Welcome to Hal leaders lead where every week you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode you'll have something simple you can apply as you develop into a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Today's guest is Eric Leacher, a former Marine Corps officer and investment banker who along with a handful of others pioneered and developed the mergers and acquisition industry and transformed the face of American business by making big bets and calculated risks. What you'll hear in this episode is that Eric believes the world belongs to the aggressive. The way he leads is by taking risks but we're not talking about delusional optimism here. Yes, it's the leaders who are willing to take risks that will be successful but only if it's done in the right way and at the right time. Now perhaps you have a big decision coming up and you're wondering if it's worth the risk. I think you'll get a lot out of today's episode. Perhaps this will actually be the boost that you need to charge forward. So here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Eric Le acher. You know Eric, I want to first of all congratulate you on your new book. What was the thinking behind the title? Risk, reward, repeat. The thinking is that to be successful in this world where so much is going on so fast in so many places that a businessman, regardless of what kind of business he's in, has got to be comfortable with taking risks. It won't happen unless you take chances and obviously all the chances don't necessarily turn out so that's the risk. If you are successful, I believe you have to reward those who helped you. So in my case, the universities that gave me scholarships and afforded me the chance to go and various people and then repeat is that you hope you influence people to do some of the things that you've done. In my case, it was philanthropy. So risk, reward, repeat. That's kind of how I live my life and that turned out to be the title for the book. Yeah, when was it that the lightning struck, Eric, and he said, you know, I'm going to write my story? I've been thinking about doing it and then I must say that one of the simulations was we got locked down in early March 2020 so I'm a procrastinator like most other people and I said, all right, if I'm ever going to do this, I'm going to do it now. So that was part of how it got started. But what I was thinking was that over my career, I'd given lots of speeches and taught courses and classes at various business schools. You know, from Harvard, Stanford, and University of Chicago in the middle and various talks and invariably, in fact, David, you remember the talk we gave together a couple of years ago. No matter what the subject was that I was speaking about, the question was, what did you do to succeed and what do I have to do to succeed? And that's an obvious question. So I said, you know, if I write a memoir, a memoir is a story and in the narrative of the story, if I bring out all the things I learned from the beginning, which applied to business and which I applied to the business and to my life, that should help answer that question, that invariable question that always comes up. And then the philanthropy was going to be part of it because a reward for me has been all the people, whether they're veterans at the University of Chicago that benefited from the veteran scholarship fund that I started, or the golf program in Northwestern, where I had a golf scholarship and we got five guys playing on the PGA tour now, these people who benefit are really appreciative. And it's a great reward. And I hope that other people who are successful in life will heed to that and do the same thing. That was the motivation for trying to write a book. Well, you mentioned the beginning, so I want to take you back to your beginning . You became one of the top amateurs in the country as a golfer and everybody talks about golf and it's impact in business. You know, how did you parlay the golf experience into helping you have a successful business career? You know, doing what I did, I didn't play business golf. Some of my clients were avid golfers and we became friends and we played golf. But, you know, I didn't know you very well and I admired what you had done in young brands, but I wouldn't walk into your offices and say, "Hey, let's go play golf ." Maybe I should have because I know I'm not sure you love golf, but I wouldn't have known that, you know. So it wasn't like you were going around saying, "Hey, let's go play golf." You know, playing golf, you meet a lot of people. When I was at business school, I went out to play with a buddy of mine who was, at that time, became a golf bro and we played and we joined up with a guy and his son and he pulled out his card when we were done and he said, "If you ever want a job, call me." And he was the chairman of the board of a big company at Chicago, the Jewel Food Stores Company. And you know what I did? I called him that winner and worked for him in the summer. They offered me a full-time job and I said, "I want to go to Wall Street. I'm going to give it a try, fight and get a job." And they said, "Well, we have two partners of investment banks on our board. Of course, I didn't know what a board was. I really didn't." And they said, "Once from Goldman Sachs and once from Lehman, they're both great, but the Lehman guy, we give him the edge. You know, he really cares about our business. Would you like to meet him?" Well, obviously. So I went to New York and had lunch there with him and the head of their investment banking and they offered me a job. So that random occurrence of playing golf with the guy and just talking to him, I wasn't asking him for anything. But for some reason, I guess he was interested in me and boy, did that help. Yeah, absolutely. You know, Eric, you took advantage of that opportunity and you contend that the world belongs to the aggressive. Where's that line of thinking come from? I can tell you exactly where it comes from. Back in the, around 1975, I was at Lehman Brothers. I became a partner four and a half years after I started. And I was handling big accounts of Lehman like Caterpillar, tractor, general foods, great big companies and basically doing bond deals. And then I started working on transactions, companies acquiring other companies . I found it. That's what I liked. And I observed the CEOs and they were different and I could see that the ones that were more aggressive were going to do things to develop their business and they were going to do it as quickly as they could in situations that made sense. And I felt that the merger business was going to change. It was going to become an active tool of American business and developing companies. It wasn't that. And there was an entity called a business round table. You probably were a member of it. And back in the '70s, it had big power. Everybody, all the big CEOs, remembers. And they had kind of an unspoken deal. And the deal was, I won't try to take over your company and you're not going to try to take over mine. So there wasn't a lot of aggressive merger activity. You didn't see hostile takeovers. And I felt that was going to change because there were just too many aggressive CEOs that wanted to do things. And I went to a lawyer named Marty Lipton and I didn't know him well. And I told him, I said, "I think this is all going to happen and I want to set up a professional merger and acquisition department within Lehman Brothers so we can compete." I said, "Will you teach me about M&A?" And he said, "What?" He said, "All right." He said, "Every Saturday morning, show up here at 9 o'clock and we'll spend the morning." And we did it for weeks. And I set up a merger and acquisition department in Lehman and my buddies all said, "You've made a career ending mistake. You're toast." He said, "Nobody's going to cooperate with you because if their M&A deals to be done, the fees are big and the partners are going to want to keep those fees for themselves." They're going to say, "I did this deal. I brought it in. Why would they bring you in?" And I said, "They're going to have to because it's going to get professional and complicated. And if they don't, their clients are going to lose and they're going to lose the client and Lehman Brothers is going to lose also." And so if you're a partner, it's not good for you. I set it up and you know what? It worked. Yeah, absolutely. And you were aggressive and you had vision and you're seen as the founder of the old M&A business, which is amazing. I was there certainly toward the beginning of it and it worked and I loved every minute of it. The more active it got, the more interested it got in it. It was a pleasure and it went on that way for my entire career. So it was a blessing. Well, I want to come back to that a little later, but I want to take you back a little bit further early on in your life and right after the college and everything, your education. I understand you volunteered to go into the Marine Corps versus taking an easier route. You could have gone in the reserves. You could have done a lot of things. What made you go that route? You know, I said, "Okay, everybody goes in military service in those days." I decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right. The six month reserve stuff didn't appeal to me. It didn't seem to me that you could be really proficient doing something like that when you weren't really trained and then they screwed up your summary. You had to go for two weeks or a month and by that time I wanted to play golf in the summer. That's when the tournaments were. So I said to hell with this, "If I'm going to serve, I want to do the most challenging thing available." And that was the Marines. Navy SEALs didn't exist. They were coming. It was the UDT, the underwater demolition of teams in Little Creek, Virginia. But the Marine Corps was where it was. I signed up and I said, "Let's see if I can cut it." Well, tell us a story from your time in the Marine Corps that you kept top of mind throughout your career, the story that you just never could forget. It was after the training at Quantico when I got assigned to the Fleet Marine Force, the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and I went down there and I went out to the company I was assigned to. And the platoon was out in the field training and they weren't going to be back for a couple of days. And the first sergeant said, "We'll go through the folders on each Marine of platoon." And the platoon was very experienced. Half of them had been there. They were off-shore in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis, ready to land. And I'm thinking, "What am I going to do here?" I'm supposed to be the superior officer. I'm 23 years old. I've been playing golf. I got through the training at Quantico, but this is really serious. And you know what? I figured it out. I said, "Okay, your only alternative is to be yourself." We got started. I did what I thought I was supposed to do. And within three or four months, it was unbelievable. And I learned everything. I learned everything that was important to me for the rest of my career and for more than that. I used that I acquired in the way I treated my children, things like that. And I learned that you had to deal with people with flawless integrity. Anything short of that dealing with Marine infantry troops, you could forget about it. Flawless integrity. It had to be the truth. You had to pursue excellence in everything you did. If you went out to the rifle range, you had to try to be the top shooter. Whatever you tried to do, you had to pursue excellence. You had to lead by example. You had to delegate. You had to give people responsibility. And I learned I had 45 men. And I would say that two-thirds of them didn't graduate from my school. And some of them came in. They're 17 years old at the lowest age. They were black, brown. They were big. They were short. They were all different sizes. And I want to tell you, most of them were smart as hell. They were intuitive. And the beauty of the Marine Corps is they got into it. You can motivate them. They wanted to be the best. I gained that breadth of knowledge about people that affected me forever. I remember my son Jimmy, who was a novelist, he wrote a book and he dedicated to me. And the thing he said, I never forget it. He said, "My father treats the doorman and the CEO the same way." Something to that effect. And I'm very proud of that. And it made me cry when I read it. It was much more articulate than I had. And I just said, "But I learned that in the Marine Corps. That affected me. I got it." Well, you know, Eric, you said you were 23 years old and you've got all these people that many of them had more experience than you. And that created a lot of anxiety for you. And how did you go about leading them? What advice can you give to people who have to lead people who are more experienced than them? You have to be yourself. You cannot fake it. You're in a situation like that where you're absolutely right, David. You just have to do it and you have to use your common sense and you just have to do what you think is right and behave the right way until they know you and until they've seen what you can do. And I did all the things they did. I felt that I could, whatever they were supposed to do, you know, physically, I felt that I was as good as them and I could do anything they could do or do it. I wanted to do it better. And so you just get into it and you try and you learn and then there becomes things where you do have the advantage and you can explain things and you can hear say, here 's what we're doing and why we're doing it and here's how we're going to do it and so forth. And you know, you build up a mutual respect over time. When did you, Eric, decide that finance was the route that you wanted to take? I decided when I got out of the barique where I wanted to go back to school and get an MBA because I'd heard about an MBA and an MBA set a person apart from the people that just had undergraduate degrees. And I wasn't coming from a prestigious background and I knew nothing about business. I had a great father, but he was an engineer. He didn't know anything about business. He never had an investment in his life and I figured if I had an MBA, that would set me apart a little bit. So I said, that's what I'm going to try to do. And I did it. When I was getting out, I took the tests and I applied and lo and behold, I got into the University of Chicago. I was thrilled that I did and I went there and I learned about business. Finance intrigued me the most. I just felt I was more interested in it and so I said, well, I want to do something you finance. I interviewed some big companies. I interviewed the Ford financial staff and Procter and Gamble and I didn't want to work for a big company. And then for whatever the reason is, who knows, I didn't want to do it. And investment banking sounded interesting. And then I told you, I got lucky with my job with Jule and they sent me to Leh man Brothers. As you were coming up in your career, was there a pivotal moment that really changed the trajectory of your career, got you noticed and put you into a different stratosphere? Well, they were kind of two. One was at Lehman. Lehman was a very, very eclectic place. They had a lot of really talented people. They were all different. And one of them was a fellow named Lewis Gluxman and he joined them and he created a commercial paper business, which as you know, is very valuable to big corporations. They all use it for short term financing. His business made a lot of money, which gave him a lot of power to Lehman. And with the commercial paper business, there was a lot of other businesses that came in. There were a lot of companies that used commercial paper, but they didn't have, this is back now in the late '60s, they didn't have investment banking relationships, but they had the commercial paper. So if they had an investment banking issue, they had something to do with the subsidiary, they wanted to buy something they would call Lewis Gluxman. And he didn't know what to do with it and he didn't want to fool around with it . And he took a liking to me because I was different. So they all thought I was Midwestern because I came from Northwestern, but I was from all over, but I wasn't one of these guys that went to Andover, Harvard, you know, Harvard Business School. I was different and he liked that. He didn't like the other guys because he was from the Lower East Side of New York and I was a former Marine. So he knew I'd been out with real people. And lo and behold, I was 27 and 28 when I started with him. And every time one of these pieces of business would come in, he would call me, I'd go over and meet with him and the guy from the company and he'd turn it over to me. You know, all of a sudden, the guy was looking at me like I was the investment banker, I was going to help him solve his problems. So I had to do it. So it was a tremendous boost for me. And I was able to do it all. You know, I figured it out and just did it. So that was one. Then the other one was the story I told you about starting the M&A business because that really transformed me and it led to big things. He started the business at Lehman and then you go to Morgan Stanley. What was it that made you leave Lehman? Lehman was a contentious place the whole time. Senior partners were, you know, each other's throats. There was no teamwork at Lehman. That's why my buddies all thought I would fail when I tried to centralize the merger business. Eventually, there was a power struggle between Gluxman, the guy that I described. He became very important because he added all kinds of fixed income businesses and he was making all the money. And the guy named Pete Peterson who he succeeded the former CEO of Lehman and he was the CEO and he treated Gluxman like a subordinate. And Gluxman couldn't stand it and eventually forced him out. And since I was tight with Gluxman, I thought, well, this is probably pretty good, you know. I'm his guy. And the bonus pool at Lehman was where everybody got paid. The salaries were low. And if the firm had a good year, the bonus pool was how everybody got paid. So the first year he divided the bonus pool, he took a disproportionate amount for himself and a couple of guys and fixed income. I couldn't kind of stomach that. Not because I wanted more. I just knew it was the wrong thing to do. And I decided that I'd been at Lehman almost 16 years and I was going to do something else. And I knew the guys at Morgan Stanley and I called up Bob Greenhill who was running the investment banking, who I knew I had done deals with him. He was a great guy. And I said, look, I've had enough. If you're interested, I'd like to talk to you. And he said, can you be up here at four o'clock this afternoon? So I was and we decided that I was coming to Morgan Stanley. What's the best advice, Eric, that you could give somebody to help them decide whether it's time to change? Well, that's a big decision and think it through, but follow your gut, follow your heart. Don't get too tangled up on, well, I got a mortgage and this and that. If you think it's the right thing to do, take the risk and go do it because you can always figure out something else. I decided very quickly that I was going to go do something else and it was turned out to be a super decision. And then what was it that made you want to run your own show? I just like to get inside of the head of the leader. I mean, take us through that thought process because you're at Morgan, you're doing well. And what made you have the guts and courage to step out? How did you make that decision? It was very simple. I wanted to do it. I wanted to see if I could do it. It was similar to just going into the Marine Corps saying, look, I want to do it right. I want to see if I can cut it. And there were a few blueteaks then. I was very friendly with a guy named Bruce Wasserstein from First Boston and he and Joe Pirella had started to want a couple of years before. They asked me to join them. I didn't want to do that. I liked them. But if I was going to do something, I was going to do something on my own. And I just wanted to do it. And I told my wife, I said, look, I know you're tired of talking about this. I think she was. But I said, if I do this, I'm going to probably make 25% of what I'm making now . She said, immediately she said, so much. She said, you've been thinking about this. Go do it. And so I did. And it was just because I wanted to. I wanted to see what it would be like. And it was fascinating. In a book when I talk about all the things that happened when I started, the first few months, it was unbelievable. So it was an experience I never had before. I guess I like taking a chance. I felt it would work. It did. It was something I would have never wanted to miss. It led to all kinds of different things. And I did it for a long time until I retired. I worked for 45 years from 1968 when I joined Lehman to 2013 when I started to work on my golf game again. What did you learn about culture working at Lehman's and Morgan Stanley that shaped the kind of culture you wanted to create in your own company? Teamwork was the key. Teamwork. Team Marine Corps. You got these 45 guys. Most of them are young. Okay, really young. 17, 18, 19 years old. They're all different. And they come from crazy backgrounds. How do you put them together? How do you call less all that young talent and make it an outstanding warrior machine? How do you do that? And it's teamwork and it's morale and treating people right and letting them know where they stand. So in business, when I went to Morgan Stanley, it was all teamwork. And it was almost too homogeneous. There wasn't a diversity in the people there. There were some women and some fantastically brilliant women who went on. Like one of them, Ruth Parrat, she's a CFO of Google, you know, an incredible talent like that. But it was very homogeneous. But the teamwork was good. And when I got there and I got a chance to run the everything department, it turned out to be exactly when Mike Milken was creating the junk bond business and the take overs in the latter half of the '80s were unbelievable. And I was involved in almost all of the big ones. And it gave me the credibility. You know, I knew that that really helped. And when I started my own firm, my attitude on teamwork was one. I wanted all the senior people to have equity, including my assistant. I gave her 1% of the business. She always had it. She had two sons and instead of sending them to the state college, one went to MIT, one went to Princeton and it was summa cum laude, five-headed Kappa, unbelievable. And so stuff like that really makes the person feel good, David. I mean, you feel like you've really done something. Absolutely. When you have that ownership and talent, it's a big driver, you know. And I got to ask you this, Eric. You obviously have a huge desire to win. And the will to win can be a powerful force if you harness it properly. How do you do it? How do you do it? Well, the will to win is infectious. At the beginning, you don't have much of a self-image, okay, if you're a normal person because you haven't accomplished anything. But as you go through your life, you know, in school and in sports and in business and in relationships and so forth, if you've done pretty well, you know, all of a sudden you get a self-image and you go that you're not so bad. You know, you're a pretty good person and you know what your capabilities are. And in my case, that just led to me wanting to do more. You know, I was lucky when I was a kid golfer. I started winning the first two tournaments I played in when I was 13, I won. And I still have the silver cup from the first one. And you know, you get a taste of that and you want more. And you develop a will to win. And I felt David and I know you did. I know you too well. In business, it's the same thing. When you have the momentum and you're doing something and you know, what you did with young brands and all this stuff in China and everywhere. And it was the same with me with M&A. You know, if I was involved in something, I wanted to win. I wanted to do the best I could do for my client and my firm. And you know, it just is a driving force. But I think it accumulates over the years. I don't think all of a sudden you press a button and snap on the lights. You know, there are a few people, Eric, that know more about it. Emerger is an acquisition than you do. Can you boil down what you think are the key success factors? Yeah. I think first of all, you have to try to know almost as much as the people you 're working with. Well, if you've done enough of it, you pick up a lot of the legal aspects, the legal choices involved with them. Financially, you have to really know accounting and you have to be able to evaluate a chief financial officer. And you have to be able to discern whether he's telling you what he should be telling you, whether it's correct or whether it's not. It's really incredibly important. But the great M&A guys have a gift. It's a little bit like I can make an analogy to Wayne Gretzky. You know, he knew where the puck was two or three moves ahead. And a really great M&A guy, he understands all the aspects and he can look ahead and he can see what the right decisions are based on the financial capabilities of each company and can see what the decision should be two or three moves ahead and he can counteract that if you can figure out how to do it. And that's not many guys can do that well. And that's what separates the really good ones from everybody else. I remember you tell me once that you said you'd rather work opposite someone that is highly skilled versus a weak adversary. That seems a bit counterintuitive. But why is that? For the reason I just said, if you can look ahead and figure out what the decision should be, you can figure out how to counteract that. If you work against somebody who doesn't have the skill to make those decisions on the other side, the model kind of splutters and it makes it harder. And so that's why I always wanted to be opposite Bruce Wasserstein or something like that because we both knew what we were thinking and we could figure out who was going to win and we could end up there. And it was professional. You know, you led in an industry that was tainted with some pretty bad actors who actually did some jail time for trading on inside information and other crops. How did this affect you? It didn't affect me at all. I've been both to approach me. He said he wanted to hire me. He said he'd pay me an incredible amount of money to set up a private equity business for him. "Merchant banking," he called it. And I told him on a spot. I said, "I have no interest. I just took a peek at him and talked to him and said it wasn't for me." And so those guys didn't affect me. You remember the first thing I said about trying to succeed in a Marie Corps with these troops was flawless integrity. And you know, you don't cheat and you know this, David, and you're playing golf . Golf is the most honest sport under the sun where the guys are playing for a z illion dollars now. He's very little cheetah. When somebody crosses the line, it comes down hard on him. So yeah, I didn't worry about that and never had a problem with the SEC or anybody else. You know, Eric, you're like a make it happen kind of person that I'm sure you had people telling you on deals that just couldn't be done, shouldn't be done, but you had a different feeling. How did you go about leading in those kind of situations? I had those situations. And I just went with my gut. If I figured there was a way to do it, we had one where we were defending Union Carbide from a milk and sponsored takeover. The Union Carbide was kind of a big commodity chemical company, but they had developed and they've had patented GladBags, STP, and Ever Ready batteries, which are all well known consumer names. I wanted to use those companies to raise value for them so that they could beat milk and zawfer. And the lawyers said, "Well, we couldn't do it, you know, and that we don't have the audits and the SEC will agree to it." And I didn't take no for an answer. And we ended up using them and we had a special dividend business that the shareholders could choose to either keep their shares or take this special dividend or take milk and zawfer. And 85% of them took special dividend. Eventually these companies were sold and the proceeds went to those shareholders and they made out really well. And I just never took no for an answer because logically they owned these companies and they had this choice and why couldn't it be done? And the SEC eventually said, "Okay." And there's another argument that you use, which I love and it's called the nickel argument, my nickel argument. Talk about that one. Well, there was a group at Morgan Stanley, very smart, 50 and 20 people that were developing ideas for clients. You know, they'd look at young brands and try to figure out ideas so there was a reason somebody could call young brands and go visit them and talk to them about buying this company or spinning something off. And most of them didn't create business directly, but they created dialogue. And the dialogue is what creates the business. So once in a while though they had a great idea. So they had one for a guy named Bob Sizzic who was running a company in Houston . The fellow with the idea called up the corporate development fellow at the company and the corporate development guy said, "Oh, we know that company." And there was McGraw Edison. He said, "We're not interested in that." So the fellow Bob Lusson was his name. He came and seen me and told me the story. And he said, "He said they're wrong. This company's different than they think it is. It's a great fit." So I called up Bob Sizzic to see you. And I had met him. I was acquainted with him. He wasn't a client of mine. And I told him what I just told you. My guy says that you're a little bit out of date on this company. And I said, "I'd really like to talk to you about it." And I said, "You know what? It's my nickel." I said, "Off-line, I'm a Houston. It won't cost you anything. You spend an hour with me. Where you do it?" And he laughed and he said, "Yeah, sure." So I went down there. And of course we ended up doing the deal. Because my guy was right and we showed him. And I did it again when AIG got in trouble. They appointed a director, Mickey Cohen, with his name, at the lawyer from Toronto, to sell off whatever he could sell off. And he needed a banker to do that. This is in '08 when the troubles were coming in severity. And I called him up. I didn't know him at all. And he said, "Oh, you're too late." He said, "I've got somebody in mind. I don't want you to come up all the way to Toronto for nothing." And I said, "Look, Mickey, it's my nickel." I said, "I want to come up and talk to you. And I want to tell you how I would handle this." And I said, "Don't worry about it." And he said, "Well, on that basis," he said, "I'd love to meet you." So I went up there and we talked. After a while he said, "Do you want to have lunch?" I said, "I was with another fellow. I can't ride on one of my partners." I said, "Sure." And so we went into cafeteria at the law firm sitting down on lunch. He said, "You're hired." And so we ended up doing a whole bunch of things for AIG. That's the my nickel theory. It sounds like that my nickel theory ended up in a lot of times, which is good. A lot of local currency came in. Yeah. That's a great common sense argument to break down a barrier and getting to somebody's door. Did you learn that from somebody else or was that just your idea? No, it's part of being aggressive. It's part of being aggressive. You got the self-image. I felt that if I went up and had a chance to talk to him, there was some chance that he would be interested. That's the self-image. You felt you're good enough to do it. The investment banking is a business where you're not sitting on your rear end. You're out there trying to do things. So to fly down to Houston or fly up to Durano, who cares? Getting back to how you make decisions. What was it that made you decide to sell your company and then buy it back? It was an accident. I actually, we were having a great run in the business and one of my key partners was a golfer. He said, "Let's go down to Australia and play golf for a week." Of course, I said, "Well, that's the industry I did." So we did. I had been to Australia and I knew some people down there. We spent a week in Melbourne playing those incredible courses in the Sand Belt. My partner, John Craven in London said, "You're down there. Why don't you come back through London and you ought to call on that west." They're really interested in investment banking and doing things. So I did. They hired me to try to help them buy DLJ, which was a pretty good-sized investment bank owned by the Equitable Insurance Company, which was owned by Axit, a big French insurance company. Anyway, a long story a little shorter. We couldn't get the deal done. The executives said, "DLJ didn't want to do it." That west said, "Well, we'd be interested in buying your business and having you build DLJ for us." We were trying to sell it. So I was thinking about it and I said, "For the right price, I know I could do that. I know we've got a great M&A business and they've got capital. We didn't have a capital." So we ended up selling it. We had a great run for three years. Then that west, the Perry Company, had a major problem in equity derivatives. We had nothing to do with it. It was completely independent of us. They decided to get out of investment banking because the problem was so big if they disclosed it, they were all going to get fired. We had a clause in our agreement with them that they couldn't sell us to anybody else so we could buy back our business. So we did. That's a great story. This has been so much fun, Eric. I want to have a little bit more with you here and do a lightning round of questions. Are you up for this? I'll try. All right. What three words best describe you? This is tough. Two words, endurance, risk taking, and interested in helping other people. If you could be one person for a day, who would it be and why? For a day, I would pick a golfer and I would pick Tiger Woods before he got injured. And now I would pick some of the like Justin Thomas. What's your biggest pet peeve? My biggest pet peeve is why this country ends up with political leaders like we end up with. What's something about you that few people would know? That I'm just a pussy cat at heart. I don't know if I believe that. And do you have any hidden talents? Well, not particularly. I think I did a good job writing this book. I would have to say that. I didn't. That's something obviously I had never done before. So I'm proud of that. But no, I think the talents are the ones you know, you know, playing mediocre golf and maybe being a decent businessman. Okay. All suitability, favorite book and why? Favorite book. Atlas Shrugged. Why? Because it's reality. It was written a long time ago and it depicts exactly where we are. In my opinion right now, you know, with our great country. So I thought you're going to say rents reward repeat. No, no, no, no. How about number of club championships? 27 or 28 including senior club championships, which I think are just as important as the other ones. So your wife Paula is also a multi club champion. Who wins when you play, Jim? Well, we're pretty even now. You know, as I've gotten older, it's gotten harder. Paula is sensational putter. And you know, the greatest golf quote ever was by Willie Park. He said, a man who can putt can win. Now she's a woman, but it applies to women and she's tough to be. You know, Eric, you've had so much success. Is there any particular recognition you're most proud of? You're the philanthropy. The veteran scholarship fund. We have 99 United States veterans right now at Booth, the University of Chicago Business School. And when you think about aspiring leaders, what would be your three best bits of advice you could give people? Oh, aspiring leaders. Well, it's flawless integrity. Be aggressive and have the will to win. Well, you certainly have all of that, Eric. And I, for one, really enjoyed your book and I enjoy your friendship. And I really appreciate you taking the time to sit down with me. Well, David, I get a lot out of being your friend because I think you're the most positive guy I've ever met. And I'm telling you, I think about it a lot and I wish I could be as positive as you. You've just got this infectious ability. And I'm telling you when we were playing in that tournament and we were four down with five to play and I'm thinking about well, see, it's five o'clock. I'll be home about six and I'm, what am I doing tonight? And you put your face right up here, you know, we're going to beat these yet. And I'm thinking and you mentioned and you know what? We did. And so we guess we, we as the operating word, we did it together. So if you're, if you're a question of, you know, what's, who's one guy I'd like to be for a day, I'm happy to be myself, but I would, I would like to be, you know, as positive and as optimistic and so forth as you are. And I'm not saying that to blow any smoke in your direction. I mean, it's, you're the best, Eric. And thank you so much. I appreciate it. Well, thank you. It's an honor for me to be on. Thank you for inviting me. You can't help but listen to these conversations without bringing it back to your own particular situations. And it reminded me that sometimes you have to take a risk by actually saying no . When I was running KFC for PepsiCo, Roger and Rico, the chairman of PepsiCo asked me to go be the CEO of Frito-Lay. But I actually told him no. Now I knew I was doing this at great risk because he wanted me to take that job , but I love the restaurant business. I love food. I love people. I love marketing. I wanted to stay in the restaurant business. Now what I didn't know is that he was planning on spinning off the restaurants and making it an independent public company. So by saying no to something that I didn't want to do, I was in the perfect place to end up running young brands. That was an unbelievable risk that I took that gave me a huge reward. And what's really exciting to me is I've been blessed in so many different ways . I can give back now. I can make the world a better place by helping you become the best leader that you can be. And I can do that only because I took that risk. Okay, that's enough about me. Let's go back to your big decision that we talked about at the beginning of this show. If there's one thing we've learned from Eric, it's that you've got to be willing to take risks. So let me ask you, are you ready to charge forward? I hope that today's episode has infused you with a dose of courage to make something big happen. Take some risks and then give generously to those who help you succeed. That's what great leadership is all about. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that great leaders are willing to take risks. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of How Leaders Lead, where every Thursday you get to listen in while I interview some of the very best leaders in the world. I make it a point to give you something simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader that you can be. I'll see you next week. Bye. now. now. now. now. now. now. now. now. now. 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