You Get the Investors You Deserve

That's paraphrasing a wisdom Warren Buffett once uttered (by the way, Warren Buffett's lunch auction sold for a record $2.63 million last weekend in the annual charity fundraiser for Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco; this is the highest winning bid in this 11th annual event so maybe the economy is coming back!) Bill George, former CEO for Medtronic when that medical instruments company experienced the largest capitalization growth of any New York Stock Exchange company in the 90s, takes this headline one step further, "Do your shareholders choose you or do you choose them? Sophisticated CEO's choose their investors by defining their particular business approach and strategy and assuring their investors are aligned with that program."

This was a bell-ringing week for me ... literally. A week ago, I got the honor of standing at the podium of the New York Stock Exchange to open trading on Monday morning for the world's most well-known marketplace. On that very day, the Wall Street Journal reported that I'd sold a majority share in my company to a company owned by an heir to the founders of Hyatt. After 23 years, I was no longer the sole shareholder of my company, nor necessarily in control of my company's destiny. How did that feel? While there's a series of mixed emotions -- just like the word "surrender" has multiple meanings, both positive and negative -- I have to say that I feel like a proud father who's married his daughter off to just the right guy. Sad at the passing of an era, but satisfied that this is exactly what's supposed to be happening and I couldn't choose a better partner for my offspring.

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