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Carlos Slim
Financier and Philanthropist
When you love life, you want to know more about life. I think engineering is important to give you the tools. And in business, to analyze, it's important to simplify, to have the essential points, the essential issues, the fundamentals, the basics, and take out everything that is secondary, to have less variables to study or to look at. Because when you have a lot of variables, and you don't make a distinction between the ones that are essential and the secondary ones and parameters, you have confusion. I will say that engineering is important, but also when I was finishing my (academic) career, I make my thesis about linear programming. That's operational research. That's to optimize functions, optimize results of things, and the study of models that take you to the optimization of the solutions.
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Carlos Slim
Financier and Philanthropist
Carlos Slim: When you make the evaluation of things, when you look at these kinds of investments, it is very important. I think maybe it is more important than engineering to understand the economy, the macro economy. The macro economy is very important, to know the national accounts, what means fiscal deficit, what means trade deficit or trade superávit (surplus), what means each item, but not only quantitative, but also qualitative. I think economy is very important, to know the basics of economy. To understand what is happening, you need to understand economy. You need to understand the financial statements of the companies, the sectors, and to have world references.
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Carlos Slim
Financier and Philanthropist
I learned many things when I was very young, maybe 12 or 13 years old. Then I learned how to understand a balance sheet. I didn't learn that in school. When you look at a balance sheet, there is a lot of information. Not only a balance sheet, but also an estado de resultados. That is a report, financial statement in general. I think finances -- to invest, there are some principles that are very clear, but very easy. You invest with basic conditions. You invest when you have confidence in the management, in the sector -- you like the sector -- and the value of the prices are not high, or are low, low value. Buying intrinsic values in good companies, in good markets and in good sectors. No? I think these kind of things are basics and are not complicated.
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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
Stephen Sondheim: It was a long afternoon. Well, it was probably two and a half hours, but the packed information I got in makes it seem longer. And you know, at that age you're a sponge, you just absorb everything. And he (Oscar Hammerstein) gave me the distillation of 30 years of experience. Now, not all in that afternoon, because then he set up a course for me, so to speak. He said, "If you want to learn to write musicals, why don't you take a good play, one that you like, and make it into a musical? And then, after you've done that, then take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. Then take a story, not one that you've written, but that is not in the dramatic form, like a novel or something like that, make it into a musical. And then make up your own story and make it into a musical." He said, by the time you get all those four done, you'll know something. And that's exactly what I did.
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Stephen Sondheim
Award-winning Composer and Lyricist
When I was 17, it was their third show. They'd written Oklahoma! and Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Oscar asked me if I'd like to work on it, because they were rehearsing over the summer, which was between college terms for me. So that's exactly what I did. I was a gopher. You know, fetched coffee and typed script. And he just wanted me to inculcate myself. And I learned a great deal watching because, particularly, the show was highly experimental and it was a failure. And both those things were very important to me, because one of the things I learned was to be brave, and the other thing, not to expect that everything's going to come out perfectly.
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