These insights from billionaire Michael Bloomberg will help you develop your business IQ

“-it’s the doers the lean and hungry ones, those with ambition in their eyes and fire in their bellies and no notions of social caste, who go the furthest and achieve the most.” - Bloomberg

May 31, 2024

These insights from billionaire Michael Bloomberg will help you develop your business IQ!

Michael Bloomberg is the founder and CEO of Bloomberg, a media, software and data company that’s a staple in the finance world. Michael has been one of the most impactful and influential technologists and media moguls of the last 30 years.

Bloomberg, the company he built, generates $10 billion dollars in revenue with 325000 customers. Bloomberg is the world’s best aggregator, analyzer and dissipater of the world’s most important information… financial information.

Bloomberg’s main product is a terminal (that costs $27000 annually per user!) that enables institutions to access, analyse and transform the financial data of the world, so that investors can better invest their time and capital. Every other road it has built in media through papers, books, TV and so on leads to Rome… the terminal.

Bloomberg is one of the most unique giant companies in the world for three main reasons. Firstly, it’s private (and it has never been acquired). Secondly, it’s still run by Michael Bloomberg (He’s 82!). Thirdly, most of its innovative products in media, data and software have been built from within.

Bloomberg is a company of builders… which begs the question, who is the builder behind it?

Michael Bloomberg was a self-described mediocre student who studied engineering first at John Hopkins University, then business administration at Harvard. Michael said much later that street smarts and common sense were the best predictors of career success.

In his autobiography, “Bloomberg by Bloomberg”, he wrote, “-it’s the doers, the lean and hungry ones, those with ambition in their eyes and fire in their bellies and no notions of social caste, who go the furthest and achieve the most.”

Michael Bloomberg is a “doer” and this video is about how we can be better “doers” too.

Part 1: Building Yourself

Don’t be afraid to get your hands ‘dirty’

After he graduated, Michael began working at Salomon Brothers & Hutzler, an investment firm. At the time, sales was seen by graduates of his calibre as undignified.

Research analysis and investment banking were much more prestigious. That didn’t matter to Michael, he’d been given a good opportunity and he would do whatever he had to do to excel at it.

Just show up

Michael believed that “80% of life is just showing up”. You don’t choose most of the cards life gives you. You don’t choose your genetic intelligence level or the economic and social conditions that you’re born into.

What you do choose, is how hard you work. The harder you work, the better chances you have at success.

Don’t let planning get in the way of doing
The hard thing about hard things is there is no formula to doing hard things. Over-planning is a waste of time. Life is too unpredictable to align itself with our plans.
The best way to move forward is to focus on gathering stepping stones by constantly enhancing our skills, working as hard as possible and planning ahead a few steps at a time, then, doing.
Often times, even these steps will be wrong, so learn from your mistakes and adjust the plan. Meaningful change is evolutionary, not revolutionary… small incremental steps lead to leaps in progress.
Sometimes, what you succeed in wasn’t always what you set out to do… don’t close the door on those opportunities.
Patience and consistency are the only ways anyone gets to their destination
Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who was the father of stoicism, preached that the key to happiness is focusing on what you can control… your actions and your attitude. Leave the outcomes, the things you cannot control, to the world.
Michael was passed over as his less effective colleagues were promoted. So what did he do? Sit down and feel sorry for himself? No! The late, great Charlie Munger said that self-pity is the worst thing you can ever have for yourself and the best way to get the things you want is to deserve them.
So Michael worked harder and became even better at his job… eventually, they had no choice but to promote him.
Find mountains that are worth climbing and climb them
Success will always be tied to uncertainty and risk. To get a chance at success, we must risk failure. Denzel Washington once said, “If you don’t fail, you’re not even trying.”.
What is life without challenge… without mountains to climb, terrains to explore and territories to conquer? A life without challenge sounds pretty boring. Pressure makes diamonds out of coal.
Find an affordable and practical vision that fills a customer need
Resources are scarce, that’s why having the ability to allocate them well gives you an advantage. Your vision as an entrepreneur needs to fill a customer need while being affordable and practical.
Michael chose to start Bloomberg because he thought about things like: what skills he had built up, up to that point; what he could do better than anyone else; how much capital he could get access to; how much he could afford to risk; what problems he thought were interesting to solve and what contacts did he already have?
Bloomberg was the next evolutionary step on a revolutionary journey. When he had figured out the answers to all those questions, he just went for it without overthinking the details. The long-term prospects of the project and its potential were things to think about down the road.
Michael’s evolutionary approach, according to him, was the reason he stayed away from banks and venture capitalists as they would have expected definite plans and that would have killed what was unique about the idea before he even had a chance to discover what it was.
Trust your creativity and move, that’s how you progress.
Once you know the way, put everything you have into building
Curiosity and the ability to learn and think are the most important attributes an entrepreneur can have. Without them, you will never have the passion, grit or conviction to see and act on the really big opportunities… and those are the opportunities in unexpected places.
The next most important skill is communication. For you to realize your vision, you must have the ability to articulate it in a way that rallies partners, funders, talent or customers in a way that makes them enthusiastic about the future you envision.
Michael Bloomberg, despite being non-technical ( he can’t code for example), understands the technology within and outside his company to an astonishing degree. No one can know everything, but if there was someone who did… It may be Michael.
That has been the basis by which he has built and grown Bloomberg. Along with his care for his team, who he identified, included, convinced and inspired to follow his vision. Bloomberg believes that an effective leader takes all the blame but shares all the praise.

Part 2: Building Successful Businesses

Michael Bloomberg deliberately built a unique product that was, at the time, one of a kind. He created an entirely new standard for work in investment. It was so ambitious that any potential backers would think he was insane but he did it the same way he did everything else… by putting the horse before the cart.

This meant he didn’t think about accounting, shipping or human relations in the beginning. He focused on two things: Building the product and selling. As Bloomberg is a company of builders, it’s unsurprising that the product comes first. But why do they simultaneously sell from the beginning?

It enables them to get feedback as they build and that enables customers to feel as if they are part of the product’s evolution. Michael says, “This strategy may not be without risks, but I’ve always thought it ridiculous to make wedding arrangements before agreeing to the marriage.”

This part of the video is about how Michael Bloomberg approaches product development.

Make something unique and useful to be differentiated
The entire basis for why Bloomberg, which sells electronic information, thrives while most other information product companies selling content fail, is the question of unique appeal and utility of the product.
One of the basic laws of economics is supply and demand… if what you offer has a lot of supply and low demand then your price goes down. If your product is unique and in limited supply, with high demand, then your price increases.
Utility also plays a major role in value… how useful is your product to your target market as compared to alternatives? If there isn’t significantly more utility, the market will look for alternatives.
Uniqueness and utility are the basis of a differentiated product.
Buy the product, not the promise
Outsourced product development doesn’t work 99% of the time. That’s because of incentives. The outside developers’ incentive is to deliver within a certain timeframe, your incentive is to get something that works perfectly.
The risk of product development has to be taken by the company that will benefit the most if it works and suffer most if it does not. Early on, Bloomberg did this with their first customer- Merrill Lynch.
Merrill only had to pay if the product worked and if Bloomberg could deliver it much earlier than they could if they made it for themselves. That’s how you earn a customer’s trust, by delivering a product that’s worth paying for.
Don’t think about, “The way it’s done”… think about the way it ought to be
Bloomberg reinvented the rules in order to succeed. Many industries have unspoken rules that have nothing to do with performance, the law or the most important party… the customer.
Bloomberg did this when they got into news, an already competitive industry with established players. They created a flywheel where each news story they generated would show the capabilities of their terminal. Each story would be better because of the terminal’s information, they would rent more terminals and get more revenue which they would then use to grow their business.
Bloomberg even automated certain news generation features like market updates to make a cheaper way to give timely information to their audience, which was something completely new in the news industry.
Michael saw technology as a way to remove the boring parts of work so that people could engage in more creative and fulfilling work. Bloomberg was also different because they invested in every media format from radio to newspapers and TV, so that wherever their customers were… Bloomberg was right there with them.
Understand what has to change with the product, to keep fulfilling what doesn’t change… the need
Bloomberg fulfils an eternal need… the need for information, it just does it better than anyone. Michael understood that their product is content and that would stand the test of time.
Distribution channels from TV to radio to the internet would change… so if they maintained their focus on creating the most unique and useful content for their customers, they would evolve.
The key would be to constantly find ways to improve things in a way that would delight their customers.
Products need champions
A product needs a leader… a visionary who designs the future and convinces the world to come along. Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
The problem and need are the customer’s, creating the solution is your job as the entrepreneur. Michael believes that successful governments and companies aren’t run by suggestions. They succeed by following a leader with a vision.

Conclusion

Michael Bloomberg is a true “doer”, a shining example of someone who has lived their life to try and change the world for the better. We should all aspire to be better doers, who consistently show up and diligently work to make the world a better place. Transforming the world in any meaningful way, comes first with transforming yourself then scaling your personal transformation to transform the lives of others. Our mission is to elevate the culture of enterprise in Africa because we believe in the ability of people like you to be impactful doers. Hopefully we can help you become a little better, and you can make the world a lot better, regardless of what you do. I wish you all the best as you do that.

Until next time,

-Max

Sources

“Bloomberg” by Michael Bloomberg

What do you think about this idea? Do you agree or disagree with this perspective? Let me know in the comments!

The Impactful Capitalists

Discussion about this post