Thirty years ago today I met Al Rappaport for the first time. I had read his book, Creating Shareholder Value, a few years before and it was a professional epiphany. He has had a profound positive influence on me, professionally and personally
At the time we met I was a junior analyst at Nomura Research Institute America working with senior analysts covering capital goods and food, beverage, and tobacco. I had somehow persuaded management to purchase a copy of Alcar software (Al is "Al" of Alcar)
My big takeaways from Creating Shareholder Value: 1. Accounting figures can obscure economic value; 2. competitive strategy analysis and valuation should be joined at the hip; and 3. stock prices reflect expectations about future financial results.
Al influenced me as a teacher/mentor and later as a collaborator. As a teacher, he shared ways of thinking about the world and tools to implement the ideas that I immediately embraced and made central to my own work. He has also helped me be a better teacher
As a collaborator, he has been an amazing source of great ideas and is appropriately critical, relentlessly upbeat, responsive, and determined to get it right. It's hard to beat that combination
We co-authored Expectations Investing, which extends the ideas of Creating Shareholder Value to investors. The book came out in the fall of 2001, about the worst timing imaginable for an investing book - after a national tragedy and in the middle of a 3-year bear market
Our revised and updated version will be out this fall - 20 years later. It was a lot of fun working with Al to assess what had and hadn't changed since the original version came out @ColumbiaBizPub amazon.com
He has been a powerful role model: an active learner and reader, a critical thinker, intellectually curious, hard working, optimistic, and physically active.
Thirty years ago I had no idea what was in store - but it's been a great journey so far
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