Behind the Drive

As a kid, Larry Miller was a guy I didn’t really get.  I think I didn’t get a lot of people as a kid.  I was probably a lot more quick to judge people than I should’ve been.  I’m not really sure what it was that made me think he was not up to my standards.  Likely it was a picture in the newspaper of him at a Jazz game on a Sunday (which rarely happened) or a quote in the newspaper in which he used some inappropriate language.  As I have got older and come to learn more about him and come to recognize my own struggles, it’s been very easy to forgive him for those shortcomings.  In fact, it’s probably just the opposite situation now as I tend to see Larry Miller as someone who had many positive characteristics and someone from whom we can learn.

Larry H. Miller: Behind the Drive: 99 Inspiring Stories from the Life of an American Entrepreneur, edited by Bryan Miller (ISBN: 978-1-62972-094-4), is a collection of short anecdotes from the lives of those people on whom Larry Miller had a positive impact.  Some of the people who contributed were well known, both inside and out of Utah.  Others were people I’d never heard of.  All had been helped in one way or another by the man that most knew only as the owner of the Utah Jazz (while his car dealership empire was well known, the Jazz were front and center in the minds of everyone that I knew).  There was story after story of Larry Miller giving of his time and money to help someone out, including competitors.  There were a couple stories from his immediate family indicating that he had a great appreciation and love for his family and wished, as he got to the end of this life, that he had made better decisions about how much time he spent with his family.  He was a passionate, hard-working man, driven by love for his family, his community, and his God, and it showed in the way he helped out in so many different people’s lives.  He paid off cars, he bought people appliances, he endowed scholarships for poor kids, he worked to keep the Jazz in Utah, seeing them as something the community could gel around, and he supported his family, friends, and community through service in the Church.

I enjoyed reading Miller’s autobiography, Driven, so it’s not too surprising that I enjoyed this book, too.  This provided a differing viewpoint, but included some of the same conclusions.  I was amazed at how many people he helped, often without asking a question.  He had no second thoughts about paying off a struggling woman’s car loan.  Employees, friends, and even strangers (when the wife of a Ukrainian he barely knew needed cancer treatment she could only get in America, he moved them to America and paid for her cancer treatments) benefited from his generosity with his hard-earned money.  He was a personable person, taking time to get to know the little people, regularly spending his lunches with mechanics at dealerships or construction workers on building sites, not the managers or foremen.  I’ve heard from other sources that Miller was a poor tipper, and that was addressed by a restaurant owner in the book, who said Miller usually gave 15% (standard at the time of the story), but his staff felt that simply because he was rich, he should’ve tipped more.  Judging by the rest of the stories, I believe Larry Miller’s tips added up to well over 15% in his life.  I found his children’s thoughts on family time fascinating and realized I could learn from that, too, even though he probably fell short in that area.  Both the effective and less-effective examples are something we can, if we are smart, learn from.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.

The Oligarchs

This was a critical decision for the insurgent democrats — they decided
to go local and make Moscow, not the national government, an engine for real change.
When I arrived in Russia as a young missionary, my first month was full of the other, more experienced missionaries telling me of the infamous ruble crash of 1998.  I honestly couldn’t fathom what it meant.  By summer of 1999, things seemed somewhat stable to a 19-year-old missionary from Utah who had never traveled outside the United States before.  I remember that the first time I heard about the crash was as I looked out over a sea of high-rise apartment buildings — the Russians refer to them as “anthills” — from the balcony window of a missionary apartment, also in a high-rise building, in the Vesyoly Posyolok area of St. Petersburg.  It was sunny, warm, and a bit of a sleepy afternoon with a streetcar rumbling by down below.  I was regaled with stories of runs on ATMs, stores, and bakeries.  It all seemed so foreign and so far away.

The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia (ISBN: 1-58648-001-4) by David E. Hoffman starts long before the ruble crash and financial crisis, telling the story of how Russia came to that point after the fall of Communism.  The story is told in a very personal way, relying heavily on the author’s many personal interviews with the major players in industry and politics, as well as his and other journalists’ first-hand experiences during the “wild ’90s” in Russia.  The book provides short biographies of the major players, household names in Russia and sometimes beyond well into the early 2000s: Aleksandr Smolensky, Yuri Luzhkov, Anatoly Chubais, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky.  The book chronicles these men’s rise to power.  They were entrepreneurs, opportunists, risk takers, visionaries, and criminals all rolled into one.  The book also provides a lot of information on Boris Yeltsin since the story of the oligarchs is inseparably woven into Yeltsin’s story.  From the dying throes of Communism to the dawn of Putinism, the book tracks the actions of the oligarchs and politicians they worked closely with and what the consequences were for Russia, Russians, and the West.  The oligarchs were an interesting group because of the they were at the forefront of a entrepreneurial movement that helped move the country forward, but they were wholly unprepared to play by rules foreign to them.  They cut a lot of back-room deals during Soviet times and continued using that same playbook the farther in the rear-view mirror the Soviet Union got.  To compensate for the changing financial and economic landscape, the oligarchs joined up with Yeltsin, going against he sentiment they had in the quotation above and helping him win a second term in the presidency because it kept the oligarchs in power.  A case is made for the necessity of that maneuver.  Finally, the book presents a few notes about how that move, keeping Yeltsin in power, ended up hurting the oligarchs because Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, has worked hard against them.

The book is rather old, written in 2001.  It is still relevant today, though.  It ends with a discussion of Putin and his rise to power and the early signs that his time in power was going to be different.  The book provides some warnings to the West (mega-rich bazillionaire George Soros is quoted in the book saying that some of his early investments in Russia were his worst investments ever) should Russia ever recover from Putinism and thaw like it did after the Cold War.  Hoffman spared no punches, and Western darling Khodorkovsky was shown to be a bit of a slimy rat.  (In fairness, all the other Russian oligarchs were portrayed that way, too, but Khodorkovsky seemed to be the leader of the pack.)  Khodorkovsky took it on the chin from Putin, but he was no angel and likely doesn’t deserve quite the level of adulation he gets from the Western press.  I enjoyed reading the stories from the ’90s and thinking back on the crazy Russia that I knew as a missionary and wishing it could’ve worked out a little better for Russia after the Cold War.  The oligarchs were likely a help and a hindrance.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.