CHAPTER

5

When problems at Bacardi worsened, Gloria had a very bad time. She severed all ties with the family and demanded her inheritance from the family estate. It was a long battle for her to secure the money as it was held up in a trust. She was finally given half her inheritance, and asked that we moved to London.

Even though my corporate days had come to an abrupt end, we were by no means uncomfortable financially. We had houses in Vermont and Florida, money saved in the bank and the new income from my wife’s trust. I had been given a severance package that would keep me on the company’s payroll for the next three years and, as icing on the cake, I had just secured myself a well-paid consulting job.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t have a day-to-day job to answer to and I had a choice. I could either get back to work or take some time off to think about my life—maybe even change some habits. I knew something was missing but I had yet to figure out what. Having worked myself into the ground for twenty years straight, first in the construction business and then in the corporate world, I decided to take a sabbatical to self-reflect and make sure I wouldn’t repeat the same mistake a third time. I put all my energy into slaving away for other people, with nothing to show for it, except some money.

Our children had already left home and there was no convincing them to move back. Gloria wanted to leave the country and I was desperate to take a sabbatical for the sake of my sanity. London seemed like the obvious option and so we jumped ship in 1991.

Getting used to living in London was not easy. We didn’t know anybody, so Gloria and I were stuck with each other incessantly. Even though I traveled back and forth to the U.S. for my consulting job, I wasn’t used to not having a full-time job to immerse myself in.

I was determined to take advantage of all this spare time, which was totally alien to me, and I was ready to embark on an adventure to begin my new life. In the ’90s in London, exploring spirituality was the “in” thing to do and Gloria jumped straight on the bandwagon. There was an abundance of crazy courses in meditation and visualization, astrology or “horror-scope” reading, as I called it then. I had nothing else to do with myself, so we tried them all.

I was introduced to guided visualizations in a college in London and, even though the idea of closing my eyes and feeling nonexistent water on my fingertips and the sun hitting my chest (when I was clearly in a dark room) was a bit kooky, I was surprised to find that the sessions left me more relaxed and my mind a lot clearer.

In the three years we lived in England, Gloria and I traveled a lot, mainly to Europe, but we were thirsty to learn more about visualization and meditation. In 1992, a friend in London recommended we fly to Nepal to visit the Buddhist monasteries. He put us in touch with a monk he knew who lived there. Gloria was on a mission to find herself once and for all. Instead, I found my guardian angel: Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, who had migrated to Nepal.

Chokyi Nyima means “son of the dharma” and Rinpoche literally means “precious one”, an honorific used to describe reincarnated Tibetan lamas. In 1959, when he was eight years old, Tulku Chokyi Nyima and his family fled Tibet shortly before the Chinese invasion. In 1974, he was instructed by the 16th Karmapa, his religious leader, to help his father establish a monastery in the Kathmandu Valley. After its completion, two years later, Karmapa instructed the Rinpoche to become its abbot. He also advised the 25-year-old Rinpoche to turn his efforts towards instructing western students, so the Rinpoche learned fluent English and has since been teaching meditation practice to people like Gloria and me.

There are thousands of books about the art of meditation but I will give you a brief account of how Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche taught me to meditate. The main goal of this Buddhist practice is to achieve inner peace through the practice of meditation, learning and reflection.

First of all, the Rinpoche told me to get in the lotus position, a sitting position where you cross your legs and keep a straight back. If the lotus position is uncomfortable, you can sit on a small low bench instead. The trick to meditation is to be able to make your mind go blank—without falling asleep first! Unless you’ve had years of training, thoughts will come into your head, but learn to just let them pass through—concentrating on your breathing and counting helps. I meditated deeply for twenty to forty minutes daily and every day my mind got less rammed with thoughts flying around. The most important part of the meditation for me is to concentrate on what I am doing and be present in this precise moment. Once you learn that, you can meditate anywhere.

Meditation is awareness of the now, the present moment, and can be applied to each and every activity in your life. Sitting meditation is a good practice for honing in on the moment. It is quiet and easier to be still, but being aware can also be applied to daily activities, like having a shower or washing the dishes. It’s more difficult to retain the same concentration you have when you are meditating sitting but it’s still possible.

When you meditate, release all those monkey thoughts with the exception of what you are doing. Have no fears of the implications of yesterday or what you forgot to do; or what tomorrow or next year will bring. Just focus on what you are doing until you finish the task you have set for yourself. It takes a lot of time, practice and discipline but it does become easier if you practice often. The aim is for the meditation to be natural to you so that you can apply it to everything you do, and be present in each moment.

When I got back to England, the meditation exercises helped me to read my own mind. I learned to understand and accept my thoughts, whatever they were. If I was angry, I learned to experience the anger and found that it would subside much faster than it used to. If I was happy, I reveled in that happiness instead of taking it for granted.

I took my own shoes to be repaired, I am ashamed to say, for what was probably the first time in my life, even though in London the shop was a mere three blocks from my house. When I entered the changarro—about a quarter of the size of my old office—I noticed how much pride the man and his wife took in their work and how happy they were fixing things. I was curious to find out what went into repairing shoes, so the couple charmingly took me to the back of their store and gave me a demonstration, explaining what all the equipment did and the intricacies of handling leather. It suddenly dawned on me that there was something missing in my life. I had been so immersed in my career that I had never taken the time to give a thought to anything or anybody other than my work and my family. Even with my children, I tended to only give them my undivided attention when they demanded it of me, instead of using my intuition to know when they needed it.

I made a conscious effort to enjoy every moment I had to myself, especially as there would be so many of them coming up. I went for long walks through Hyde Park, choosing to walk almost everywhere and paying attention to my surroundings and the people around me. I noticed things I had passed by obliviously every day; the small details that can matter the most. I listened to music and attended symphonies, and I did a lot of exercise, which is like another form of meditative practice for me. It helps energize me and clear my mind and gets rid of any anxieties that build up throughout the course of the day.

The year after we met the Rinpoche, Gloria and I decided to continue our search for Buddhist enlightenment. One of our meditation teachers informed us that a professor from a London University was organizing a month-and-a-half-long group trip from China to Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet, so we signed up and took our children, who were then seventeen and twenty, along for the ride. It ended up being just us and a couple of others as the rest of the group canceled en masse at the last minute.

The routes from China to Tibet are like an effective death trap. There’s a legendary passageway called the Tea-Horse Road that connects what are now two regions, which dates back to the reign of the Song Dynasty (618-907) when brick tea, a medicinal bitter drink made from a subtropical evergreen Tibetan shrub, was the prime trading commodity between China and Tibet. A hundred and thirty pounds of the pressed twigs, leaves and stems would be worth a horse before the days of Genghis Khan.

When Asia’s predominant mode of transportation was by foot or hoof, the ancient trail was the main trading route from Yu’an, in the Chinese tea-growing region of the Sichuan Province, to Lhasa, the almost-12,000-foot-high capital of Tibet. Today, you have to wrestle through an impenetrable wall of jungle, only to find yourself clinging onto trees to stay alive.

With Jenny and Luis along, we opted for the less life-threatening route—although if I’m going to be honest, even without the children as an excuse, it’s highly unlikely we would have trekked on cliff edges for six weeks. Instead, we chose the more “luxurious” option, driving in four-wheel trucks with the security of a tour guide.

The only way to get through the harsh terrain was to drive alongside the flat riverbeds, a secret the locals were obviously in on too. Three times in as many weeks we found ourselves confronted by a huge tree blocking the dirt trail before us. There was only one path, so each time we were forced to stop and consider our bleak options. And then, as if by magic, a gang that I can best describe as highwaymen disguised in shabby, exotic costumes, would pop out of the jungle and offer to move the tree—at a price, of course.

They were carrying ominous slingshots, a slight giveaway that the tree hadn’t just happened to fall, but we paid them their fee and continued our journey. After the first two times, our driver lost his patience and flatly refused to pay, stomping, “I’ve had enough!” I asked him how much the road bandits were asking for and when he told me he would rather risk our lives than pay one dollar, I nearly sacrificed him to the bandits.

As we drove from China’s lush valleys up to the “rooftop of the world,” I noticed that all the trees had disappeared. When I asked why, our guide explained it was because we were crossing some of the highest terrain in the world and, as we drove across Tibet’s vast plateaus, our lungs waged war with air so thin, we may as well have been sucking the inside of a vacuum cleaner. I began to understand why no tree could possibly survive. Three small steps from the truck, we were bewildered to find ourselves on the verge of hyperventilating, but we learned to live with the altitude sickness for days on end. Breathing on those plateaus definitely helped my meditative practice as I could think of little else! When we finally reached the sharp drop into Lhasa, I developed a newfound appreciation for oxygen.

On our first night, the local guide boasted about the hotel he was going to take us to, but when we arrived, it looked more like a stable and our bedroom was crawling with rats. After that experience, we expressed a bit too much enthusiasm for sleeping in the open air whenever possible. We set up camp on the flat plains and all we could see for miles on end was a vast expanse of open fields and a backdrop of mountains way off in the distance. When we woke up, there were three or four Nomad families hovering a few feet from our tents, staring at us curiously as if we were the tourist attraction. Their cheeks were bright red as a consequence of the high latitude, sun and harsh winds, and when they saw us they laughed gently and continued on their way.

When we finally got to Tibet, I felt like I had been on a journey through purgatory and had entered paradise. At the end of our tour, we left our guide behind and flew from Lhasa to Nepal to visit the Rinpoche again and we invited him to stay with us back at our house in Stonefield, Oxford, the following year.

Meditation did not change my life immediately but it did allow me to calm down instead of trying to force the future. It gave me a sense of patience and taught me to wait until the time is right. I learned not to impulsively react to situations and to take my thoughts and feelings into account and experience them for what they are instead of trying to change the things I have no control over.

It wasn’t for another few years that I was able to find a sense of inner peace. My whole life would take another drastic turn before that could happen, but the sabbatical did help me discover that “doing nothing” but meditation and observation could be a beautiful thing. I discovered that a balance of both activity and inactivity was the healthiest state of being for me. It’s easy to get into a rut, to get trapped into doing either all or nothing. People can get too comfortable taking it easy and find it difficult to get motivated. It’s like when you go on holiday—it takes a lot more effort to get into a rhythm on your first day back to work. Similarly, when you’re on a deadline or working in overdrive, it’s difficult to step down from that adrenaline-induced top gear.

I am permanently working on achieving a balance between the two extremes: work gives me the acceleration and the high, while meditation and regular exercise gives me the clarity and energy I need to live in the moment.

Even though I was generally taking the time to enjoy my life like I never had before, I was getting anxious to get back to a full-time career. I felt as though I had a lot to offer and, now that I was armed with my new tools for dealing with life, the roof would not collapse on my head again, and even if it did, it wouldn’t arouse the same emotions in me anymore. But how could I get back in the game?

When someone has a problem they are trying desperately to solve and they relentlessly drum it into the ground, it is common for them to no longer be able to see the problem through clear eyes. If they take a step back and focus on something else, usually the solution will pop up as if it had been there the whole time. And that’s what happened on my sabbatical…the solution fell in my lap. I met a man who would change my life: a young Mexican entrepreneur named Ricardo Salinas.

Shortly after Gloria and I moved to London, I attended a Young Presidents Organization convention in September 1991. I had joined the YPO back when I was the President of Bacardi Imports. The goal of the organization is to connect business leaders from all over the world, encouraging them to exchange and discuss ideas. There was a series of events hosted by the London University Academy for small groups of YPO members, consisting of about twelve to fifteen couples. It was an opportunity to mingle prior to embarking on a cruise to Morocco, Lisbon and Seville on the Queen Mary. At one of the introductory events at Manor House, just outside of London, I sat next to Ricardo Salinas and his then wife, Ninfa. Ricardo and I got along so well, he later asked me to come and work for him in Mexico. Even though he was young, Ricardo clearly had a vision for building a future empire. He had a business strategy focused on serving a huge underserved market that was a great business opportunity and as well as a social development booster, the “bottom of the pyramid” (BOP), a consumer base that could potentially consist of 80% of the world’s population.

When Ricardo asked me to join him on his crusade, I was definitely tempted but ultimately too complacent with my never-ending sabbatical in London to budge. However, we kept in touch and reunited at those YPO conventions every year.

Just as I was beginning to become overly familiar with the inside of my head, Ricardo, with telepathic timing, invited me to visit him in Mexico. He told me that he had made a very difficult decision to leave the family business in someone else’s hands in order to acquire a TV network from the government of Mexico, and the challenge would require all of his resources and attention. In March 1993, I flew to Acapulco where Ricardo was visiting his father. He took me on a tour of all the Elektra stores across the city; at that point there were 300 throughout the country. We went on a walk on the public beach where he wanted to show me the people he served and in the same week we drove to some of the Elektra stores in Toluca, which is about an hour away from his home in Mexico City.

I shared his vision and passion for the people, but as inspiring as it was, I was still content with returning to my thoughts. In the summer of 1994, Ricardo once again asked me to join him on his business ventures and this time I could not say no. This young man was running full steam ahead with such conviction and daring, the thought of being left behind (and another sun-deprived winter in England), got my rusty wheels rolling once again.

I accepted his offer contingent on my wife’s consent and having to first make arrangements to disengage from my properties and the accumulation of other dross that came with living in England for three years. On November 1, 1994, I humbly arrived in Mexico to assume my position at the company. Six weeks later, the Mexican economy celebrated my arrival with one of the most disastrous economic collapses in its history. The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, was forced to let the peso float freely, devaluing it almost 100 percent; in the year leading up to February 1995, the rate rose from 3.5 to 6.3 pesos to the dollar.

I didn’t realize how unintentionally funny I could be until I moved to Mexico. My Cuban Spanish mixed in with a little Spanglish was highly entertaining for people as there are words that don’t exist in Mexican that I sure remembered using in Cuba, and I was always at the center of misunderstandings. For example, once I was at an important meeting with the top directors of Elektra and I presented an idea. One executive responded to it with, “Puta Madre.” I sprung from my seat to take a punch until I was informed that in Mexico it doesn’t mean “your mother is a whore.” Also, my boss, Pedro Padilla, liked to say “No Mames” all the time. It literally means “do not suck on it,” which I found really disturbing until I found out in street language it means “I am surprised.”

On my first day of work, when I reported to my new boss at Grupo Salinas, Pedro Padilla, he showed me a short summary of the business on his computer and told me that in no time I would be running it. For now, Ricardo wanted me to take over from him as the company’s CFO.

I almost had a hernia. I had promised Ricardo I would help out, but running the company was in a whole other league. Not only was I rusty after putting my career on the shelf for three years, the only thing I knew about being a numbers guy was that I wasn’t one. Although I know how intrinsic they are to a functioning company, stocks and balance sheets bore me to tears and the only financial experience I’d had was from doing estimates for my construction business over a decade earlier. I couldn’t even bluff my way out of this one. I didn’t want to let Ricardo down before I had started, but running the business was biting off more than I wanted to chew and I didn’t see any choice but to be upfront about it.

Pedro arranged for me to meet Ricardo, which was not a great impression for my first week, and even less so when I sheepishly laid all my cards out on the table and admitted that I, by no means, had any intention of running the company in the future—especially one I was so unfamiliar with and didn’t yet understand. I did, however, have a good sense for people and situations and was creative enough to find solutions strategically. If he had the patience to let me take one step at a time and learn the ins and outs of the company, we could go from there.

I couldn’t believe my luck when Ricardo responded, “Well, we have this position open, why don’t you try out being a CFO. If you don’t like it, we’ll try something else.”

I accepted the offer, determined to succeed. And thus I learned another life lesson: seize opportunity. I am always reminded of the following story when I think of that moment with Ricardo:

There was a great flood and the whole town had to be evacuated but one man in the town refused to leave his house, insisting “No, no. God will save me.” The flood got worse and soon his whole house was swamped with water. All his neighbors fled but he insisted on staying.

He raced up the stairs and stuck his head out the window to see if anyone else was waiting for God. A boat sailed by and the rescue team told him to jump in but he insisted, “No, no, I’m going to wait here because I know God will save me.” Soon his whole house was flooded and he was forced to climb onto his roof. A helicopter came by and threw down a rope ladder for him to climb, but he insisted on waiting for God to save him.

The whole town had been evacuated and he was the only man left. The water was now up to his chin and another helicopter flew by. They told him it was his last chance to be rescued but the man was adamant God would save him at the last moment.

The man drowned and found himself at the Gates of Heaven where he came face to face with God.

“I don’t understand why you never came to save me.

I waited and waited and never lost faith in you. The whole town lost faith but I was sure you would come for me when the time came. I was the last man standing on the roof of my house waiting for you to save me and I never wavered in my belief in you,” the man complained.

“You ungrateful piece of work,” responded God. “I sent you a boat and you refused to get on it. I then sent you not one but two helicopters and you still refused to be rescued. What else could I have done to save you?”

The lesson from this is to seize opportunity while it’s staring you in the face. Sometimes you may not realize that you’re being given an opportunity but always be openminded and prepared, and when life throws you a bone, grab it and run with it with all the gusto you have.

My experience with Ricardo at Grupo Salinas has proven to me that you don’t need five talents to make ten, such as in the Book of Matthew, or to be a declared genius in something to be successful at it. Create your own opportunities when they are not handed to you on a plate; make the most of the material resources available to you instead of seeking what you don’t have. If you know yourself and the environment you are entering inside out, strategic thinking is the best resource to help you conquer any situation or outsmart any enemy.

Someone who has talent, but no skill in politics or leadership, will find it a challenge to get far in business; and a person who is cunning in power and politics, but with no spark or creativity, will find it equally difficult. There’s only so much you can cheat your way through life, so it’s necessary to find a balance.

Ricardo’s father, Hugo Salinas Price, was president of Grupo Elektra when Ricardo joined the family business in 1981. He paid his son a pittance to work as the company’s imports manager and Ricardo was determined to forge a career based on his own merits. He set out to conquer the television and telephony markets, but to buy a phone company or a television network would cost him millions of dollars.

Ricardo didn’t have the money to enter such a capital-intensive market but he did have an eye for what people wanted and he found a way to give it to them. There was a near-monopoly on TV programming, enabling the networks to offer the whole of Mexico just two mind-numbing channels to choose from. Something needed to give. In 1981, Ricardo paved his entry into the telecommunications industry, but little did he know the enormity of the business satellite TV would become.

Ricardo found a way to give his customers access to over a hundred American stations by installing parabolic antennas on their rooftops. At the time, networks hadn’t started encoding their programming and so, by having a satellite dish on your roof, you could not only tap into their plethora of stations; they were free. Ricardo saw the huge business opportunity and began designing his own enormous dishes, initially made of boards and chicken wire. Ricardo’s antennas were much flatter and bigger than the normal ones but also much cheaper. He went door-to-door handing out flyers to attract customers and installed them on their rooftops himself, assembling the 5-foot-wide sphere, aiming it, adding the amplifier, cable and receiver and lastly attaching the TV. Presto, Mexico had American TV! Antennas became so common in the ’80s, the metallic dishes formed an almostsolid canopy over Monterrey, the second-largest metropolitan area in Mexico, and Ricardo’s business boomed—until the networks caught on and started encoding their programming. By then, fiberglass antennas had cannibalized his metal ones, but Ricardo had already moved on.

The same year, Ricardo dabbled in another side business, importing switchboard consoles. In 1981, calls weren’t directly transferred, so businesses with more than one line needed a switchboard to connect the outside call to its recipient. Telmex reigned over the switchboard industry and charged thousands of dollars for archaic devices with huge buttons. However, companies had no alternative because Telmex had a monopoly across the country. While Ricardo was Elektra’s import manager, he flew to Korea to meet with the company’s suppliers and manufacturers and saw that they had much more advanced multi-line consoles there for a fraction of the price. He knew he had to bring them back to Mexico.

He started off with a switchboard console with three lines and sold them to his friends while he set up a business installing and programming the multi-line consoles and providing a maintenance service. Soon he introduced models with 6 lines and 16 extensions and then expanded to 8 lines and 36 extensions, fulfilling a demand across the entire country.

With his small parabolic antenna and switchboard ventures, Ricardo saw a potential market for each business and scraped together all the resources available to him in order to get them off the ground: he partnered with a local blacksmith who physically constructed the antennas while he peddled the five-foot metal dishes door to door, saving on manpower by installing those he managed to sell on his customer’s rooftops with his bare hands. There was a huge sports center for the workers nearby on Rio Frio Street where they held soccer, baseball, volleyball and basketball tournaments and that’s where Ricardo kept his antennas.

As he was simultaneously negotiating with Korean manufacturers on behalf of Elektra, he convinced them to throw in the high-tech phone systems for his side business at a bargain. Before word had spread among his future customers, he easily unloaded the telephone consoles onto friends and the companies they worked for because his prices were irresistible and their existing Mexican systems looked like blushing fossils next to the state-of-the-art Korean technology. He didn’t have the infrastructure to provide a maintenance service for his telephone systems, so he borrowed a distribution network his brother had already established for another business, and he had his sister, Norah Emilia, worked from home to help translate the telecommunications equipment manuals into Spanish so that he could pass government regulation standards.

These small ventures were just the beginning of Ricardo’s crusade: the parabolic antennas paved the way for the first invasion of Mexico’s television monopoly since 1955. Ricardo took over the state-owned TV channels 7 and 13 and transformed the country’s television industry. Similarly, Ricardo went from importing switchboards and consoles to becoming a leader in telecommunications in Mexico, competing against a long-established duopoly: Iusacell, which he later acquired, and Telcel, which today has cornered almost the entire cell phone market.

You have to give yourself the chance to succeed, run with an idea and keep on going. Some ideas work and others don’t. From the age of eight, Ricardo learned to always be looking out for business opportunities and then actually execute them. A lot of people sit on ideas and then watch in fury as other people become successful, bitter that it could have been them. In an age when technology and communication advancements are making our world network smaller by the day, it seems that the totally new ideas left to explore are limited, but people are making radical advancements at a spiraling rate every day.

You have nothing to prove to other people, so don’t be afraid of not being good enough or of failing. There are many successful entrepreneurs out there who have made a career out of sheer persistence. Ricardo is a living example that you don’t need to be an expert to break into a market; you just need to have a clear objective, start small and keep at it until you get to the top.

Referring to Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-hour rule,” a lot of success is reliant on determination and the hours you put in. Of course, talent helps and some people are better than others at being creative and some are wired more mathematically but the rest can be compensated with persistence, hard work and being at the right place at the right time—the latter being contingent on being able to recognize the opportunity.

I am not a genius, but I can sniff out an opportunity and persist at it until it materializes. Whether or not I am equipped with the prior experience or knowledge, I will see things through to the bitter end, finding out how to make it a success along the way. When I joined Bacardi, I had no history of working in either liquor or marketing and when I joined Elektra the most financial experience I had was from running estimates for my construction business. The trick is to rise to the challenge and not be afraid of making mistakes —learn from them and keep persisting until you reach the top.

Ricardo and I are similar in that if we spot an opportunity, we are not paralyzed by our own inexperience. When he bought TV Azteca, Ricardo was slandered for not having a career history in media and entertainment, but how could he if there had been a monopoly running the television industry since his birth? He bid for the company regardless and made some glaring mistakes at first—for one by famously announcing that TV Azteca wasn’t going to do newscasts and that it was going to broadcast pure entertainment. Then he said it wasn’t going to produce, that the network was going to buy everything, because they were in the distribution business. The important thing was that he learned from his mistakes and adapted quickly. Today, Azteca produces a large number of newscasts, over 8,000 hours of entertainment, sports, show-business coverage and novelas, making it the second-largest producer of Spanish-language programming in the world.

Ricardo Salinas is a true entrepreneur. He has an inspired vision…but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be realized. He also knows how to execute his ideas and he will persist for as long as it takes.

Thomas Edison was another master entrepreneur. He was a renowned inventor himself but he thrived from adopting and manipulating other people’s ideas—most famously Nikola Tesla’s—to his advantage. By comparing Edison and Tesla it becomes apparent that a vision and the knowledge to execute it are not enough. You need to be business minded also and it is the combination of the two that has allowed Ricardo to reach the heights he has climbed.

Tesla and Edison were both great men but in execution they were polar opposites. Edison himself said that he had no need to be a mathematician because he could always hire one. He was really a businessman and publicist, spotting the trends and the opportunities that were out there, then hiring the best in the field to do the work for him. After all, he hired Tesla who redesigned his obsolete direct current generators and helped him save his company.

Edison promised to reward the young Serb for his efforts, telling him “there’s $50,000 in it for you, if you take me up on this.” Tesla did take him up on the offer and he labored to improve the archaic dynamos night and day— while imagining all the things he could do with the $50,000. He arrived for work two hours before anyone else and stayed long after even the assistants had left, and at the end of just one year, he again delivered the goods, presenting Edison with 24 varying models of the dynamo. Tesla had increased the output of Edison’s direct current dynamos while decreasing their operating costs, replacing the old control switches with fully automatic controls. The prototypes were a success and Edison was delighted, announcing, “We will start full production on these immediately.” It was go, go, go!

When Tesla raised the issue of his success fee, Edison joked, “Nikola, you just don’t understand our American humor!” When Edison compensated him with a $10 raise, Tesla had a complete sense of humor failure and quit.

You could put Tesla’s tragic life down to misfortune if it wasn’t a pattern that occurred again and again throughout his life. Having been evicted from hotels because he couldn’t pay his bills, Tesla resorted to arduous hand labor, digging ditches in the streets of New York. He continued to invent prolifically and was offered $60,000 by the Westinghouse Electric Company for his patents, $6,000 in cash plus 150 shares of stock. Tesla negotiated additional royalties of $2.5 per horsepower of electricity sold and they had a deal.¹

A year later, there was an economic crash and Westinghouse begged Tesla to give up most of his stake. Tesla’s royalties were estimated to be worth $12 million after just four years, with the potential to become a billionaire and one of the world’s wealthiest men in a few more. As utilities expanded, the Serb was to collect on powerhouse equipment and motors on every application of the alternating-current system patents. However, his desire to see his AC system materialize consumed him and he valued his inventions much more than any paycheck. Tesla willingly tore up his royalty agreement and made Westinghouse promise to save the company and develop his AC systems in return. In 1897, he accepted a buyout of his patents and royalties for $216,000, a pittance compared to what he would have been worth. Westinghouse’s company went on to cash billions of dollars worth of checks while Tesla lived in miserable poverty, barely scraping by on donations from sympathetic friends.

Tesla was robbed once again two years later when the young Italian experimenter Guglielmo Marconi was granted the patent for the invention of radio, when he broadcast a signal across the English Channel in 1899, using a patent Tesla had filed in 1897—and guess who was a consulting engineer and a key subsidizer of Marconi’s financial backing? None other than Tesla’s archrival: Thomas Edison.

Tesla finally reached boiling point when Marconi won the Nobel Prize for inventing the radio in 1909. He sued the Marconi Company for infringement in 1915, but was in no financial condition to litigate a case against a major corporation. It wasn’t until 1943 that the U.S. Supreme Court finally upheld Tesla’s radio patent—the same year he died, alone in a two-room hotel suite with barely a penny to his name.

Tesla was an undisputed genius but unfortunately his talent was only worth as much as he could do with it. Tesla received 112 patents, but after the period in which he worked with Westinghouse, only about 20% of them were tied to commercial success. Tesla invented the induction motor as well as the AC power system and the radio but never gained the credit or money he was owed. Although many or perhaps most of Edison’s patents were bought or stolen, he received a huge 1,093 in his lifetime and managed to transform nearly every single one into a thriving business.

Edison’s forte was taking existing ideas and making them commercially viable. He didn’t invent the first electric light bulb but he did make it safe and practical for home use. The existing arc lamps were too bright to be used for small spaces such as the rooms of a house and they had an extremely short life, were expensive to produce and used a lot of electricity, making them difficult to apply on a large scale. Edison’s eventual achievement was to create an incandescent electric light as well as an electric lighting system that contained all the elements necessary to make the incandescent light practical, safe and economical. He was able to sell the concept to homes and businesses by mass-producing relatively long-lasting light bulbs along with a complete system that generated and distributed electricity efficiently.

One of the greatest differences between Edison and Tesla was that Edison always had several people involved with his projects while Tesla generally worked alone. Tesla might have had extremely high levels of personal productivity at times, but Edison had the advantage of having a virtual army at his disposal. For example, Edison was able to accumulate over 5 million pages of organized records while Tesla stored most of his ideas in his brain. Edison and Tesla both had legendary work ethics, but only Edison had it instilled at an organizational level.

Ricardo Salinas has the same business acumen as Edison, in that he is able to spot an idea that will be commercially viable and act on it before someone else does. Having an idea or technical expertise is not enough. To be an entrepreneur, you need to be able to raise money, motivate a work force and sell your idea to the public—before your competitors get there first.

Even though Grupo Salinas has grown into an enormous undertaking riddled with bureaucracy, it is a priority for Salinas to be able to act out changes quickly so as not to be paralyzed by its size. Ideas happen simultaneously all the time and it is important to be able to beat your competitors to the punch.

The 100th Monkey story is a good example of this. It has been circulated so often among researchers of human behavior that it has developed into an urban legend. Even though the facts have been discredited by most scientists, the concept behind the story is a metaphor for how, throughout history, inventions have happened simultaneously.

If you don’t dissect this story too thoroughly, it shows the point I’m trying to make in very simple terms. The original story appeared in the mid to late ’70s. In Lyall Watson’s book Lifetide, he describes research on Japanese macaque monkeys, which have been studied intensively for more than four decades in a number of wild colonies. This is an excerpt from its most widely known version in the opening to the book The Hundredth Monkey, by Ken Keyes. [Japan Monkey Center reports in the journal Primates, vol. 2, vol. 5 and vol. 6.]

The story dates back to 1952 when scientists were experimenting on monkeys on the island of Koshima. They were feeding monkeys sweet potatoes which they dropped in the sand. The monkeys took a liking to the raw potatoes but were disturbed by the sand.

An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too.

Soon, the scientists noticed that other monkeys on the island were picking up this cultural innovation and by 1958 all the young monkeys had learned to wash the sand off of the potatoes and even some of the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.

Then, at sunrise one morning in the autumn of 1958, for the purpose of the story, let’s suppose the hundredth monkey on Koshima Island learned to wash potatoes.

And that’s when it happened!

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey had somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But even more intriguing was that this development had somehow jumped across the ocean and colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama had begun washing their sweet potatoes!

The story shows that while a breakthrough is slowly catching on in one part of a world, it may have already evolved in another.

There are a lot of people that are all talk. They talk about the great idea they have but they don’t do anything about it. Every time you see them they are excitedly telling you about the same idea or a new one they’ve drummed up but years later they have nothing to show for it. Don’t be that person.

Don’t sit on an idea expecting it always to be there. Someone else may already be developing the same idea somewhere else. The world is advancing at an accelerated pace and there will always be someone else encroaching on your territory or not far behind. They may be right there stealing your idea from under your nose, so keep your ideas to yourself. The faster you take action, and the less you say about it, the smaller the opportunity for others to beat you to the punch.

The 100th Monkey story also allegorizes the increasing ease and rapidity with which new skills and technology are developing. There are other, more sophisticated experiments on human psychology that prove it becomes easier to learn what other people have already learned. One phenomenon is the otherwise inexplicable rise in IQ that has taken place over the last few decades, the so-called “Flynn Effect.”

The technological and scientific race has been accelerating at a steady incline. In the last century, we’ve had more discoveries and inventions than since the beginning of human consciousness. Nathan Myrvold, the man who started Microsoft’s research division, has set out to catapult that process to new heights by setting up a company called Intellectual Ventures. It brings together the world’s smartest minds in order to brainstorm new inventions as a collective —faster. Instead of waiting for people to make discoveries as they have done in the past, his aim is to churn out hybrid ideas as if he were a pedigree dog breeder, which he then patents and licenses to interested companies.

Telephony is an example of the rapid incline technology has and continues to develop. The fixed line telephone was invented in 1876 but it took nearly a century for the portable mobile to be invented by Motorola in 1973. The first trials of a “cell” that could maintain multiple roaming calls took place in Chicago in 1977 with 2,000 customers. Two years later, in 1979, the Japanese built the first commercial cellular telephone system in Tokyo. Early cell phones cost upward of several thousand dollars. These first-generation cell phones were hardly elegant—many people called them “luggables” rather than “portables,” and as one reporter noted in The Guardian, “mobiles of that era are often compared to bricks, but this is unfair. Bricks are quite attractive and relatively light.”

By 1985, there were approximately 340,000 wireless subscribers in the United States, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Associate (CTIA); by 1995, that number had increased to more than 33 million, and by 2003, more than 158 million people in the country had gone wireless. In 2011, the figure will swell to beyond 5 billion subscribers across the world and, with today’s incentives, getting a free phone with the purchase of a calling plan is standard.

To emphasize just how quickly the craze has spread, consider this: In 35 years, cell phone penetration has escalated from 2,000 customers to 5 billion. Even in third-world countries, owning a cell phone is more important to many people than having a roof over their head.

And at just the right time, Ricardo Salinas was in the right place with the right idea—and he executed it.