conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Rich, Making, Primarily with the genre: Business & Money, Economics?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'How to Get Rich'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first four paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: How to Get Rich
  But how can it be good for a company to waste the difference between $8 million and $15 million for an asset going nowhere? The medium- or long-term answer is that it isn't good. The company will have squandered $7 million (more, with inflation taken into consideration) and clogged up its managerial focus with a deadbeat property. But the short-term answer is that it's probably the best thing to do in the circumstances. Not to mention that in larger corporations, the short term is often the only term senior management, goaded on by share price "analysts," can bring itself to care about.
  I mention all this just to give you a sense of what failure tastes like and a glimpse at the hidden costs of closure. If there is any way at all you can play "pass the parcel" with a venture you believe is destined to fail and in which you are a principal, then do not hesitate. Pass the damn parcel and move on to the next opportunity.
  I'm now going to give you a piece of obvious advice. Listen closely to your bean-counters and accountants. Or seek one out you trust when the whiff of failure is in the air and get advice. They are a much-maligned group, bean-counters. It is true that they are risk-averse to an extraordinary degree, and that if bean-counters ruled the world we would be permitted to produce nothing but beans, just to be on the safe side. But they also have professional training. And many of them have seen financial failure before and know that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably an oncoming train. If you listen very carefully and are careful, too, to mask your irritation at their litany of hard facts, you might save yourself a small fortune.
  There are incompetent and even crooked bean-counters, of course, and I have, sadly, employed one or two of them. But on the whole, I wish I had listened more often and more carefully to their advice in my business life. When the going is getting tough, when there is a scent of rotting fish in the air, they are right more often than they are wrong. Curse them.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She'd said her piece. She had no more to say. I left the funeral with a double burden. Not just the death of an old friend, but the knowledge that I had frightened a woman who had tried to be kind to me when I was a boy. Not exactly an epitaph to be proud of, is it?
  By cutting loose, you will be free to make a whopping great fortune while your tiger scares the hell out of little old ladies. And old gentlemen for that matter. And if you do not have a tiger handy, I suggest you acquire one quickly if you wish to amass serious wealth.
  No matter. We are not here to discuss the rag-and-bone shop of your heart or make metaphors about tigers.
  The world is full of money. Some of that money has your name on it. All you have to do is collect it.
  Gold rushes don't happen in old mines. There will be people making a good living out of old mines, but they won't be too keen to let you muscle in on their stake. Look for new mountains where gold is being mined; or will be mined soon.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Good luck on your quest if you decide to undertake it. And remember the words of Benjamin Jowett: "Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl."
  Thanks, too, to Branda Maholtz and Courtney Young, my Penguin Portfolio editors in the USA and their boss, Adrian Zackheim. Adrian suggested that there was no point in attempting to hide the fact that, despite years of familiarity with America, I am an English-man at heart. "Don't Americanize it too much!" he mockingly lectured us. So we didn't. And he was right.
  I am grateful to Caroline Rush, my personal assistant, who shepherded the whole project through its various incarnations. As I am to my other assistants, Wendy, Amy, Sharon, Michael and Toby, for keeping the world at bay while I wrote and wrote. Not to mention the guys and girls who run my companies while I do such crazy things: Alistair Ramsay, Brett Reynolds, Stephen Colvin, John Lagana, James Tye, Justin Smith and Steven Kotok.
  And to a tiny feral cat called Stringy, who crept around my writer's cottage on Mustique while I wrote all this. I can never mend her broken tail. But she has allowed me to stroke her now. And soon, she will allow me to pick her up. Smart as paint, like all her tribe, she has already discovered that the vent from a refrigerator is the warmest place in an air-conditioned room. Not to mention that the very same refrigerator appears to contain an inexhaustible supply of smoked salmon, milk and roast ham.
  He has homes in Central London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Manhattan, Connecticut and the Caribbean island of Mustique.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And remember the words of Benjamin Jowett: "Never retreat. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl."
  Thanks, too, to Branda Maholtz and Courtney Young, my Penguin Portfolio editors in the USA and their boss, Adrian Zackheim. Adrian suggested that there was no point in attempting to hide the fact that, despite years of familiarity with America, I am an English-man at heart. "Don't Americanize it too much!" he mockingly lectured us. So we didn't. And he was right.
  I am grateful to Caroline Rush, my personal assistant, who shepherded the whole project through its various incarnations. As I am to my other assistants, Wendy, Amy, Sharon, Michael and Toby, for keeping the world at bay while I wrote and wrote. Not to mention the guys and girls who run my companies while I do such crazy things: Alistair Ramsay, Brett Reynolds, Stephen Colvin, John Lagana, James Tye, Justin Smith and Steven Kotok.
  And to a tiny feral cat called Stringy, who crept around my writer's cottage on Mustique while I wrote all this. I can never mend her broken tail. But she has allowed me to stroke her now. And soon, she will allow me to pick her up. Smart as paint, like all her tribe, she has already discovered that the vent from a refrigerator is the warmest place in an air-conditioned room. Not to mention that the very same refrigerator appears to contain an inexhaustible supply of smoked salmon, milk and roast ham.
  He has homes in Central London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Manhattan, Connecticut and the Caribbean island of Mustique.