Being from the Boston area, I have long followed and been interested in the career of Sumner Redstone. This autobiography greatly added to my knowledge of the man by describing the thought processes behind the many successful innovations he has helped pioneer. The main drawback of the book is that you will find his personality unappealing at times. He savages those who do not meet his exceptionally high standards.If you do not know who Mr. Redstone is, let me fill you in a little. He is a self-made multibillionaire, who is the chairman and controlling shareholder of Viacom. This is the company that brings you the CBS television network, Paramount motion pictures, and many popular cable networks like MTV and Showtime. Mr. Redstone may well be the brightest owner of a major company in the world. He is certainly one of the best educated. But beyond that, he is undoubtedly one of the most competitive. The combination gives him the impact of a Mack truck when he decides to move.
The book begins with the most famous story about Mr. Redstone, how he survived almost being burned to death in a fire in Boston's Copley Plaza at age 55. You will come away impressed with his determination from reading about this experience. If you are like me, you will come away even more impressed that this experience had little psychological impact on him. It was just one more challenge.
The story then picks up with the horrible problems he had in turning around Blockbuster Video after purchasing it during Viacom's acquisition of Paramount. To succeed required recruiting two different top officers of the company (the first one was not successful) and renegotiating the fundamental way that motion picture studios were compensated for video rentals (substituting a revenue sharing arrangement for purchases of video tapes).
Mr. Redstone always wins in business. It's that simple. In fact, in this autobiography, he can recount few occasions when he did not in any aspect of his life. He bitterly resents the injustices present from those few instances. One was when a professor of law gave him a D in constitutional law at Harvard Law school (when he had taken the course earlier at another law school, he had received an A+). While an appellate lawyer for the federal government, he won 18 appeals in a row.
"I am hands on . . . but I also invite confrontation." Mr. Redstone acts as though each penny involved is potentially his own, and that the principle at stake is a life-and-death one. This gives his focus an intensity that no one I have ever met could match. His descriptions of bidding contests to buy businesses and efforts to win legal cases will provide fruitful examples of best practices for generations to come. If you want to win in business or law, think like Mr. Redstone. And get the best talent to help you . . . particularly if you are not a towering genius like Mr. Redstone.
The title of the book is somewhat misleading. Mr. Redstone is equally devoted to being a committed person who acts with courage and good character. In other words, he wants to win for the right reasons and in the right way. It's the principle that counts. For example, he gave the money he won suing the hotel where he nearly died to the burn unit of the hospital that treated him. He was originally attracted to law because it was supposed to be about justice. He found that practicing law, however, was just a business rather than a way to do justice. Almost all of his major business victories were aided at least in part by legal actions that he masterminded.
On the other hand, most people would not find the way he spends his time to be the ideal life. You'll have to decide for yourself how a single-minded pursuit of winning should be balanced by other interests and considerations.
I do encourage you to be more understanding and accepting of lesser mortals than Mr. Redstone is in this book. There is, after all, only one Sumner Redstone.
