The First Billion Is the Hardest: Reflections on a Life of Comebacks and America's Energy Future
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With a Plan for Reducing U.S. Oil DependencyIt's never too late to top your personal best.Now eighty years old, T. Boone Pickens is a legendary figure in the business world. Known as the "Oracle of Oil" because of his uncanny ability to predict the direction of fuel prices, he built Mesa Petroleum, one of the largest independent oil companies in the United States, from a $2,500 investment. In the 1980s, Pickens became a household name when he executed a series of unsolicited buyout bids for undervalued oil companies, in the process reinventing the notion of shareholders' rights. Even his failures were successful in that they forced risk-averse managers to reconsider the way they did business.When Pickens left Mesa at age sixty-eight after a spectacular downward spiral in the company's profits, many counted him out. Indeed, what followed for him was a painful divorce, clinical depression, a temporary inability to predict the...
Ch. 1 Blood, Guts, and Feathers 15Ch. 2 "A Big Deal Takes as Much Time as a Little Deal" 25Ch. 3 Starting Over 59Ch. 4 The Bottom of the Canyon 75Ch. 5 Loading the Boat 93Ch. 6 It's All About the Team 113Ch. 7 Learning to Live with Peak Oil 127Ch. 8 Going Long and Scoring Big 155Ch. 9 Stepping Up My Giving 165Ch. 10 "Roll Up the Maps!" 191Ch. 11 Mixing Oil and Water 211Ch. 12 The Biggest Deal of My Career: Wind 225Ch. 13 The Big Idea: An Energy Plan for America 235Afterword: Going Forward 247Index 253
