Reading List: Midas Managers by Rob Slee

Rob Slee is a fun and thoughtful author. The power in his writing comes from his twenty years as a middle-market investment banker. His first book, Private Capital Markets, filled-in a huge gap in business literature on the private markets, and we have actually seen it being used as a business textbook. That book methodically outlined the functioning of the private capital markets that support the biggest, but least noticed segment of our business markets.

Midas Managers shows the power of story to teach. The eighteen stories in the book describe some of the all-star managers that were clients over the course of Slee’s investment banking career. After telling each story, Slee converts the lessons into a formula that, he hopes, the reader can replicate. The stories are broken down into three major categories: Arbitrage, Business Models, and Private Finance.

Slee has a lot of passion for helping American businesses succeed in a competitive global market. That passion comes through in his stories. But he also has a great sense of humor that is sprinkled throughout, especially in the “Investment Banker Man” cartoons that he also wrote.

Many of our readers are, like the entrepreneurs profiled in this book, private business owners and managers. But everyone will be able to relate to these stories which are told from their point of view, in the context of their lives and about their journey to create value. Slee expresses something we are always preaching in an especially succinct way, that “value is just unrealized wealth.”

You can read more about this book on the book’s website.