The Art of the Deal – Thoughts

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art of the deal, book report, book reviews, donald trump

Finished Art of the Deal.  Took a little longer than expected, but I wasn’t exactly reading for speed.

Whenever someone writes about themselves, or justifies their own actions, you must expect a healthy slant or even outright exaggeration in favor of themselves.  I’ve seen it throughout the inaugural addresses – Presidents who we hold as paragons attempt to justify actions that we have come to view as deplorable, and vice versa.  President Donald Trump is much the same way, though we have the added benefits of 1) Seeing him in action – hearing his speeches and reading fact checkers and 2) Reading his own words, in which he admits that he engages in “truthful hyperbole”.  Art of the Deal is Trump filtered through a ghostwriter.  Some of it is accurate, some may not be so accurate, and it will be largely positive in his favor.

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch13&14

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art of the deal, book reviews, donald trump

Chapter 13 – Comeback: A West Side Story

 

“Nor was I eager to load myself down with huge carrying costs while my personal resources were still very limited.  By devoting myself to other deals instead, I generated a cash flow large enough to support the carrying costs on virtually any project.  I also built a record of success that made banks happy to lend me money for nearly any deal.”

“The truth is that unless you design a project to be self-supporting as you build it, you risk getting eaten alive before you’ve turned the corner into profit.”

“An average 150-unit luxury high-rise building in New York takes two years to sell out – and that assumes a strong market and good promotion.  To sell literally thousands of units in a new development requires that you have both something unique to sell and a very aggressive approach to selling it.”

“One of the first things that anyone should learn about real estate – and New York real estate in particular – is never to sign a letter of intent.  Years can be spent in court trying to get out of a seemingly simple and ‘nonbinding’ agreement.”

“When I told [my lawyer] what I’d done, he wasn’t happy, but to this day I’m convinced that my ripping up that [letter of intent] – which may or may not have been binding – is the reason that Macri did come back to me, instead of going to any of a dozen other potential bidders, when it finally became clear that he couldn’t get his financing after all.”

“The more awareness and excitement I could create early on, the easier it was going to be to attract buyers down the line.  A lot of developers build first and promote later, if at all.”

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch11&12

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art of the deal, book reviews, donald trump

Chapter 11 – Long Shot: The Spring and Fall of the USFL

“I’ve always been a football fan.  I love sports, and having my own team seemed the realization of a great fantasy.  I also liked the idea of taking on the NFL, a smug, self-satisfied monopoly that I believed was highly vulnerable to an aggressive competitor.”

“In any partnership, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.”

“Fans like winners.  They come to watch stars – great, exciting players who do great, exciting things.”

“To me, committees are what insecure people create in order to put off making hard decisions.”

“… I like consultants even less than I like committees.  When it comes down to making a smart decision, the most distinguished planning committee working with the highest-priced consultants doesn’t hold a candle to a group of guys with a reasonable amount of common sense and their own money on the line.”

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch9&10

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art of the deal, book reviews, donald trump

Chapter 9 – Wynn-Fall: The Battle for Hilton

“It’s not easy to make your own mark on a company your father founded and built into a huge success.  Some sons opt out altogether and don’t even try to compete.  Others are content to manage what their fathers have already built.  A few sons set out to outdo their fathers at the same game, and that may be the toughest thing of all, particularly when the father’s name is Conrad Hilton.”

“Hilton might have survived everything if Barron himself had taken the licensing hearings more seriously.  Instead he virtually ignored them.”

“There are times when you have to be aggressive, but there are also times when your best strategy is to lie back.”

“Conrad Hilton used his will to disenfranchise his children and grandchildren. … Conrad believed very strongly that inherited wealth destroys moral character and motivation.  I happen to agree that it often does.”

“I’m not saying I would also have won, but if I went down, it would have been kicking and screaming.  I would have closed the hotel and let it rot.  That’s just my makeup.  I fight when I feel I’m getting screwed, even if it’s costly and difficult and highly risky.”

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch7&8

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Chapter 7 – Trump Tower: The Tiffany Location

“I knew this was a tough sell, so I tried to find ways to make the deal sound more attractive.  I suggested, for example, that I would build above his store, and that he could keep it open during construction.  That’s not really feasible, but the point was that I would have done almost anything to get that piece of property.”

“I was relentless, even in the face of total lack of encouragement, because much more often than you’d think, sheer persistence is the difference between success and failure.”

“It just shows you that sometimes making a deal comes down to timing.  Somebody else might have called him a few days or a few weeks before me, and the whole thing could have turned out differently.  Instead, I went to see him, and we had a very good meeting.”

“In order to put up the building I had in mind, I was going to have to assemble several other adjacent pieces – and then seek numerous zoning variances.  That’s often the situation in New York real estate, but in this case I was dealing with an exceptionally prestigious, visible site, which meant every move I made was going to be unusually difficult, and very carefully scrutinized.”

“He was skeptical that I’d get the zoning necessary to build the huge building I had in mind, but he’d also seen what I’d achieved with the Commodore.  By the time I left his office, he’d given me a commitment – subject to my delivering on my promises.  Once again, I found myself juggling provisional commitments.”

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch5&6

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Chapter 5 – The Move to Manhattan

“The really important thing was that by virtue of this move I became much more familiar with Manhattan.  I began to walk the streets in a way you never do if you just come in to visit or do business.  I got to know all the good properties.”

“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.  My mother is as much of a rock as my father.  She is totally devoted to my father — they recently celebrated fifty years of marriage.  That’s what I grew up with, and here’s this guy talking about stealing wives. …When I finally did get married, I married a very beautiful woman, but a woman who also happens to be a rock …”

“‘I don’t like lawyers.  I think all they do is delay deals, instead of making deals, and every answer they you is no, and they are always looking to settle instead of fight … I’m just not built that way.  I’d rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder.‘”

“If you want to buy something, it’s obviously in your best interest to convince the seller that what he’t got isn’t worth very much.”  

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch3&4

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art of the deal, book reviews, donald trump

Chapter 3 – Growing Up

“My father’s success also made it possible for him to give to his younger brother something he’d missed himself: a college education. … Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordered on awe.  In most cases they didn’t deserve it.  My father could run circles around most academics and he would have done very well in college, if he’d been able to go.”

“Freddy was probably happiest during that period in his life, and yet I can remember saying to him, even though I was eight years younger, ‘Come on, Freddy, what are you doing?  You’re wasting your time.’  I regret now that I ever said that.  … Perhaps I was just too young to realize that it was irrelevant what my father or I thought about what Freddy was doing.  What mattered was that he enjoyed it.”

“You made it in my father’s business – rent-controlled and rent-stabilized buildings – by being very tough and very relentless.  To turn a profit, you had to keep your costs down, and my father was always very price-conscious.  He’d negotiate just as hard with a supplier of mops and floor wax as he would with the general contractor for the larger items on a project.  One advantage my father had was that he knew what everything cost.  No one could put anything over on him.”

Book Excerpts – The Art of the Deal, ch1&2

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art of the deal, book reviews, donald trump

Chapter 1 – Dealing: A Week in the Life

Trump goes through a typical week, complete with new deals in the pipeline, groundbreakings, and calls with highpowered contacts.

“In any case, there’s no way I could avoid depositions, even if I never brought a lawsuit myself.  Nowadays, if your name is Donald Trump, everyone in the world seems to want to sue you.”

“I always take calls from my kids, no matter what I’m doing … as they get older, being a father gets easier.  I adore them all, but I’ve never been great at playing with toy trucks and dolls.  Now, though, Donny is beginning to get interested in buildings and real estate and sports, and that’s great.”

“I tell [my secretary] to call [a senator] … I don’t know [the senator] personally, but he’s one of the few senators who fought hard against the new tax bill.  It’s probably too late, but I just want to congratulate him on having the courage of his convictions, even though it might cost him politically.”

“My people keep telling me I shouldn’t write letters like this to critics.  The way I see it, critics get to say what they want to about my work, so why shouldn’t I be able to say what I want to about theirs?”