度失準，損失掉投資資本的九成。但皮肯斯從沒想過要引退。
皮肯斯從私生活與職涯的谷底東山再起，是業界最令人印象深刻的事蹟，僅僅數年就用他投資基金裡僅剩的300萬美元，賺回80億美元，使他得以77歲高齡成為，世界上年薪第二高的避險基金經理人。但他可還沒收手。現在皮肯斯正在進行世上最驚人的能源賭注。如果他得遂心願，未來美國大部分車輛都將是瓦斯車，而美國廣大的草原帶也將成為風力發電大本營。
目前的皮肯斯，膽大程度不比他數十年前隻手改變美國石油業時遜色，他把數十億美元下注在自己所確信的未來。在本書中，他詳細說明未來的樣貌，不只為美國的能源獨立，呈上完整規畫，對於重要資源也有精采介紹，例如水資源──另一個他賭上數十億美元的產業。2008年，他向歐巴馬獻上「皮肯斯計畫」，未來十年內，改用風力、水力和天然氣，將減少美國石油進口需求超過三分之一，替代性能源是他今後人生努力的目標。
本書出自一位謙遜非凡、卻被視為世上最有遠見的商人之手，裡面記錄著一個實現了罕見成功的人生故事，以及一份從全球能源與天然資源戰場前線傳回來的報告，任何關心未來能源投資及環保的人們，都該密切注意。
每個人都被賦予第二、第三和第四次行動的權利，要多少有多少。但必要條件是，保持身心健康，以便使自己留在場內。我們是唯一能限制自己的人。
编辑推荐
Review
“Entertaining…both Adam Smith and Horatio Alger would find something to like in the rise of T. Boone Pickens.”
—Wall Street Journal
“The latest memoir from the Texas oilman…Pickens’ sauciness does entertain.”
—Time magazine
“Sassy…breezes along…salted with earthy aphorisms.”
—Bloomberg.com
“Self-deprecating and audacious…overall, it’s decidedly informative about the machinations of business.”
—Dallas Morning News
“A fascinating, eye-opening book by one of America's greatest iconoclasts and entrepreneurs. Boone Pickens’ sense of daring and innovation has never been sharper. Readers will quickly realize that this billionaire's extraordinary achievements are but a warm-up for what he is about to do now.”
—Steve Forbes, President and CEO, Forbes Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine
“Boone’s analysis of America’s energy situation is 100% on the money. In easy and colorful language he tells us where we are going wrong and what we must do about it. The country should listen to him — now!”
—Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
“It is inspiring to see Boone Pickens tackling the big issues, daring himself to think bigger, putting forward wind, water and energy ideas that are nothing less than paradigm busters.This absorbing and illuminating book shows why Boone has been more successful than just about all his competitors, and, more crucially, why the problem of resource scarcity may not be as insoluble as some think.”
—Jeffrey Immelt, CEO, General Electric
“Boone Pickens was among the first to grasp that corporations can be marvelous catalysts for progress if individual investors are given a say in what their priorities should be. Today, as humanity faces resource scarcity and dwindling supplies of cheap energy, the responsibility that has devolved to entrepreneurs, and the investors who back them, has never been more immense. Yet, in recounting his own story of comeback after comeback and tackling some of history's biggest oil, wind and water projects, Boone shows that sometimes all it takes is rejecting the ‘usual’ and striking out across virgin territory. In that sense, Boone is a pioneer, and this is a pioneer’s story. Even now, the man they call the Oracle of Oil is blazing new paths that may, indeed, lead us out of the predicament we find ourselves in.”
—Carl Icahn, Chairman, Icahn Co., Inc.
媒体推荐
“Entertaining…both Adam Smith and Horatio Alger would find something to like in the rise of T. Boone Pickens.”
—Wall Street Journal
“The latest memoir from the Texas oilman…Pickens’ sauciness does entertain.”
—Time magazine
“Sassy…breezes along…salted with earthy aphorisms.”
—Bloomberg.com
“Self-deprecating and audacious…overall, it’s decidedly informative about the machinations of business.”
—Dallas Morning News
“A fascinating, eye-opening book by one of America's greatest iconoclasts and entrepreneurs. Boone Pickens’ sense of daring and innovation has never been sharper. Readers will quickly realize that this billionaire's extraordinary achievements are but a warm-up for what he is about to do now.”
—Steve Forbes, President and CEO, Forbes Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes magazine
“Boone’s analysis of America’s energy situation is 100% on the money. In easy and colorful language he tells us where we are going wrong and what we must do about it. The country should listen to him — now!”
—Warren Buffett, Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
“It is inspiring to see Boone Pickens tackling the big issues, daring himself to think bigger, putting forward wind, water and energy ideas that are nothing less than paradigm busters. This absorbing and illuminating book shows why Boone has been more successful than just about all his competitors, and, more crucially, why the problem of resource scarcity may not be as insoluble as some think.”
—Jeffrey Immelt, CEO, General Electric
“Boone Pickens was among the first to grasp that corporations can be marvelous catalysts for progress if individual investors are given a say in what their priorities should be. Today, as humanity faces resource scarcity and dwindling supplies of cheap energy, the responsibility that has devolved to entrepreneurs, and the investors who back them, has never been more immense. Yet, in recounting his own story of comeback after comeback and tackling some of history's biggest oil, wind and water projects, Boone shows that sometimes all it takes is rejecting the ‘usual’ and striking out across virgin territory. In that sense, Boone is a pioneer, and this is a pioneer’s story. Even now, the man they call the Oracle of Oil is blazing new paths that may, indeed, lead us out of the predicament we find ourselves in.”
—Carl Icahn, Chairman, Icahn Co., Inc.
From the Hardcover edition.作者简介
T. Boone Pickens is, in his ninth decade, the very active strategic and managerial force behind BP Capital, one of America’s most successful energy-investment companies. Currently, Pickens ranks among the world’s richest men. He lives with his wife in the Dallas—Fort Worth area and at his ranch in the Texas Panhandle. 文摘
CHAPTER 1
Blood, Guts, and Feathers
Booneism #1: Don't rush the monkey, and you'll see a better show.
Risk has always been a part of my life. I'm not sure whether I'm drawn to it or it's drawn to me, but at every point in my eighty years, I've been faced with a challenge, and in just about every instance I've taken it. Even my birth was a do-or-die proposition.
My mother went into labor on May 21, 1928. It was a long ordeal, and things weren't going well. The doctor, George Wallace, took my father, Tom, into a small room and closed the door. He had a grave look on his face, and my father immediately spotted a large book on a table. He assumed it was a Bible.
Your wife has been in labor a long time, and she can't deliver. I'm worried about her. You can save your wife or your baby, but not both, Dr. Wallace said.
My father wasn't an either-or sort of guy. He was a natural-born risk taker and the son of a Methodist preacher. And so when Dr. Wallace, who happened to be a surgeon, told him that it was either my mother, Grace, or me, my father refused to choose. He pleaded with the doctor to try the first Caesarean section in that hospital's history.
Well, Tom, I've heard about a C-section, but I've never done one, the doctor said. He pointed to the book on the table. All I've got is a page and a half and one picture in that medical book to go by.
We're gonna pray, and you're gonna deliver the baby, my father told him.
A short time later, Dr. Wallace came out of the operating room with a broad smile on his face. He had just performed his first Caesarean. The procedure wouldn't be repeated at that hospital for more than twenty-five years. Dr. Wallace was a surgeon-no general practitioner would have ever performed a C-section-and he'd lived in that small town in Oklahoma for just two years. The odds of him being the man that delivered me were slim at best. I've always thought I was the luckiest man alive, and right from the start I proved it.
You've got a little boy, Dr. Wallace told my father. And your wife is doing fine.
the sign read: welcome to holdenville. where the pavement ends, the west begins, and the rock island crosses the frisco. And that, sports fans, was Holdenville, a railroad town in eastern Oklahoma, a speck in the grand sweep of the Great Plains, where the open land was vast, rolling, and endless.
My father was in the oil business. Outgoing, generous, a great
storyteller, and a gifted poker player, he arrived in Holdenville at age twenty-five. He was a lawyer but soon realized that law was nowhere near as exciting as oil. So he became an independent land man, convincing landowners to lease him their mineral rights, which he in turn sold to oil companies. I was an only child, but I was always surrounded by family who lived next door: my grandmother Nellie Molonson; my widowed aunt, Ethel Reed; and my cousin Billy Bob, who was like an older brother to me. My parents were hardworking, thrifty, honest, and self-sufficient. They came from an era when a job was viewed as a privilege, not a right. I grew up during the Great Depression, but our family always had food on the table. My grandmother had a large vegetable garden, and each night she served fresh or canned vegetables. Some nights we had meat to go with the vegetables, and some nights we didn't, but we were never hungry.
My mother, Grace-the disciplinarian in our family-instilled important lessons in me early on, which prepared me for the challenges ahead. During the war, she ran our area's Office of Price Administration, which rationed gasoline and other goods. She had a great sense of integrity; if she said she would do something, you could consider it done. My grandmother Nellie was so disciplined that most nights she would have only one cup of tea and a slice of dry whole wheat toast for supper. She taught me things I've never forgotten.
Remember, a fool and his money are soon parted, she said when I told her I was going to spend 50 cents on a haircut, a movie, and a bag of popcorn.
Sometime, everybody has to learn to sit on their own bottom, she said whenever I asked for too much help with something.
As soon as I was old enough, I started mowing lawns, which I did until I could take on a paper route at age twelve. I began on a street grandly named Broadway of America with the smallest route in town: twenty-eight houses with a penny-a-paper profit per day. When other routes came open next to mine, I talked my supervisor into letting me take them on. Within five years my route grew from 28 papers to 156 and I had saved close to $200, which I hid in a hole under the floor in my closet. It was my first experience in the takeover field: expansion by acquisition.
In my first year as a paperboy, I found a wallet on the sidewalk. Inside it were the name and address of the owner. I delivered it to the man, and he gave me a dollar reward. It was a windfall. My mother, grandmother, and aunt were on the porch when I got home. They didn't respond as I'd expected or hoped to the news of my finding the wallet and getting the reward. They didn't looked at one another. They didn't have to. They were so much alike that their heads moved in unison, almost as if each head was attached to the others by a string. I pleaded my case over and over, but they sent me straight back to return the dollar to the man.
You are not going to be paid to be honest, my grandmother told me.
So I had to go back to the man and give his dollar back.
No, no, this is for you!
I know!
And you should have it!
I know!
But I also knew better than to go against anything my mother, grandmother, and aunt told me. I gave the money back and headed home on my bike in a downpour. I damn near drowned. I got home drenched and looking for sympathy. I could play the pitiful routine really well. Aunt Ethel didn't buy it.
If you hadn't argued with us, you'd have been back before it rained, she said.
In 1927 a major oil field had been discovered in Seminole, a sleepy little town just down the road from Holdenville. It had turned into a boomtown. By 1938 the search for big oil in our area had run its course. My father began to run out of luck. Instead of playing it safe with land deals, he started investing in wildcats, which were wells drilled by independent oilmen in uncharted territory. Successful wildcats came with big payoffs-but at great risk. Our family was soon pinched. The yellow Pierce Arrow sedan my father had bought for my mother during a streak of good luck was gone; our Chevy wasn't new anymore. Dad took a job with a regular paycheck at Phillips Petroleum Company. In 1943, he was reassigned to an office in the Texas Panhandle. My mother and I joined him in 1944. I was sixteen, loved Holdenville, and didn't want to leave. But move we did. I had learned important lessons from my high school basketball coach in Armarillo, T. G. Hull. He told us to play all out but not to dwell on either successes or losses. He taught me that when the game is over, it's over.
Our team did well in high school basketball, and I attended Texas AM on a basketball scholarship. A little short and slow for college basketball, I lost my scholarship after a year and transferred to Oklahoma AM at Stillwater (now Oklahoma State University) my sophomore year. At my father's urging, I decided to switch my major to geology. When I graduated at the age of twenty-two, Phillips Petroleum hired me as a geologist. It was a difficult time in the oil industry. Geologist jobs were in short supply. By this time in my life, I had mowed lawns and thrown papers. I'd worked on a drilling rig as a roughneck, on the railroad as a fireman, and in a refinery. Hard work was nothing new to me. What kind of master plan did you have back in your early career? people ask me. I was married and had a child when I took my job with Phillips; the master plan was simply to get everybody fed.
Back when I was with Phillips, I was working with three geologists and a couple of engineers on a joint interest well. I was making $5,000 a year. One of the geologists asked, If you could lock in a salary right now for the rest of your life and work until you're sixty-five years old, what would you sign up for? Everybody thought about it; I was the only one who answered. I had a wife and two kids by then and wanted to ensure that my family lived comfortably.
What would I work for without raises until I turned sixty-five?
Twenty-five thousand dollars, I said finally. At that period of my life, security was very important to me. Thank goodness it was only a conversation.
at phillips, I met the monster: Big Oil. Phillips was one of the twenty largest corporations in America. It had 20,000 employees, chemical and plastic divisions, refineries, an international operation, hundreds of Phillips 66 gas stations, and two dozen exploration and production offices-all run by a big and sluggish army of bureaucrats. I went to work in the home office in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Every morning a bell rang at five minutes before eight, signaling you to your desk, just like in school. At noon, everyone would be standing by the door, waiting for the lunch bell. At one, the bell would ring, signaling that lunch was over. The final bell rang at five, and they didn't want anybody staying past quitting time.
(I once got reprimanded for staying until six.) Paranoia was rampant. What sickened me most was the waste. Management was incapable of listening to or even considering alternative ideas to save the company money or find more oil.
If you're unhappy, why don't you quit? my wife asked me after one of many nights of hearing my complaints. I don't think she meant it or dreamed that I would actually do it. After three years, five months, twenty-one days, and four hours, I...
| 出版社 | Tsai Fong Books |
|---|---|
| 作者 | T. Boone Pickens |