Dr. Diane Hamilton Interviews Billionaire Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments

[Pekelo]

as previously said it depends on your philosophy. you can use current members of your work force to do the work. if necessary you postpone activities. you don't hire a body that you are not certain fits into your organization. it is a philosophy. you are entitled to your opinion what is necessary.

Let's say you are hiring garbage collectors. You are seriously underhanded, your guys simply can't handle the load alone. Some facts:

1. The garbage HAS TO BE collected. The show must go on.
2. You can't damage your current guys by over working them, because they might leave (get sick) further screwing you.

So what do you do? You hire the best of the candidates, not the one that satisfies your standard.

You might have noticed my choice of analogy is a bit strange but similar situations happen in office work too.

 

[Sig]

Let's say you are hiring garbage collectors. You are seriously underhanded, your guys simply can't handle the load alone. Some facts:

1. The garbage HAS TO BE collected. The show must go on.
2. You can't damage your current guys by over working them, because they might leave (get sick) further screwing you.

So what do you do? You hire the best of the candidates, not the one that satisfies your standard.

You might have noticed my choice of analogy is a bit strange but similar situations happen in office work too.

That's making a massive assumption that the candidate pool is fixed and you as a hiring manager have no control over it. Which just isn't the case. Fisher is a shit place to work, they pay below market wages, the job is generally not interesting or fulfilling because you're just a sales machine with no effort put into actually helping your existing clients, the hours suck, the CEO and executive team are...odd, to put it nicely. So when Fisher puts out a ad for a position, thousands of high quality people don't even give a thought to applying. They work for the hundreds of companies in the Valley who pay well, have great work conditions, great leaders.... And shockingly they don't find that they need to fire 40% of their hires, not even close! Fisher gets what's left.

BTW, hiring garbage collectors isn't even in the same universe as hiring for a job at a wealth management firm. It's far harder to be a leader in a garbage collection company than a wealth management company, Ken Fisher and his team of merry men wouldn't last a day!

 

[drcha]

That is a rather low standard, slightly better than a coin flip.

Actually, I think 60% is pretty good, because it is not a 50-50 chance that you'll hire a good employee. Most people are shitty employees. They do not know how to keep at a problem until they solve it, do not know when to stop and ask versus when to move ahead, and they want to give as little as possible while getting as much as possible in return. You can try to help shape them, but they don't know how to accept your help so that they can become better employees--don't even realize it when you are trying to do something for their benefit.

I doubt whether I was a great employee until I became an employer. After that, when I went back to work for others (to learn a new industry), they thought I was stellar. The problem is that when you become a stellar employee, you realize how mediocre and limited the people you work for are...so here I am working for myself again.

 

[murray t turtle]

Agree and he has a slew of lawyers to keep disgruntled clients and employees quiet..

%%
Thanks for the reminder; i was going to say some more about his European stocks call... Even though it worked fine, [better than average] he has ''confidental'' on every page of his report

 

[RRY16]

It's telling that the company has hundreds of people working in sales and fewer than a dozen actually researching and picking stocks. I'll give it to him that he built a very effective sales machine. But otherwise he's a crappy asset manager and shitty employer. It's pretty rich that he's giving advice in this particular area, the company is infamous for treating it's employees like crap and big employee turnover as a result, as well as a shockingly high number of employee and customer lawsuits as mentioned. Come to think of it, they probably spend significantly more on legal than stock picking and asset management as well. Slimey.

He figured out the holy grail of direct mail marketing and now internet marketing..I've met 2 people from His firm that were with him from the start and agree they are strange birds in a cult like way and he doesn't hire anyone with any kind of top tier Buy side or Sell side experience which is telling and keeps everything buttoned up.

 

[ironchef]

I have a lot of respect for Fisher, but... he's a billlionaire because he's a great asset-gatherer. Anyway thanks for the interview summary.

Agree. His spam mails are annoying. His father Philip Fisher is much better, read his book instead.

 

[Sig]

Agree. His spam mails are annoying. His father Philip Fisher is much better, read his book instead.

Very true, his dad was well respected and his books are still a good read even 50 years later.