Last Monday, Susan and I were dinner guests of neighbors, Connie and Randy Jones. Among other things, we discussed Randy's new book, The Richest Man in Town (published by Business Plus, a division of Hachette Publishing Company), which should be in the bookstores in a couple of weeks and, I think, can be ordered from Amazon now. In order to write this book, Randy interviewed the richest self-made person in each of the 100 largest cities and towns in the United States. Naturally, we asked whether Randy could discern any common traits in these people? One of the qualities that Randy noted was that these people all seem to have, like musicians for music, perfect pitch for their enterprises.
In thinking about it, my father has perfect pitch for architecture. He started practicing architecture in 1932, started his own practice in 1935, and retired in 1997. He certainly has other interests (for example, he played golf or hit golf balls practically every day), but he was content to go to his office on weekends to work on a project.
I'm not sure that I ever had perfect pitch for any of my businesses. I tended to see an opportunity, figure out what would be required to capitalize on the opportunity, and assemble the requisite people, capital, and other resources. These were not businesses for which I was particularly qualified or, in several instances, in which I was particularly interested. For example, Rick Childress and I started and managed a fund to invest in undervalued, publicly traded, industrial companies, and, later, a fund to invest in regional banks just before it became legal for banks to operate across state lines. Both funds were highly successful, and Rick and I had a lot of fun creating and managing them. But Rick had the perfect pitch for the research underlying these funds that made them special. When I saw that there was a shortage of property-and-casualty reinsurance capacity, I decided to start a new reinsurance company. ReCapital Corporation was successful, but I had no interest in the insurance industry, even though I served as chairman of the company. The people that I brought in to run the company, led by the late Don Chisolm and Jim Roberts, were the consummate professionals who had perfect pitch for reinsurance. As I noted in a recent post on BioVex, even though I am quite interested in nanotechnology, I regard the people that I brought into Harris & Harris Group as the ones with perfect pitch for venture capital based on deep scientific and technological understanding.
As for myself, I think the best that I could say is that I created opportunities for others who had perfect pitch for particular businesses. I'm not sure that counts!
