CONTENTS
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Art of Being Unreasonable
Being Unreasonably Unreasonable
Discovering the Art of Unreason
Chapter 2: Why Not? The Powerful Question
“Why Not?” as the First Step to Success
Nothing Sets Me Off More Than Being Told I Can’t Do Something
“Why Not?” Should Be Something You Ask Every Day
Chapter 3: Forget Conventional Wisdom
Conventional Wisdom Strangles Innovation
Innovation Is a Permanent Revolution
Success Is a Starting Point, Not a Conclusion
Nothing Lasts Forever
Look Outside Your Personal and Professional Comfort Zone
Chapter 4: Do Your Homework No Matter How Much Time It Takes
Don’t Waste Time on Shortcuts—They’re Usually Dead Ends
Pay Attention to History
Is Core Competency Just Another Term for Complacency?
Once You’ve Done Your Homework, Put in the Long Effort—It Will Pay Off in Unexpected Ways
Big Ideas Don’t Happen in a Moment
You Can’t Do It All Yourself, So Ask Questions and Delegate
Chapter 5: The Value of Being Second
Follow the Smart First Movers
Markets Evolve and First Movers Sometimes Can’t, or Won’t, Keep Up
First Movers Always Leave Some Room—You Just Need to Find It
Study a First Mover’s Failure for Clues to Success
Whether You’re the First Mover, the Second, or the Last—Just Keep Moving
Chapter 6: How to Work 24/7 and Still Get 8 Hours of Sleep
Work Doesn’t Have to Be Your Life, But Your Life Is Your Work
Know What You Have to Do, Which Is Less Than You Think
Not Everyone Needs 8 Hours
Setting Priorities Means Being Disciplined, but Not Rigid
If You Can’t Delegate, It’s Not Them, It’s You
Try Saying “Let’s Move On”—Even to Me
Chapter 7: Bright and Young Is a Winning Combination
Sometimes You Are What You Wear
Interviews Don’t Have to Be Tricky
Qualifications Are Almost Everything
How to Keep ’Em Once You Hire ’Em
Youth Can Be a Risky Bet
Older People Can Be Young Too
Chapter 8: Risk
Clinging to Safety Is More Irrational Than Taking Risk
Asking the Key Questions
Risk Can Be Contagious—Don’t Catch the Deadly Kind
Never Bet the Farm—Or Even Half the Farm
Chapter 9: How to Get Results
Make Sound Promises and Offer Something in Return
Perfect Your Pitch, and Make It Big
Chapter 10: Leverage
Some Straight Talk About the Mother of All Loans—Your Mortgage
Spread the Wealth—How to Leverage Doing Good
Extend the Power of Your Dollar—Find Money That Costs Less Than Yours
Leveraging People and Effort Works Just as Well as Leveraging Money
Chapter 11: Marketing
Know Your Customers and What Moves Them
Focus on Value Because Your Customers Will
Market Like a Major Player, but Don’t Spend Like One
Make What You’re Selling Matter—From the Name and Slogan on Down
Selling a Cause Requires More Than Conviction
Chapter 12: Investing
Don’t Fear Risk, but Don’t Take One if You Don’t Have to
Focus on Picking an Advisor, Not Stocks
Diversify or Die
Volatility Happens
Chapter 13: Negotiation
How to Make a Sound Offer Every Time
In a Good Negotiation, Everybody Wins
Never Be Afraid to Ask
Surviving the Silences and the Stares—Stay Unemotional and Disciplined
Be Ready to Say Yes and Don’t Sit Down Unless You Can Make a Decision
Don’t Swing Wildly—Start Close to Where You Want to End Up
Never Forget What Makes the Other Guy Tick
Chapter 14: The Logic of Being Logical
A Logical Idea Is One That Makes You Say, “Why Didn’t I Think of That?”
Like Wine, an Idea May Need to Age
Chapter 15: I Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog
Go After Big Game
Whether or Not You Succeed, You Have to Keep Hunting
Unreasonable Persistence Produces Big Payoffs
Even the Unreasonably Persistent Must Know When to Quit
Chapter 16: Is that the Best You Can Do? Motivating People by Challenging Them
High Expectations and Shared Challenges Create Loyalty
Nothing Motivates Like Achievement
What’s Better Than Praise—Money and Higher Expectations
Fear Is Not a Motivator—It Only Gets You Unhappy Employees and Poor Work
Whether You Succeed or Fail, Keep Moving
Chapter 17: Competition
Just Because There’s a Winner Doesn’t Mean There’s a Loser
Architecture—The Purest Form of Competition
The Unexpected Pluses of Architecture Competitions
Concept Over Cost
Chapter 18: It’s Better to Be Respected Than Loved
Disagreement Is Healthy—Learn How to Distinguish It from Dissent
Good Principles Are Portable—Stick to Them
Let Go of Power Before You Let Go of Principles
Don’t Become Ensnared by Egos—Not Even Your Own
If You’re in the Way, Move
Nothing Wins People Over Like Success
Chapter 19: Giving Back
Everyone Can Be a Philanthropist—Not Just the Rich
Don’t Just Give It Away—Look for the Place to Make a Difference
Start Giving Now—And It Doesn’t Have to Be Money
Be a Philanthropic Game Changer—Start Local and Think Like an Entrepreneur
Chapter 20: Education: Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste
The World Is Moving Forward, but American Education Is Stagnant
If There’s a Crisis, Get Involved and Make a Change
Big Goals and Big Results
Taking Big Risks Means Getting Big Pushback
Chapter 21: The Unreasonableness of Art and Artists
Why I Collect
Doing Homework—Even for an Avocation—Will Deepen Your Experience
Pursuing a Passion Sometimes Means Casting Aside Your Business Sense
How Not to Get Distracted by Your Passion
A Passion Is Not a License to Spend
For Even Greater Rewards, Share What You Love
Chapter 22: Reflections and Second Thoughts
My Parents’ Unintentional Gift
My Sons and My Choice—On That Elusive Work-Life Balance
Don’t Let Others Define Your Failures or Your Successes
My Proudest Moments—They May Not Be What You Think
I Hope My Greatest Achievement Is Yet to Come
The Best Move I Ever Made
Appendix
Supplemental Images
Index
Copyright © 2012 by Eli Broad. All rights reserved.
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To Edye, the love of my life
FOREWORD
We have all met unreasonable people in our lives. Some of us have even been called unreasonable—or worse. But if ever there’s been someone qualified to write a book on being unreasonable, it is Eli Broad. And if ever there’s been a time when we need more people to be unreasonable—in business, philanthropy, and especially government—it’s right now.
Eli Broad’s life is a great American story, not only because it is a story of hard work and success, but because it’s a story of dreams—of pushing into new frontiers and believing that the impossible can be achieved. That’s what Eli has done throughout his life, and it’s why he has accomplished as much as he has. But this book is less about what Eli has done and more about how he has done it.
I first met Eli some 30 years ago, back when I was just starting my own company. Eli had already built a Fortune 500 company from scratch, KB Home—and he would go on to build a second: SunAmerica. Maybe the second time is easier, but I doubt it. Building a company is an all-consuming undertaking that requires an enormous amount of dedication, an unflagging belief in your idea, and plenty of good luck. But to me, the fact that he built a second Fortune 500 company is less impressive than the fact that he set out to do it in the first place. Plenty of other people would have kicked back and enjoyed an early retirement. Not Eli. He wanted to continue building—and he had the guts to try to do it in an entirely different industry.
Within these pages, you will find a firsthand account of how he built those two Fortune 500 companies; how he helped shape Los Angeles into a cultural and architectural capital; how he is working to revolutionize the way we diagnose, treat, and prevent disease; and how he is helping transform public education around the nation, including in New York City.
When I was first elected mayor of New York in 2001, I set out to transform the city’s broken and dysfunctional Board of Education and turn around a school system that had been failing students for decades. It was a daunting challenge; the New York City school system has 1.1 million students, which would make it the 10th largest system in the United States, just behind Dallas. Ending decades of dysfunction and replacing it with a culture of innovation and excellence would require bold action and a willingness to take on the special interests—and to do that, we knew we would need lots of support. We reached out to private sector leaders and philanthropists and asked them to become our partners—and Eli Broad was one of the very first calls we made.
Eli understands how important education reform is to the future of our country, and he is as passionate as I am about putting the needs of children first—no matter what the special interests say. Over the past decade, Eli has been instrumental in helping us undertake major reforms, including launching the NYC Leadership Academy to train the next generation of principals, creating more charter school options for students and parents, and strengthening accountability.
As a result, our students have made enormous progress, and today, high school graduation rates are 40 percent higher than they were when we began. When New York City won the prestigious Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2007, we could not have been more honored.
Eli and I both believe that philanthropy is most valuable—and powerful—when it dares to go where governments will not or cannot, and he has provided critical support in helping us launch promising but untested ideas. This willingness to take risks has been a defining characteristic of Eli’s life. Yet he has been so successful not only because he is fearless and forward-looking but also because he does his homework. He studies the data, analyzes trends, and identifies opportunities that others may miss. Whether in business or philanthropy, he is an entrepreneur in everything he does—always open to new ideas, always looking for new approaches, and always willing to buck the conventional wisdom.
When Eli embraced the idea for a genomic medical research center that would bring together scientists from MIT and Harvard, he was told that the two rival universities would never collaborate on such a project. He ignored that advice, and today The Broad Institute is changing the way we understand science and medicine. Of course, Eli has also had his share of crazy ideas—like the time he wanted to buy the Tribune Company. Even though I own a media business, I told him he was out of his mind, and he came to agree that he was lucky to be the unsuccessful bidder.
The Eli Broad you will meet in these pages is the Eli Broad I’ve gotten to know and admire: honest and tough, blunt and direct. When he speaks and writes, he has no use for business jargon or management gibberish. His language is as clear as his vision. You will also meet the one person who is the secret of his success: his wife, Edye. She is truly a full partner in all that they do. And when Eli is unreasonable, Edye is gracious, kind, and understanding. Together, they are one talented team.
This book holds lessons for anyone who has ever failed—and anyone who has ever dreamt big. As someone who started a company after getting fired, I know how difficult it is to swim against the tide. When I first started a business making financial information more easily accessible via computers, everyone thought I was crazy. “That’s not the way the industry works,” I was told. And when I decided to run for mayor of New York, everyone thought I was really crazy. “You don’t know the first thing about politics!” I was told. And that was true. But I knew what Eli knows: If you want to achieve the impossible, you have to start by being unreasonable.
Of course, being unreasonable can also be a recipe for disaster. So how do you learn the art of being unreasonable? Keep reading.
Michael Bloomberg is mayor of New York City, founder of Bloomberg LP, and an active philanthropist.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although I am solitary by nature, much of what I have been able to accomplish in each of my careers has been possible only because I always surround myself with a team of smart, hardworking, dedicated professionals. This book is no different, and although I offer up praise and appreciation sparingly, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the contributions that helped make this book a reality.
Special thanks to Swati Pandey, whose gift for prose transformed my thoughts and ideas into words better than I ever could have done alone. She is a talented young writer who I predict will have a long and prosperous future as a stunningly successful author. Quite simply, she was a joy to work with. Tim Rutten is a graceful wordsmith whose smart edits and wise counsel proved invaluable, and I appreciate his careful skill in refining the stories and lessons contained in these pages. Thank you to Karen Denne, my chief communications officer, for her exemplary coordination and invaluable qualitative oversight. Jim Newton’s generous advice and keen eye for talent contributed to this project in ways too numerous to list. Thanks to Dan Wolf for helping get this book off the ground and for his continuing encouragement.
I was fortunate to have had a supportive and adept team at John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Senior editor Richard Narramore saw the potential of this book in its very early stages and helped shape it. Thanks to Lydia Dimitriatis and Lauren Freestone for their assistance shepherding us through the publishing process. Special thanks to my agent, Lisa Queen, for her support.
I have met a lot of people during my nearly 79 years. I am drawn to personalities different from my own, people who have a unique worldview and are accomplished in their varied fields. Over the years, Jeff Koons has become a dear friend. He generously allowed us to use the image of one of my favorite works of art, Rabbit, on the cover of this book, and for that I am grateful. Photographers Jay Clendenin and Nancy Pastor always make me look good, so I appreciate their talents. I have never met anyone like Eric Lander. You will read about him in these pages, and my only fear is that printed words could never do him justice. He is simply extraordinary, with passion, energy, and focus that are unmatched.
In our philanthropic work, my wife, Edye, and I are fortunate to be guided by a wise and credentialed board of governors, each of whom contributes a diverse perspective, informed by vast accomplishments. They help shape our philanthropic approach, which you will read about in the later chapters of this book.
The experiences expressed in these pages represent my best recollection, and any mistakes are unintended and solely my own. But I was aided in my memory by colleagues and friends Jay Wintrob, Jana Greer, Bruce Karatz, and Andrea Van de Kamp, who took time out of their busy schedules to help me recall many of the details I missed because I was moving too quickly to take note. I am fortunate to know them, and I treasure the times we shared, working together to build companies and institutions. And, Dick Riordan, I thank you for working with me on some of my most memorable undertakings and for our enduring friendship over nearly 40 years.
I have long admired Mike Bloomberg for his bold leadership, business acumen, and straight-shooter approach to life. He has become a valued friend, and I am delighted that he shared his thoughts in this book’s foreword.
We have the very best team at The Broad Foundations, but there are a few people who deserve special mention. Gerun Riley is my chief of staff and right hand in virtually all of my endeavors. She is always one step ahead of me and juggles an extraordinary workload. She does it all with grace and superb skill. I am in capable and kind hands with Joane Ra and Kathleen Lungren Jobe, who keep me on track, always with the most gracious disposition. Edye and I are fortunate that Cindy Quane has overseen our family office for many years, and we are grateful for her loyalty. We have a whip-smart investment team. They advise me, challenge me, and always exhibit sharp insights. Thank you to Marc Schwartz and K.C. Krieger for their patience and persistence when I’m at my most unreasonable in matters of finance and investment. Their assistance with Chapter 12 helped me articulate what I often do instinctively.
The project that is consuming much of my attention these days is the construction of The Broad, our new museum in downtown Los Angeles. Despite the daunting amount of work that is filling their days and nights, Joanne Heyler and Deborah Kanter found time to contribute their insights to these pages. I am indebted to them for their continuing commitment to our work. There are many more members of our foundation team, too many to list individually but I have to express appreciation to Rachel Smookler, Gregory McGinity, Erica Lepping, Jeannine Guido, Molly Ryan, Hilary Rowe, and Tara McBride for their help with this book.
Three people have been a constant in much of my life, and I don’t express my profound love for them often enough. To our sons, Jeffrey and Gary, I know I wasn’t the easiest father. While I have been a demanding boss and businessman, I was also an impatient and exacting parent. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had more time to make amends. But I offer you my love as deeply as a parent can.
Until my last day, I will count my blessings that Edythe Lawson agreed to become Edythe Broad. In recent years, I have referred to Edye as my chief inspiration officer. While others have tolerated me, Edye has loved me, unconditionally. She has stuck by me, covered my shortcomings, and brought a warmth and graciousness to our family and our friends that are unmatched. While I welcomed public interest and attention throughout my careers, Edye was enormously private and always shied away from crowds and cameras. Across the years, she accompanied me to most every dinner, gala, and gathering—often tucking off in a corner of a packed room with a book. Although Edye is a voracious reader—I’ve always joked that she is the largest book buyer on the West Coast—she didn’t want me to write a book because she preferred to keep our lives private. But she proved to be my most valued editor and has always been my most treasured confidante. One of the best things about this book is the chance to tell the world how much she means to me. Edye, I love you.
I am unreasonable.
It’s the one adjective everyone I know—family, friends, associates, employees, and critics—has used to describe me.
Occasionally, some of them have also called me crazy or nuts. But they’ve all told me at some point that I was being unreasonable because my goals were unrealistic, my deadlines couldn’t be met, my ideas were far-fetched, or my approach trampled on the conventional wisdom.
But I believe that being unreasonable has been the key to my success. In this book I want to show you how applying unreasonable thinking can help you achieve goals others may tell you are out of reach, just as it has for me.
Over the past six decades I have had four careers: accounting, homebuilding, retirement savings, and philanthropy. I became the first person to build two Fortune 500 companies from the ground up in two different industries. The $6 billion I earned in business is now being used to help reform public education in America, assemble two world-class art collections and make them widely accessible, and provide critical start-up funding for cutting-edge biomedical research.
What gives me the most satisfaction is that all my careers have demanded that I meet people’s essential needs—helping them realize their dreams of homeownership and a secure retirement, educating their children, experiencing great art, and living a healthier life. Each has also required me to be quite unreasonable—to have outsized ambition, discipline, energy, and focus and to have the confidence to ignore people who said I couldn’t do it. If this book does nothing else, I hope it helps you silence the voice of conventional wisdom that too often keeps people from even attempting to achieve their goals.
Through my careers there has been one constant: a paperweight on my desk, a gift my wife, Edye, gave me some time after we were married in 1954. It sat on the tiny desk in a shared office in Detroit, Michigan, where, as a young CPA, I first envisioned starting the local homebuilding business that would become KB Home. It made the trip to Los Angeles, where it rested in my new office with a view of the Pacific Ocean at my retirement savings company, SunAmerica. Today, Edye’s gift sits on the pale wood desk where I oversee The Broad Foundations’ wide-ranging philanthropies. My office walls may be covered with art by Jasper Johns and photographs of the interesting people I have met during my career, but time and again—as it has so often over the years—my gaze goes to Edye’s paperweight and its inscription, a quote from George Bernard Shaw: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.”
You could say Edye and I got married because I was unreasonable. After a friend gave me Edye’s phone number, I called out of the blue and asked her to dinner. She had no idea who I was and couldn’t even remember my friend. She said yes only because her mother pressured her into it. I drove to her house one Saturday night and hoped that she wouldn’t slam the door after seeing my big ears and goofy grin. Lucky for me, she didn’t. Only a few dates later I proposed, promising her my vision of a great future: our own home, two kids, two cars, and maybe a vacation once a year to Florida.
Edye’s yes was my greatest piece of good fortune. Our marriage remains Exhibit A in my case for the value of being unreasonable. In love and in business, if you know what you want, you have to go for it.
I didn’t stop being unreasonable once Edye and I were married. Sometimes it made me harder to live with than I needed to be. I hadn’t yet realized that there’s an art to being effectively unreasonable. One night, for example, when Edye wanted to see a movie, I drove to the theater only to turn right back around when I saw the long line. I wasn’t about to waste time standing around for tickets, even if, as Edye sensibly pointed out, there was no other way to see a movie.
A few months later, when we had barely settled into married life, I convinced her to sell our wedding china so that we could use the money to buy land. Edye was the only woman among her friends—maybe the only woman ever—who traded dishes for dirt.
Home wasn’t the only place I was unreasonable. I didn’t try too hard to hold on to my job at a small local accounting firm. I passed the CPA exam at age 20 on the first try—a test that took my boss and other higher-ups several tries to ace. As the youngest CPA in Michigan’s history, I started demanding a raise. My boss didn’t like that—or my refusal to drop the subject—and I was fired.
Asking your new boss for a raise because you did something he couldn’t do is an example of being artlessly unreasonable. It’s not a habit you want to cultivate because, frankly, it’s just another way of being willful or selfish. It won’t get you anywhere but into trouble.
After getting fired, I hung out the shingle of my own accounting firm. I found a rent-free office thanks to Edye’s cousin’s husband, Donald Kaufman, who let me share his. Don was a homebuilder who put up several houses a year and worked the rest of the time as a subcontractor on building sites. In exchange for the office, I told Don I would do his accounting.
Within several weeks of settling in, I was bored and restless. I had a few clients and I was teaching night courses in accounting at the Detroit Institute of Technology, but I still didn’t have enough work to keep me busy. I wanted more money and more excitement.
The problem was the only thing I knew how to do was accounting. I wasn’t interested in going into another line of work that required new credentials because I didn’t want to go back to school. I had pushed myself hard to graduate cum laude from Michigan State University in just three years. I tried to get a job working at a homebuilder but was turned away for lack of experience. That’s when I asked myself, “Why not start my own homebuilding company?”
I thought about my skills and my personality and whether they would be a good fit for the field. I read industry magazines that I got at the library. Meticulous research, as you will see, became a key to my success in all four of my careers. I studied other homebuilders, who struck me as too inefficient and not focused enough on the best available financing. They could build a house blindfolded, but they didn’t pay enough attention to their finances. A keen eye for numbers would be my competitive advantage.
I read and analyzed enough news to know that America in those years was moving from a nation of tenants to a country of homeowners. Building houses was not complicated, and I wasn’t going to have to build them anyway. I would just have to manage subcontractors and suppliers and find a partner who knew his way around the field—which is exactly what Don Kaufman was. That’s how we became Kaufman and Broad.
I told Edye my plans, and—instead of telling me I was nuts—she encouraged me to go for it. She also gave me the suggestion that made it all possible. She said to ask her dad, Morris, for start-up capital, $12,500. He said yes, and my first company was born.
I heard complaints about how unreasonable I was as soon as I set foot on our first construction site. Some of my subcontractors owned shirts older than I was, and they weren’t too keen on listening to me explain how they could build homes faster and more cheaply if they would just stick to the budget and schedule I had drawn up. But by then I had carefully researched the cost of all the material we would need and the time it would take to complete every step in the building process.
That alone wasn’t enough to convince the contractors to work for us. Instead, I appealed to their interests. It was a little intimidating—I was a young kid asking seasoned contractors to work for less and wait a little longer to get paid. But they quickly saw my logic. If they stuck to my plan, our company would grow rapidly and they would have more work—even during the winter months, when building traditionally slows down. They took a chance with us, and the gamble paid off. We built 120 homes that first year. We made money—and so did our contractors.
Something similar happened three decades later, when I turned a small, rather sleepy insurance firm into the multibillion-dollar retirement savings company SunAmerica. Not long after the company spun off from Kaufman and Broad and became a separate publicly traded company in 1989, I walked into our conference room and told my senior executives that I wanted 20 percent growth every year. Again, there were murmurs from some of the more experienced hands that I was nuts.
But I had done my homework. Research—and using what you learn from it to analyze every situation—is what separates being unreasonable from being irrational. I knew we could achieve that high growth rate by acquiring smaller companies, building a broker network as big as Merrill Lynch’s, and being the best at marketing and addressing customer needs. I promised my employees great rewards if they joined me in reaching for that unreasonable goal. When we got down to work, we turned SunAmerica into a provider of secure retirements for millions of Americans—and the best performing stock on the New York Stock Exchange from 1990 until we merged with American International Group (AIG) in 1998.
The world of philanthropy is no less suspicious of unreasonable ideas and goals. I heard the usual complaints whenever I tried anything ambitious: helping to launch the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1979, raising the money to build Los Angeles’s acclaimed Walt Disney Concert Hall, working to transform K–12 urban school districts across America, and funding critical biomedical research with strategic investments in the style of a venture capitalist. All of those efforts succeeded, and I found that people who started out calling me crazy were suddenly happy to be my partners.
Victory, as the old saying goes, has many fathers. People will flock to support you when you do well, but in the crucial early moments, and whenever you try to create something out of nothing, you will be on a solitary path blocked by obstacles and doubt. If you’re already on that kind of course, this book will speak to you in a special way. It will give you examples from my experience that will help you enlist allies and collaborators. It will show you how to smooth your unreasonableness into an artful and focused drive. Being artfully unreasonable won’t necessarily make you a good team player, but it can make you a dramatically effective leader.
If, instead, you worry a lot about what other people think and you fear being called unreasonable, this book will show you that with research, good analysis, and focus you can have the confidence to do what others would dismiss as unreasonable and achieve the successes nobody thought you could reach.
The lessons I’ve taken to heart from nearly 60 years in business and philanthropy are ones I still use every day: ask a lot of questions, pursue the untried, revise expectations upward, take risks, be restless, and most important, seek out the best in your work—the best deal, the best investment, the best people, the best causes, the best art—and the best in yourself.
If you’ve never heard my name pronounced, you probably think it rhymes with rod.
When my father immigrated to the United States, he added the a to his Lithuanian surname, Brod. He thought the extra vowel would make Brod seem less strange. Unfortunately, neither he nor the rest of his family—who happily adopted the new spelling and rod pronunciation—could foresee just how much fun the guys in my junior high school would have calling me “broad.”
Then I had an idea: Why not change my name?
Broad, however, was my family’s name. It was the name on the sign above the Detroit five-and-dime my father owned. Legally changing my name would also involve a trip to court, which would trigger more ridicule when the other kids found out I had done something so drastic just to avoid teasing. So, I thought, why not alter just the pronunciation? “Broad, rhymes with road,” I started telling people, from teachers on down to my classmates. I told my parents about the switch one evening at dinner. They just smiled and shook their heads. They knew even then that there wasn’t a lot they could do to change my mind—and I learned the advantage of reframing the facts in a way nobody had considered before.
The name stuck. I became “Eli Broad, rhymes with road.” Some of the teasing continued, but it didn’t really sting anymore. I had changed myself. I liked my new name. To me it seemed strong and refined. I still say, “Rhymes with road,” when I introduce myself to people for the first time, and I’m still happy with the way it sounds. I even enjoy the association with the word road, which always suggests a way forward—my preferred direction.
It all started just because I asked a simple question: “Why not?”
Children instinctively ask, “Why not?” Adults soon lose the habit, in large part because they have accepted the status quo. But that’s exactly when you need to ask the question with greater force. The questions you’re willing to ask when others think they have all the answers are doors to discovery.
Asking “Why not?” worked for my parents. Both were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. My mom’s family was in the timber business back home and had some money, but my father had nothing in the old country and even less when he arrived in New York. They often needed extra money, so they decided to open, of all things, a Christmas store. They had no experience, they had never run a store, and they were Jewish—but why not? They rented an empty storefront for two months every year. I helped them stock shelves and sell cards, strings of lights, stockings, wrapping paper, and last-minute gifts. My parents worked long hours right up until Christmas Eve, when everyone else was with their families. All of a sudden, what started as a strange idea—one the conventional wisdom said my parents had no business pursuing—became a major part of getting our family through the Great Depression.
My first business also began with “Why not?” when I was 13 years old. I had been collecting stamps since I was 5, living in a walk-up apartment in the Bronx with my parents. My Uncle Misha lived upstate in Peekskill and collected stamps from around the world. I often spent weekends at his house, flipping through his grand old leather volumes of stamps—learning how to pick out the good ones, how to store them properly, how much they were worth. I continued collecting even after we moved to Detroit when I was 7 years old. I bought stamps whenever I had some spare money, getting sheets of them at the post office the first day a new set came out. I started reading stamp collecting magazines and spent weekends riding the streetcar to downtown Detroit, where stamp dealers would set up shop in empty storefronts. I once discovered an early American stamp on the floor at a convention. (I suppose it helped that, at my age, I was the closest to the floor and shyly looking down.) It was more valuable than any other stamp I owned.