E-mail a friendPeter Peterson
airdate July 9, 2009
Peter Peterson has enjoyed success as a corporate exec, businessman and in the public sector. He helmed Lehman Brothers and Bell and Howell Corp. and co-founded The Blackstone Group, a private investment banking firm. He's also founding president of The Concord Coalition. Peterson is the Council on Foreign Relations' Chairman Emeritus, served as Commerce Secretary in the Nixon administration and chaired the Federal Reserve Bank of NY. He's written several books, including the memoir, The Education of an American Dreamer.
Successful entrepreneur talks about his life after college and offers advice when pursuing a career. (2:16)
Full interview. (15:36)
Peter Peterson
Tavis: Peter Peterson's life would sound like the stuff of a great American fiction piece if it weren't all true. The Depression-era son of Greek immigrants once worked at his family diner in Nebraska before turning the Blackstone group into a billion-dollar empire. He's also a former secretary of Commerce.
As for his legacy you need look no further than the $1 billion he's endowed for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. His new memoir is called "The Education of an American Dreamer." He joins us tonight from New York. Mr. Peterson, nice to have you on the program, sir.
Peter Peterson: Thank you very much.
Tavis: It's hard to know where to start this conversation because your life has been so rich and so full. I suspect that what makes sense is to start, at least for my taste, with the name Peter G. Peterson. You tell a fascinating story in the book about how your father changed the name. Tell me that story.
Peterson: Well, my father's older brother came over from Greece first and he was working on the railroad, and he at least alleges that they were complaining that Petropolis, which was their original name, "polis" in Greece meaning "son of," "Petros," "Peter," was too hard to pronounce, and why didn't they change it?
So they changed it to Peterson - son of Peter, which is a direct translation of what the name is in Greek.
Tavis: I wonder, to your point "he alleges," how you think your life might have been different without the ring. This Peter G. Peterson has a ring to it. Had you stuck with that original - had your father, I should say, stuck with that original name, what do you think your life might have been?
Peterson: Well, when I pronounce my name Peter Peterson it sounds like I was born to be redundant. (Laughter) It's an interesting question as to whether in those early days having a long Greek name might have been a problem. I've never experienced that directly but as you know, prejudice can be very indirect and implicit.
I do remember this much - the Ku Klux Klan picketed my father's restaurant with a sign that said, "Don't eat with the Greek." So there was obviously some prejudice there, and they didn't have any Blacks in Kearney, Nebraska, so they took another step and went to the Greeks, I guess. So there must have been some prejudice.
Tavis: How old were you about this time, do you recall?
Peterson: I was about eight or nine years old when I started working in the restaurant. I took cash. I was always pretty good at math and I made change at the cash register.
I was an aggressive little character. My father had meal tickets in which you could get $5.50 worth of food for $5 if you paid the $5 in cash, and I kept careful track at the cash register of which meal tickets were nearly running out. And when I saw one that was almost out I would run over to the table and say, "Are you sure you don't want a meal ticket?" Because I wanted the receipts to be as high as possible that day.
Tavis: So you were selling, even as a kid. I asked how old you were around the time of that Klan story because I'm curious as to what kind of impact that has on a kid, when he sees his father's business being picketed clearly because of race? Or ethnicity, in this case.
Peterson: Well, they shielded me from actually seeing it, so all I heard as a kid were the stories about it. My reaction would have probably been different if I'd seen those white robes that the Ku Klux Klan wore, but it didn't have a great deal of impact on me, no.
Tavis: Coming here with nothing, how did your father get into position to own a restaurant in the first place?
Peterson: Well, he took a job no one else wanted, as a dishwasher in the caboose of the Union-Pacific Railroad that was being built. The reason no one wanted it, as you probably know, sitting out in the sun in Nebraska without air conditioning in the summer, 120 degrees outside - I can't imagine what it was inside, washing dishes, with the steaming hot dishes and everything.
But nobody wanted that job. But he took it because he was smart enough to realize that he could sleep on the caboose and he could get free meals on the caboose. So he was able to save every penny he made to put into the restaurant. So I learned a lot from him about being a workaholic - some would say I learned the lesson too well - and saving for the future, which is what he taught me.
He also taught me philanthropy. They used to call them bums in those days; some would say hobos. But you may recall during the Depression unemployment was 25 percent or so average but it was higher than that in certain farm areas.
So every day, so-called bums or hobos would line up at the back door of the kitchen, and my father had his own work-for-welfare program that as long as each of these people did some work he would feed them something. And he did the same thing with his village back home. He paved the streets, he paid for a water system, and he really made it important to my life to give money back and he loved this country.
The only song he knew was "God Bless America," and whenever he sang it, tears would run down his cheeks. So he taught me a lot about hard work, about saving for the future, and about giving back, and I will always be grateful to him.
In my book I mention lessons that I've learned, and one of them is always focus in your work on two areas, if you can. Number one, on those areas where you have some kind of comparative advantage - in other words, your strength. The second criterion is have passion for your work, because if you're good at it and you're passionate about it you're much more likely to succeed.
And the corollary of that is avoid jobs that may pay a little bit more that don't play to your strengths, that play to your weaknesses, like retailing in the case of Peter G. Peterson, or jobs that you don't have much passion for, because you're not likely to be successful in those long-term, even though they may pay a little bit more or have a bigger office or have a bigger title at the beginning. But you ought to be in a career for the long term, not the immediate term.
Tavis: Was it always your goal to make money or did you end up making money by the choices that you made?
Peterson: I've been called by my friends and critics relentlessly analytical, so I decided that I ought to get into a field in which the heart of the business was analysis.
So I went to work for a market research firm and God, what a contrast between market research and retailing for me. It was all analyzing people's attitudes and statistics and so forth, and I was not only pretty good at it, but I loved it and I rose very rapidly in that field as a result.
Tavis: What was it about that kind of research that has so much money in it?
Peterson: Well, you were participating in certain rather big decisions. For example, one of our clients was the Ford Motor Company, and they were looking for ideas on how they could sell more Ford cars. So we did some very interesting research on how people felt about Fords versus Chevys and Plymouths.
For example we showed people a picture of a car that had just been in an accident but you couldn't see what kind of a car it was. And we'd ask people, "Tell us the story about how this happened." And if there were a wreck there they were much more likely to say it was a Ford owner.
In other words, people tended to think of Fords as being driven by people who just loved power and they didn't think the cars were made very well. And we told them that if they wanted to sell more Fords to Chevy owners they would have to cover some of their concerns. And their concerns were that the cars weren't really built terribly well and weren't terribly safe.
So then we told them how people decided what made a car safe or not safe. And you remember everybody says they want to kick the tires? Well, that turned out to be a cliché that was not the case. When we tried to find out how did people decide if the car was solid or not, it was by opening and closing the door and hearing the click that comes when the car is built well.
So we did that kind of what you might call psychological analysis.
Tavis: I get it now - I get now how it is that companies would pay a lot of money for that kind of research, that kind of information, which leads to the obviously question, for me at least, which is whether or not you still believe that in today's world that kind of data research, that kind of information, is still as valuable and still as accurate.
Peterson: Oh, I'm sure it is. There's nothing like understanding the consumer. I'm a big admirer of the gentleman that runs Proctor and Gamble that has so many successful products for the home. I talked to him one day about his secret and in effect he was his own kind of consumer research man.
For example, he told me when he went to a foreign country one of the things he'd do is spend a couple of days in people's homes. And he would watch them using their categories of products and then he'd ask them their own questions about what they wanted and what they liked and what they didn't like and so forth.
So I think if you're going to be successful today, whether you do formal market research or informal market research, you've got to understand the consumer and what that consumer is looking for.
Tavis: Does your life - it's not over yet, obviously, and I'm glad it's not -
Peterson: (Laughs) No.
Tavis: (Laughs) Does it feel complete? And by complete, I mean does it feel like you have covered the bases? Does it feel like you've come full circle, being able to do the kind of philanthropy that you're doing now?
I ask that question because you talked earlier about your father and the lessons he taught you. It sounds to me like, given your philanthropy now, you've come full circle, learning all the lessons your dad was trying to teach you.
Peterson: I never thought in a billion years I'd ever have a billion dollars, and I had more than enough so I decided to give it to this foundation that I set up. And the main purpose of this foundation is to make it possible for the next generation to also enjoy the American dream the way I did. And one of the things that worries me a great deal about this country today is we've piled up such huge debt and huge obligations that we're doing something that's quite immoral that imperils the American dream.
We're handing trillions of dollars of debt to our own children that are not going to be financeable. We're handing over trillions of promises that would mean tremendous increases in taxes on our own kids. And the idea of slipping your kids the check for our free lunch is not my idea of what my father was trying to teach me.
Tavis: It's a great legacy and there's a great back story to the legacy of Peter G. Peterson. His new book is called "The Education of an American Dreamer: How a Son of Greek Immigrants Learned His Way from a Nebraska Diner to Washington, Wall Street and Beyond." Ambassador Peterson, nice to have you on the program and all the best to you, sir.
Peterson: Thank you, Tavis, very much.
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