Book Review: Boardroom Bullrider: 5 Lessons Learned about Business in 8 Seconds

Bryan Merritt is a turnaround artist, a hired gun who travels around the world, helping companies who have lost their mojo to become vibrant and profitable again. If his clients are willing to take his blunt, straightforward advice, and make the changes he says they need to make, then they win, and he is successful. He loves this kind of work and it gives him great satisfaction.

Much of his approach to business was learned in the arena – the rodeo arena, to be specific. Ever since he got on the back of his first bull at 16, he was hooked. He loved bullriding, and it also gave him great satisfaction.

                                 

You don’t get a lot of time to think when you’re on the back of the bull. If you’re good, you get 8 seconds, and then the buzzer sounds, you win, and you look for a graceful way to dismount. But bulls don’t like to be ridden, so you’d better know what you’re doing if you intend to win. In his bullriding career, Merritt identified five key lessons to help him stay on the bull – the same five key lessons that he uses as a corporate fix-it man to save floundering companies.

You don’t have to hire his company, Matrix Management Systems, LLC, to benefit from his wisdom. Merritt also does webinars and workshops. Now he offers those five lessons to you in his new book, Boardroom Bullrider: 5 Lessons Learned about Business in 8 Seconds. Skillfully mixing rodeo stories with stories about the business world, Merritt presents his five lessons and, in his straightforward manner, at the end of each lesson he pushes you to “get on the bull,” to do something that will make you make the lesson part of you.

I won’t tell you what his five lessons are. That’s what the book is for. Read it yourself. I measured it against some of the classics in business literature, and Boardroom Bullrider holds its own. 

The one thing the classics have over Bullrider is page count. Merritt manages to make his points in 158 pages, not counting an absorbing introduction. Merritt is a great storyteller, but he doesn’t waste words. That’s his style. It’s part of the 80/20 principle that he focuses on so passionately. Still, you will find yourself wishing that he had spent more time on certain points, turning one sentence into a paragraph or one paragraph into several.

His advice is not just for moneymaking companies. It’s also for nonprofit organizations, government agencies – and you as an individual. Bryan’s advice can help you succeed in life.

Boardroom Bullrider is available from many booksellers, including Amazon.com, or directly from Bullrider Press.  

Bonuses

I sent this letter to my senators, my representative, and the prez. My Canadian friends can translate that into Canoobian, right? Right.

I'm well aware of the fact that the prez will never see my words, but at least my opinion will be tabulated and added to the statistics that get reported to him daily. As for the others, chances are pretty good that they'll actually read my words, or an excerpt therefrom.

You can help by reprinting my words. Make sure you include my name.

Dear [insert title and name here]:

I'm writing to you today about the bonuses that have been making the news. I'm adamantly opposed to the bonuses, and I want to convince you to oppose them and to do whatever you can to discontinue them.

I understand the principle behind these annual bonuses.

On reason for the bonuses is that when a company is doing well, those executives who are responsible for its success are rewarded more than the rank and file, supposedly because they are more responsible than the rank and file for the company's success. That's a bunch of bull, but I won't get into that in this letter.

The other reason for the bonuses is to "retain" top talent so that they're not wooed away by their competitors. The NFL, NBA, and MLB do the same thing. We know how it works. This isn't rocket science.

But when a company has a disastrous financial year, its stock price falls through the floor, it has to lay off thousands of its employees to rescue its bottom line, and THEN it has to call on the federal government for financial help, ITS EXECUTIVES DO NOT DESERVE A BONUS, NOR ARE THEY WORTH RETAINING.

And they especially don't deserve a bonus if ONE CENT OF IT comes from my taxes. I'm out of work right now. I can't get a job. I've been trying since December. I know people who have been trying for longer than that. Don't go giving my money to someone who was in some small part responsible for the mess we're in right now.

I'd be glad to speak with you in person about this.

Regards
Ray Depew
[address and phone deleted]

We Can't Trust Them With Our Money

This time I'm speaking, not of our elected officials, but of the presidents of the banks and other struggling institutions that are quickly consuming the $700 billion from the first bailout.

Every single bank that made bad loans in the past 3 years knew exactly what they were doing. They threw away all of the rules or guidelines or due diligence or what have you, about making loans to people when you know there's not a snowball's chance in Phoenix of the borrowers ever making good on the loans. But they did it anyway. Call it greed, or hubris, if you want.

Basically, all of those banks were irresponsible with your money.

Then, all of those loans and mortgages were repackaged into financial instruments (like stocks or bonds), called "mortgage backed securities," which the banks then sold to each other at face value. The buyers and sellers knew all along that a lot of the mortgages backing those securities were bad mortgages. They should never have been sold at face value. They should been discounted, sold for face value multiplied by the probability that the mortgages backing them would ever be paid off. The buyers and sellers knew the score. They knew that many (most?) of those loans were risky and would probably end in default. For a bank or lender to say "Well, I didn't know" or "Well, the borrower qualified for the loan" is just stupid. I wouldn't fall for it. My next-door neighbor wouldn't fall for it. What made those MBAs and Wall Street tycoons fall for it?

Basically, all of those banks and investors threw away their common sense in the name of greed -- although they would never call it "greed."

Then, when borrowers started defaulting en masse and these mortgage backed securities started dissolving and slipping through the bankers' and investors' fingers, they ran crying to the government, begging to be saved from their own greed and stupidity. President Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, as one of his last acts, gave them over $700 billion with no strings attached and no provision for accountability.

Do you know what they did with that money? Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sent a lot of their managers to a golf resort in Texas, for a week of relaxing and unwinding. A banker in New York had his office remodeled, spending $1.2 million on the job. One bank completed the purchase of a customized, luxury jet that they had ordered two years earlier. And executives at many of these failed institutions rewarded themselves for their greed and their irresponsibility by taking huge bonuses from the bailout money, in a period when thousands of people per day were losing their jobs. Maybe they thought we wouldn't notice.

Basically, the banks and their executives were stupid.

Do you know who should have lost their jobs? The entire executive suites at these banks! Some bankers and politicians tried to justify those bonuses, but their words rang hollow in the ears of ordinary Americans. A bonus is a reward for doing something right, and it's clear to everybody in America except the aforementioned stupid executives that they didn't do anything right last year.

Now the Obama administration and Congress want to give Wall Street and Company another $820 billion bailout. NO! The people who run Wall Street and Company (along with the people who run Washington) have shown that we cannot trust them with our money.

I have a better idea. If the federal government is serious about bailing out those in financial distress, if they really want to stimulate the economy, and if they're willing to spend $820 billion to do it, then give that money directly to the people.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States right now is 305,729,371. If the government were to distribute that money evenly to every man, woman and child in the United States, we would each get a check for $2,6822.11. And I can promise you that the majority of Americans would be a lot more wise and responsible in how they used that money than the great minds of Wall Street and our elected officials in Washington have proven themselves to be.