The Last Pickens Show
When T. Boone Pickens launched his Pickens Plan last summer, crude oil was at $136 a barrel. Now, with crude at or below $40, does anyone care anymore about what Pickens has to say?
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Wednesday, January 28th, 2009, 3:25 pm
Randy Hill-Texas says:
I want to start off by saying that T. Boone Pickens is one of our great American entrepreneurs with a heritage of great success. Over his extensive career, he has shown great leadership. He is an example of true entrepreneurial achievement.
What we have seen over the past 2 years with T. Boone is a fantastic pursuit of a great dream - which is what every entrepreneur has in one way or another. What T. Boone has done with the Pickens Plan and his larger-than-life wind project idea has been very exciting.
As entrepreneurs, we all take risks. The risk is that we have to get our idea and our concept across to the public so that we can present our idea. When we do this, we are putting a thought out there for raising support, raising capital, or raising attention to our project.
T. Boone had a multi-level plan to where he was going to build a wind farm, he was going to carry his own power into Dallas-Fort Worth through those transmission lines, and using the same corridor, he was going to carry water from the Panhandle back to the Metroplex.
As an entrepreneur, when you’re putting these ideas out there, you’re taking a risk, very similar to Kenneth Musgrave, one of our great entrepreneurs from Abilene. Kenneth did the same thing with the Hendrick ranch. Kenneth was attempting to purchase a large-scale ranch and he was using the media as his promotion. All of us use the media in this way: to raise capital or attention for our project, to promote our idea. What Kenneth Musgrave was doing was promoting that he had struck this deal and his intentions were to cut up the property and sell it off - but with the current economic conditions, he was forced to back out of the deal.
On both of these fronts, you have an entrepreneur putting ideas out there but problems came up. With T. Boone, the credit markets are simply not in a condition to support a large-scale project like he was promoting. With Musgrave, he put his project out there, and he had the interested buyers who wanted a piece of what he had put together, however the financial crisis has put that plan on hold.
The problem with these two projects is not the idea - their ideas are good, but at this time, they are just not going to go forward. It’s the risk they take. They put their ideas out there in a very public way. The risk they take is that their idea is either a great success or it fails, or it just doesn’t work out to the level they had hoped.
It’s the same thing for the entrepreneur wanting to start a donut shop. He puts some significant money into the equipment needed to make donuts. Then he puts an ad in the paper saying that he’ll be selling donuts on Monday morning. He is taking a huge risk by doing that - is it going to succeed, fail or just not measure up simply because of negative market conditions?
Such entrepreneurs are great men and are to be commended. We need more people who are willing to take a risk and put great ideas out there. The measurement of a great entrepreneur is not the accomplishment itself, but the risk he is willing to take to accomplish great things. As well, you can always measure success by how an entrepreneur picks himself up when he fails.
Randy Hill-Texas
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