Twenty-Two Questions For R.J. Kirk
Saddle up for some secrets of this self-made billionaire.
Net Worth: $1.55 billion
Age: 55
Source of Wealth: Pharmaceuticals
What's the biggest business blunder you've ever made, and what did you learn from it?
I have on a couple of occasions permitted continued investment in a small company after the time that I had become convinced that the investment was unlikely to provide a return. At the time, I thought that perhaps I should give the younger members of my investment team, avid supporters of the little companies, the opportunity to "prove me wrong." This qualifies as a blunder because (1) there is absolutely no satisfaction in being proved correct while participating in the destruction of value, (2) if my organization must produce value by proving me wrong, I probably should leave and (3) there are more than a sufficient number of good opportunities concerning which our team is in full agreement, and focusing on these investments always will be the right idea. The lessons (unfortunately, these are lessons that I have had to learn more than once) is that investment (of time, money or any resource) should never be governed by any sense of inertia, and if you are on a team you should play like a team.
What's the one thing every first-time entrepreneur should know?
That the business world is full of "received wisdom," i.e., that the opinions of various business experts are often informed by untested propositions that eventually will be shown to be wrong. (Needless to say, this is per force true of most of the opinions I am passing along here.) The entrepreneur should be prepared to draw on many types of expertise but always with a view to building his case "from the bottom up," always bearing in mind the old saw: "Nobody knows nothing." Since no one else really knows, maybe you have a chance to figure it out.
What's the last book or article you read that you'd recommend to other entrepreneurs?
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (2004).
What one job should every person have to do at least once in their life?
Sell. Ideally, the experience would be on a sales floor and in a job working on pure commission, in competition with others who have that same job.
How do you know when to keep fighting or to cut bait?
One may only know when the final result is known. If the question is meant to ask how one decides in advance whether to persevere against challenge, the fundamental answer is that one must ask himself whether the application of effort can produce a good outcome. We often may observe people persevering in the hope that the world will somehow change to an environment that is more promising for this particular work, e.g., that the investment climate will improve, that the value of some type of thing, whether real estate or securities, will rise generally. To such people (and we all have been in this group at one time or another), I like to point out that if you are able to make such macroeconomic wagers, you should simply play an appropriate index that is reflective of your view and skip all the hard work. One should therefore concentrate his work into areas in which he is convinced that his efforts will make the difference between success and failure.
Will/should the U.S. have universal health care?
Yes, it will; no, it should not--no more than it should offer universal food, universal housing, universal transportation or any other communistic provisioning. The history of private enterprise and state enterprise convincingly demonstrates the folly of such state-run initiatives. I certainly understand why politicians want to do it, however, and that is why I believe it will occur.
What will be the new retirement age for 2009 grads?
I think that retirement on account of age alone will disappear as a convention.
Finish this sentence: The United States' role as the leader of the free world depends upon ...
Respect for individual liberty, private property and the rule of law.
Should the government have a say on executive compensation?
No. I do not understand the suggestion that society can be made better by providing less incentive to competitive individuals in private enterprise. I can easily understand, however, that American industry can be forced to become as mediocre as our government is by instilling within it the same sort of norms that have enforced mediocrity there.
Gold: Hoard it, trade it or avoid it?
I have no view on this topic.
You have $100 million to spend in real estate, what do you buy and where?
I would buy out of the obligation to do such a thing.
Are we in a sucker’s rally?
Answering this requires a macroeconomic forecast that has at least a 50% chance of being wrong.
You wake up dead broke tomorrow--what do you do?
The same thing that I did today and that I shall do tomorrow in any case.
What keeps you awake at night?
I sleep well, but I have plenty of anxiety about succeeding in the things we have undertaken.
What’s the biggest threat to your industry?
Increasing regulatory requirements and the steadily weakening intellectual property regime cause me to wonder whether my countrymen really want the remaining unmet human health needs addressed.
By the time a trend appears in the mainstream press, is it too late for investors to capitalize on it?
Far from it, but the best bet usually would be to go contra the reported trend. The more nonsense I have heard about supposedly "green" energy alternatives (that cost five times as much as hydrocarbon based fuels), for example, the more I have realized what a great investment oil and gas infrastructure must be.
What 21st-century invention (discovered or not) has the greatest potential to change our lives?
It is far too early in the century to call that, but, based on what I believe today, one area that is likely to give rise to a great number of innovations is what I am calling the Second Age of Biotech. For its first 30 years, biotech focused on the transcribed portion of the genome (genes) because of the obvious utility of their expression by-products (proteins). Increasingly, however, we are going to see biotech focus on the other, more interesting parts of the genome, which relate principally to its regulatory motifs. As our understanding of these essential logic controllers becomes more comprehensive (we are only scratching the surface today), we should be able to introduce an increasing amount of conditionality and "tightness of activity" to our customized production cells and to human therapeutics, thus spawning revolutionary changes in materials science, agriculture and health care.
Who helped you the most in getting you to where you are today?
My father, Joseph J. Kirk, was a great example of what a man could be. A high school drop-out who, at age 16, lied about his age in order to join the Air Force, he always held multiple jobs to provide for his family, to save and invest and to improve the lives of all whom he knew. I do not believe that anyone who knew him failed to believe himself better off for the experience.
How much vacation time to do you take each year?
I avoid enforced leisure. I have considered one of my personal missions to be "the optimization of the average day" and I have been successful enough at that to consider the typical day to be wonderful.
What is your benchmark of success? When did you reach it?
I do not possess even the bench on which to make such a judgment. It is for others to say whether I am useful or not.
At this point, does money still motivate you?
Money never motivated me, but seeing something that I had a hand in creating turn into a structure that is tangible to others, e.g., within which people live and raise their families, is a thrill beyond all imagining. Whether selling a greeting card or a motorcycle or building a company, one finds satisfaction throughout life in seeing things become more and more real as they reverberate into the world.
Describe your life in five words.
I decided to be happy.
Randal J. Kirk on the Forbes 400 Richest List
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