“Brad Garlinghouse, David Booth, Dana Anderson, and the Discipline of being very, very lucky.”
Dear Bank of Prairie Village Shareholders and Clients ~
In my last letter I mentioned recently having the good fortune of listening to several very accomplished individuals. I specifically mentioned Bill Self and Rob Riggle.
Going into 2026 I want to discuss three other gentlemen, Brad Garlinghouse, David Booth and Dana Anderson. I believe their views, lessons and attitudes are ones we should all carry into 2026.
I listened to Brad Garlinghouse, at a KU Business School forum in October.
Brad, age 54, grew up in Topeka, Kansas, and went to KU where he majored in Economics. He was a member of the Sigma Nu Fraternity, and the KU Student Body President. Brad stated as the Student Body President, his biggest accomplishment was bringing to KU a headline rock band which gave a most well-attended and highly successful concert. (I immediately decided I liked the guy for no other reason than this singular accomplishment.)
Brad went on to state, in addition to his student leadership and academic work, he started a small record store on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence. (I’ve always liked students who start their own businesses while in school.) Brad stated he learned many important business principals running a failing record shop at age 20.
Following graduation, Brad went on to the Harvard Business School (HBS). At HBS Brad said his eyes were opened regarding business. He decided to head to the Bay Area, and what was beginning to be called Silicon Valley, rather than the standard HBS routes of investment banking McKinney & Company consulting.
To say Brad killed it in Silicon Valley is an understatement. He swiftly became an early senior executive at Yahoo, and then AOL. While at Yahoo, he drafted what became a viral sensation, known as the Peanut Butter Manifesto. Specifically, Brad stated “Yahoo needed to focus on its core competency instead of spreading itself too then like peanut butter.” (Always a good but often overlooked corporate strategy.)
From Yahoo, Brad continued to operate as a senior executive in various Silicon Valley companies eventually becoming a CEO. At one company, he left because he refused the
direction the Board wanted to take. (Hey, I love rebels, who can walk away from what one believes are misguided corporate directives.)
Instead of sulking, Brad accepted the CEO role of a blockchain, and cryptocurrency company called Ripple Labs. He said he took the job solely because he “believed in the enthusiastic founder’s grand, if hard to understand, vision.” Today Brad appears an almost 10 percent owner of the company valued at $40 billion. (Even I can do that math.)
Although Silicon Valley is a bit of a mystery to me, I was fascinated by Brad’s common-sense approach to management and leadership.
When asked about his leadership style, Brad stated, “I am one of those leaders who always insists if someone walks into my office with a pile-of-poop-sized problem ~ they also need to bring a pooper scooper with them listing the potential solutions to the problem. My job is not to scream about the poop pile or who made it, but to evaluate how it can be best cleaned up and not repeated.”
I smiled to myself, thinking Brad’s leadership quote should be written in big letters in every KU Business School classroom for every future business leader to read and memorize.
Brad was then asked about how he hires associates. Brad stated, “I always ask prospects on a scale of 1 to 10 if they feel as if they are a lucky person.” (At this, my ears perked up, as I have been told by others this is a terrific interview question.)
Brad stated he “only hires people who say they are at least a 10 in luckiness.” His reasoning was sound. As Brad said, “Intelligent people understand simply being born in the United States where our water is clean, food is plentiful, and housing abundant compared to the rest of the world, makes everyone at least a 9 for being lucky enough to live here. Hence 10 should be the starting point of every intelligent prospect’s baseline of luckiness.”
A week after listening to Brad Garlinghouse, I joined a fireside chat with David Booth, the KU graduate who founded Dimensional Funds in Austin, Texas. (David Booth bought and gave the University of Kansas the original Naismith Rules of Basketball and is for whom the KU Football stadium and the Chicago School of Business are named.)
David Booth grew up in Lawrence. His dad worked delivering the Kansas City Star, and their modest home was literally down the street from Allen Field House. This much I knew about Mr. Booth, before I attended his chat.
When asked about his business career, David Booth leaned back and then forward in his chair and stated enthusiastically, “I had the luckiest business career anyone could imagine!”
He went through why he was so lucky. According to David, he was lucky because at various points in his career, well-meaning people in authority went out of their way to assist him, even though he could offer nothing in return.
Like Brad Garlinghouse, David Booth did not major in business at KU. Rather, he majored in Mathematics. I was a bit shocked to hear this. Following graduation, and with a one-way ticket to being drafted, it was, however, the KU Business School Dean, who took him aside to see if he could qualify for some graduate school program to defer his inevitable trip to the Vietnam jungles.
Pursuing a giant book the KU Business School Dean found an obscure Chicago Business School program requiring a mathematics major. At the time, the Chicago Business School had the highest number of Nobel prize winners on its faculty.
David Booth earned a Master’s at the University of Chicago’s Business School. He was in the process of completing a Doctorate Degree when he and some other grad students decided to drop out and start a mutual fund. The Fund was based on some breakthrough quantitative formulas they researched. As David said, “we were an odd assortment of nerds, but I loved them and all their idiosyncrasies.”
David then said, “I was lucky enough to get some of those Nobel prize-winning professors to invest and join my Board based on the promise if we failed, they could use the experience as real-world academic research! As it turns out, we were lucky and our theories panned out.”
In my head I calculated pursuing a University of Chicago Business School doctoral degree was not all a matter of luck. There had to be some intelligence and grinding work accompanying his journey. (But hey, if David Booth chalked up all his success to being lucky, who was I to counter him?)
Sitting next to me, listening to David Booth was 92-year-old Dana Anderson, originally from Salina who was a member of the Delta Tau Delta Fraternity at KU. Dana Anderson is a Kansas business legend who has the KU Football Coaching Complex named for him. Since Dana Anderson was a high school classmate of my father’s at Salina High, I knew Mr. Anderson’s business career very well. After graduating from KU with a journalism degree, he went to work for the Power and Light company in Topeka, then transferred to selling residential real estate and then moved onto commercial real estate development. Eventually he became Vice Chairman of one of the nation’s largest Real Estate Development Companies. Everyone who knows Dana Anderson loves his sense of humor and self-deprecation.
David Booth had no more finished telling his story, when Dana leaned into me and said with a conspiratorial smile. “Dan, David is wrong about being lucky.” I looked at Mr. Anderson, assuming he was going to say how hard David Booth worked and how much he overcame to get where he was. Instead, Mr. Anderson smiled and said, “I’m the luckiest businessman ever ~ not David Booth. I had so many great mentors, and partners who helped me along I can’t even count them.”
With that, Mr. Anderson just kept smiling and nodding for me to agree with him. I smiled, nodded my head and gave Dana Anderson an agreeing wink ~ even though I knew how hard Dana had worked and how much risk he took to build his real estate empire.
As I walked across the KU campus to my car, I thought about having recently listened to three of the most accomplished businessmen I’ve ever known. All three stated unequivocally they felt very lucky in their business careers. They attributed their luck to people going out of their way to mentor and help them ~ for what they perceived no other reason than goodwill.
They did not talk about their work ethic, the daily grind or the hard efforts and long hours they put into their careers. It was as if these were “just givens.” Moreover, they spoke little about the giant risks they took, their stumbles along the way, their resilience in getting back up, or their resolve in addressing mind-numbing challenges. Again, they acted as if these “were just givens.”
Rather they focused on their blessings and their luck in having people willing to go out of their way to help them on their journey.
As we go into the New Year, let’s remember hard work, grinding and resiliency are just “givens.” Rather let’s remember to think of ourselves as lucky for all the people whom we’ve barely known, who went out of their way to help us along. Let’s also resolve to be one of those who helps and mentors “lucky” others, ~ for no other reason than the goodwill of seeing them succeed.
~ With that, let’s go kill it in 2026 and make it one fine year to remember. ~ Dan Bolen
Dan Bolen ~ Chairman
Bank of Prairie Village
“The Bank of Prairie Village ~ Home of Blue Lion Banking” ~ cited March 2020, April 2021, April 2022, April 2023 and April 2024 by the by the Kansas City Business Journal as one of the “Safest Banks in Kansas City for Your Money.”
Small Batch Banking ~ Once Client at a Time.
