We just receive a limited edition of Dan Peña hardcover book Building Your Own Guthrie. It’s 325 pages with gold leaf trim at the edge of the pages. On a bookshelf it looks more like a holy book than a business book. It looks to us as if Dan has a self published it and is contemplating a mass-market book to follow.

Without a doubt, Dan has created more controversy than any other CEO Club speaker; some members say he is a devil incarnate, and others say he is the best business coach on planet.

Dozens of CEO Club members, after hearing his talk at a CEO Club meeting, spent a fortune to attend his one-week “ Quantum Leap” seminar.

He holds it in Scotland at his 50, 000-square foot Guthrie Castle. Everyone agrees it’s a spectacular property.

We excerpted part of a book on page 4; however, we caution you that half the CEOs hate him and the other half love him. What percentage of the following Peñaism are true?

You be the judge, but they will get you thinking, and Dan is an expert at shuffling your card deck.

Building Your Own Guthrie

The world’s greatest teachers are able to boil down pages of text and hours of oratory into a pithy phrase or quick parable. Over the years I’ve used the quotes of others and a few nuggets of my own wisdom to better clarify Quanturn Leap concepts. My protégés have come to call them “Peñaisms.”

1. Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.

2. Don’t waste time on things you can’t change.

3. When you deal with the opinionated or egotistical, always give credit where it isn’t due.

4. Business deals start and end with people—the interaction of flesh and blood, bone and sinew, heart and mind, emotion and soul.

5. Dream big. . .think big.. be big.

6. Dream big—and dare to fail’

7. The more you investigate, the less you have to invest.

8. Never, ever second-guess yourself.

9. Cash only prolongs death. It doesn’t prevent it.

10. I’ve never seen a “part-time” super-successful, high-performance per- son.

11.  A deal has to sound good before it is good.

12. During Quantum Growth, any prob1cm you solve will be replaced immediately by a larger, more complicated problem.

13. Every party to every negotiation has a comfort zone. The effective negotiator is the one who can define the boundaries of the other party’s corn- fort zone, then place the deal inside the boundary of that zone nearest his own interests.

14. Stick to your knitting. To maximize the return on invested capital, deploy your assets, resources, and capabilities in those areas wherein lie your expertise and experience.

15. Man plans; God laughs.

16. You won’t always have all the answers. Take seriously the advice of only those you greatly respect.

17. The consequence of a misguided decision is de minimis in the cosmos of eternity.

18. Always shoot for the moon. Even if you don’t hit it, you’ll at least get
80%.

19. Always, always, always pay your- self—and your employees—first’ through all economic cycles.

20. Plan for success. With no backup plans, no ripcords, no fail- safes—or you will fail.

21. Management performance sins will always be for- given during pen- ods of rapidly in- creasing revenues.

22. Learn to play bad golf well.

23. Become more disciplined. The pain of discipline hurts less than the pain of regret.

24. Hunger makes beasts of men, and demons of beasts.

25. Everybody is worried about life after death. I worry about life before death.

26. The business world is divided into people with great ideas and people who take action on those ideas.

27. If you want things to change, first you have to change.

28. A man who dwells on his past robs his future.

29. There’s a big difference between playing to win and playing to not lose.

30. The difference between a failure and a high-performance individual is how each deals with fear. We are all afraid. A high-performance person uses fear to galvanize actions.

31. Ignorance is a steep hill with jagged rocks at the bottom.

32. The only difference between a chAmp and a chUmp is U.”

33. To succeed in business you must do more than take a step in the right direction. You had to take a Quantum Leap.

34. A good plan executed today is better than a great plan executed next week.

35. In order to really succeed in business, you must have outside advisors. These must be trusted advisors, professionals at your accounting and law firms with whom you have a very special relationship. These advisors be- come your moles within their own or- ganization, more loyal to you than their employer… motivated, aggressive, ambitious, and bright—but not as bright as they thinks.

37. The fulfillment of your dream is directly proportional t your desire to succeed – . and how much you’re willing to sacrifice. If you are not prepared to die, then you are not prepared to live. .

38. When you get rid of someone, never give them a “hook’ with which to get back in. Always make a clean definable and irrevocable break.

39. Quantum Leap success means fishing with nets, not just with lines.

40. To achieve “hyper-growth “avert avoidable mistakes and let your successes run their course. Do more of what you’re doing right—and less of what you’re doing wrong.

41. You always need a reason to overlook the obvious.

42. Never underestimate how wrong you can be. Even the most careful planning can be overtaken by external events and circumstances.

43. Always maintain your personal relationships on the same plane upon which they were formed. True friends will rejoice in your professional successes. Allow them to enjoy them with you. Never reassess their personal and professional lives in terms of your own.

44. Your most valuable natural asset is your own gut instinct. Don’t be afraid of it. Your instinct has more power than all of the conventional wisdom in the world.

45.8usiness.opportunities abounds—but formidable barriers exist. And the biggest barrier is psychological. It Is you.

46. Your greatest idea, born out of revolutionary thinking and passion, will die of indifference, apathy, and the satiation of low expectations.

47. Conventional wisdom is almost always wrong.

48. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just because something has never been done doesn’t mean It can’t be done. The fact that you have never seen or heard something is not proof it doesn’t exist.

49. Every worthy dream has a “pay-price-to-action.”That means you have to give up something to get something. You can’t have it all.

50. The old Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler” has a message for CEO’s. “You’ve got to know when to hold’em, and know when to flod’em.” As a CEO you’ll get more advice from your staff than you know what to do with. But it’s up to you to know when to “hold’em and when to “fold’em.” Listen to your gut. Make your decision and move on.

51. I never met a super-successful, high-performance per- son who wasn’t enthusiastic.

52. The best way to predict the future is to create it your- sea.

53. A deal is either hot—or it’s not.

54. You don’t have to know how you’re going to get there. But you do need to know where you want to go.

55. If you have no destination, wherever you end up will be acceptable.

56. It costs nothing to aim high—but if you aim at nothing, you’ll hit anything. -.

57. FEAR . . . is False Expectations Appearing Real.

58. Patience Is just an excuse for procrastination.

59. “Thinking it over” is for people who can’t take action.

60. Quantum Growth eliminates dear sailing. So you’d better learn to navigate troubled waters.

61. From chaos comes order. In chaos is opportunity.

62. Whoever said money can’t buy you happiness doesn’t know where to shop. (A “Linda Peñaism”)

63. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

64. More of the same usually just gives you more of the same.

85. Structure follows strategy. If you base your strategy on your existing structure, you limit your potential to what you’ve already done.

86. Watch your business peaks and your troughs. As long as your lows are higher than before, your Quantum Leap Action Plan is working.

87. A guarantor a fool with a pen.

88. No matter how tempt- g, never accept shot-term solutions to long-term problems.

89. Too many companies try to patch when they should amputate. “Let’s reorganize and save this mess” is a clarion call to disaster. Cut your losses, kick the cuttings out of your way, and move on.

90. If you want to travel above and beyond the herd, don’t try to be bet- ter. Try to be different. Or better yet, be first!

91. Your doubts are not the product of accurate thinking, but of habitual thinking.

92. Find your passion and wrap your career around it.

93. Live your life on purpose!

94. You’ll be motivated by inspiration… or desperation. It’s your choice.

95. People with low self-esteem pro- ted themselves by not taking risks. High self-esteem gives you the power of confidence to take chances.

96. Give yourself permission to make mistakes. It’s called learning.

97. The only things in this life that you’ll really regret are the risks—and adventures—you didn’t take.

98. “Hell” can be the video of your life if you had taken the actions to become super-successful.

99. Nothing you’ll ever do in business is a matter of life or death. In the cosmos of time, any decision you make is
a fart in the wind.

100. You cannot make a Quantum Leap if you don’t share the wealth with your Dream Team and employees—be it cash, equity, options, or warrants that are tangible rewards for performance and loyalty.

101. Never, ever share doubts with anyone.

102. Being all you can be is possible for anyone, but…

103. Super success is not for every- one. Period.

104. Fear of failure is caused by lack of self-esteem and confidence. Dealing with fear is the key to super success.

105. Don’t take high-performance ad- vice from your peers, family or friends unless they are high-performance people themselves.

106. You cannot grow exponentially by yourself. You need the support of others

107. Don’t set time limits for achieving goals. They should transcend time.

108. Set goals you cannot achieve in your lifetime.

109. Business should not run smoothly while you’re making your Quantum Leap. Chaos is normal. The business on quiet waters is still in the harbor.

110. Life is what happens while you’re making plans.

111. The road to success is always under construction.

112. Get ruthless about trying some- thing different.

113. Motivation is your “fire in the out.” But unless it’s fueled it goes.

114. I have no more mountains left to climb—but me!

Five Tips for Dealing with Legal Issues

While CEOS love to tell lawyer jokes and blame all their problems on these officers of the court that paints only a partial picture. Of all the outside resources that CEOS mangage, the one managed least effectively is the legal function. In practice, CEOS do well with bankers, accountants, shareholders, employees and suppliers, but too high a percentage fail to appreciate the value of top-flight legal services.

Here are a handful of useful legal tips that will make your CEO job just so much easier.

1. Dan Peña (see article on Page 4) says CEOs’ biggest legal problem is that they are cheap. Consequently, they hire cheap lawyers. He asks, “If you were going for brain surgery, would you ask for a discount from the surgeon?” You can’t pay enough for good legal counsel, according to Dan.

2. Peiia also overpowers the normally bland deposition. Not only does he have a court stenographer present, he hires a video crew to videotape the deposition. Besides the obvious intimidation effect, a careful editing of videotapes can be devastating at trial. Another smart idea.

3. Do you know what it means to conflict out the usual suspects? That’s lawyer talk for limiting your opponents’ access to the top lawyers. The ruse is that if you visit a law firm and tell your story, you just conflicted out all the lawyers in that law firm. In issues of narrow scope, it could be possible to tie up all the good guys before your opponent knows what is happening. Too few of us ever take advantage of this rule. You don’t have to pay the lawyers; you just have to tell your story.

4. Do you know the best time to serve or initiate a lawsuit? That answer varies by area of the country, but you’d be shocked to discover the percentage of lawsuits filed the day before Ramadan, Christmas, New Year’s, and Yom Kippur. This limits opponent access to talent as the lawyers are on vacation. The best month to file a lawsuit is August.

5. Many lawsuits require the use of an outside professional investigation (P.I) service. This tip comes from David Zeldin, a P.I. in NY. Never hire the P.I. directly, as you could be forced to disclose all you’ve learned. If your lawyers hire the P.I., the work considered part of the lawyer’s work product and is therefore, not subject to full disclosure. The same, interestingly enough, does not apply to the work product of accountants.

CEO Observation

As you’ll see, these little tips are not widely known but they are example of what leads to frustrations in dealing with attorneys, and that leads to lawyers’ jokes; which are belly laughers. The mature CEO soon learns to be smarter at managing the legal function.

However, lawyers’ jokes are still a mild seductive when the other side has you “out-layered.” The problem is not that there are too many lawyers – rather, there are not enough good lawyers.

CLUB CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICERS
June 1998
Volume 4 – Issue 6

Brought up in a tough Hispanic ghetto of East Los Angeles, he was arrested five times, jailed in his teens and looked to be heading nowhere fast.

Now he is now a multi-millionaire, living in an 80-room I 5th-century castle near Forfar, and he believes anyone who follows his theories can reap similar rewards.

His success has certainly been spectacular.

In 1982, with $820 in his pocket, he founded oil firm Great Western Resources. Eight years later it was worth $445million on flotation.

He has since had major successes with other firms, and he says his Quantum Leap Advantage method is the key.

“I developed this methodology here in Great Britain in the early 1980s, specifically in Scotland, because I have lived here since 1984.

“It is not something I developed in the US, couldn’t sell, then came to Scotland.

“I developed it here, went down to the City, took their money and came back to try to help, coach, teach, cajole or drag as many Scottish entrepreneurs as I can across the goal-line.”

A week of advice at his Guthrie Castle home usually costs £10,000 hut last week he told 700 Aberdeen entrepreneurs the secret of his success for free.

Mr. Pena, 51, was guest speaker at the first meeting of the Aberdeen Entrepreneurs’ Club at the Aberdeen Stakis, an event co-sponsored by Grampian Enterprise on the suggestion of one of his partners based in Peterhead.

“I am very keen to help Scottish entrepreneurs because I live here and Scotland has been good to mc. especially Angus county,” he said, adding that his daughter was born in nearby Dundee.

Mr Pena left Los Angeles afler he flunked out of college and joined the army. He quiddy rose through the ranks, becoming and Intelligence and Security Officer at NATO headquarters in the late 1960s.

He then took a degree in business administration at California State University, graduating in 1971. Heembarkedonacareer on Wall Street but left the financial hub in the late l970s to set up his own energy and natural resources business.

“I was dead broke, fired, made redundarn and I had $820. I started a company on Friday, July 13, 1982, and eight years later it was worth $4-5milIion.

“That was in a declining oil market. We did it through acquisitions. When our assets were declining in value, we went through a series of 20-plus acquisitions.

“I have done that not just once. I have been consolidating fragmented industries for 20 years.” He said he retired five years ago but is still chairman of several successful firms.

“I am in the construction and leisure businesses. At this stage in my life I have got to have fun otherwise I don’t want to do it,”

Mr Pens said there was no great mystery in making a business a winner, adding that his Quantum theory was mainly a distillate of the vital ingredients.

“They are precepts that people like Andrew Carnegie have been using for more than 100 years. It’s about raising one’s expectations.

“Most of the time our business success is more or less in line with what we expect it to be. If expectations are high, like Richard Bransori’s, results will be high. A myth we dispel is that geometric growth is not sustainable, you tell Bill Gates that!

“When you start your business and you go from zero to £50,000 in one year, you have grown geometrically.

“Then something happens — commonsensc dictates you can’t grow at 100% a year so you sit back on your assets and you become satiated.

“Bill Gates and other men and women that have grown tremendously successful companies didn’t adhere to that. They believed they could sustain growth that was more than just arithmetic.” He said has method also focused on how to get funding.

“The myth is that it is difficult to get money out of financial institutions. Most entrepreneurs become uncomfortable, but we get them comfortable about it.

“I’m in a position where the banks will come to me here at Guthrie. We sit in the library and look at the 18th bole of my own 18-hole golf course.

“A senior lender came a few months ago and told me that he was £778million under-loaned. Right now they have never been flush with more cash.”

Despite his ease in dealing with high-powered executives and multi-million cash sums. Mr Pena says he can also relate to the struggling business novice.

“I made my money in the same trench warfare they are fighting every day.

“I didn’t make it by writing a best-selling book, I didn’t make it by selling tapes and I didn’t make it by putting bums on seminar seats.

“I understand what it is to miss a payroll, to be months behind in your mortgage payrnent . to almost have your car taken away because you miss a payment. I can relate to all that because it happened to me. I am a hands-on business coach. I didn’t read 700 books like one famous guru, I have made 700 transactions.”

He said many people had the potential to become a big business success. “All my 40 business partners have come out of seminar audiences. All of them.

“Instead of opening up an office for merchant banking in London or New York, I use seminars as a conduit for business transactions for me to look at. It is a lot more fun. I don’t have to deal with the City.

“I just get to deal with the entrepreneurs. We cut all the advisers out and I am able to help them directly.

“Sometimes that direct intervention is money, sometime it is just showing them how to get the money. The fact that you had credentials, or didn’t have credentials, doesn’t matter.

Mr. Pens sees no bounds to his own success and predicts a bright future for his current batch of projects.

These include Success and Development International, which is due for flotation in the US in March of April. It is currently the 152nd fastest-growing firm in the Inc 500 list published annually in the US.

Press and Journal
February 5, 1997
David Gault

 Pena graduated from Reseda High School in 1963. He attended CSUN as a niath and engineering student until he went into the army in 1966.

While serving as a security officer for NATO forces in Europe, Pena was responsible for “hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets. That coupled with the fact that it was the first time that I was academically and physically stretched, I saw that I could accomplish more than people thought,” he said.

He returned to CSUN in 1969 and changed his major to business management. “I got into an accelerated program, taking as many as 28 units a semester and 15 units in summer school.” He also took classes at UCLA and held a part-time job. “You have to force yourself to be organized,” Pena said. 

After graduation in January 1971 he took a job with a real estate investment company. In less than a year he became sales manager, earning a six-figure income. When the company folded, he was shocked. “My first taste of success had exploded in my face. Now I needed success more than ever,” he said.

Pena became a stockbroker and a financial planner. i-fe was vice president of Bear Stearns & Co., where he advised major U.S. and international clients. He then became chairman of J.P.K. Industries Inc., a vertically integrated energy company.

His most exciting professional accomplishment was founding his present company, Great Western Resources lnc.,in 1982 with $840. The energy company is now worth $450-$500 million. Great Western operates in 22 states and the Gulf of Mexico and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange.

His wife, Linda Sewall Pena, a CSUN alumna, says that his success is no surprise to her. “When I met him, I knew that he would definitely make his mark. I have always been his greatest supporter. There was a major business tragedy in our life, but I never thought that maybe we had better take a safer road,” she said.

Pena looks at Great Western not as a job or a career, but as a “way of life. Every conscious moment of the day is devoted to Great Western Resources, and probably when I sleep, too,” he said.

Being in the energy business, Pena voices concern over our nations limited natural resources. “I think this nation has to formulate an energy policy. We import over 46 percent of the oil we use, which is one percent worse than when we had the first oil embargo in 1973. Since 1980, 5,000 oil and gas corn-flies have gone out of business. The public is driving bigger cars again and people seem to have forgotten the long gas lines.

“Saudi Arabia has 200-300 years of oil left at current production rates. We have eight years of energy supply in this country. We have 400 years of coal reserves and coal is not popular unless it is low-sulpher. A student in Econ 101 can figure it out.”

Major international oil companies are “cutting back their oil exploration and production budgets in the U.S. anywhere from 50-85 percent and going foreign. The oil companies are going where they can get more bangs for their buck and the (foreign) governments help them.” As the major companies pull out of the United States, it creates a vacuum for independents to filI,”Pena said. “The market they’re leaving here is plenty big for Great Western to go from a $500 million company to a $5 billion company.”

Pena advises current students “to stretch themselves, academically, as much as they can. Instead of taking an elective that you know you’re going to get an A in, take physics. Take the hardest way through instead of the easiest way. See what you are made of,” he added.

“The only difference between going to Harvard or Princeton and going to CSUN,” he said, “is that the people from those other institutionsarcautomatically perceived to be very bright. When YOU go to a school where you have to explain the name, you are not perceived as very bright, even if you come in with a 4.0. Within the first year everything evens out, assuming that the kid who went to CSUN stretched himself or herself.

“As I told President Cleary, after almost 20 years, each year that goes by, I appreciate the opportunity that I had here and the education that I got here, more than I did when I first graduated,” rena said. “You learn to value what you have learned.”