The Bill Cook Story

Bob Hammel

Description

Biography of a visionary Indiana billionaire who is saving lives and landmarks

Bill Cook epitomizes the American success story. His business ventures in medical devices, pharmaceuticals, genetics, real estate, retail management, and travel services have made him a billionaire. Yet, Cook continues to lead a modest life, involving himself in a variety of philanthropic activities that have included historic preservation and even a marching band. This riveting story is the first-ever biography of the entrepreneur who, working from the spare bedroom of his Bloomington, Indiana, apartment in 1963 with a $1,500 investment, began to construct the wire guides, needles, and catheters that would become the foundation of the global multi-billion-dollar Cook Group. Biographer Bob Hammel, with extraordinary access to Cook, his files, and his associates, has created a vivid portrait of this modern, multidimensional Horatio Alger—quirky humor, widely varied interests, and all. Informative and inspiring, this book celebrates an exceptional self-made individual.

Contents
Preface

A Day in a Life
Kidnapping

The Life
1. Playing in Peoria
2. The Canton High Years
3. A Wide Gold Band
4. Road to Bloomington
5. Bedroom Beginning
Ain't but One Bill Cook
6. Moving Up
An Ow, a Bow-Wow, a Hoosegow
7. Team Taking Shape
Taking Flight
8. Foothold in Europe
9. Doctors
10. Stents and Suits
11. Health
12. The Guidant Fiasco
The Band Director
13. Philosophy
14. Religion
15. Politics
16. Cook Clinic
The Bill Cook Plan for America

The Day Revisited
Kidnapping Redux

17. The Future

Wealth
18. Power and Opportunity
19. Restorations
20. A Good Time in Our Lives

Acknowledgments
Sources and Notes
Index

Sujets

• Entrepreneuriat
• entrepreneur
• Emprendedor
• Business
• Economics
• Entrepreneurship
• Employabilité, métiers et formations

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 26 septembre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253018533
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 10 Mo

Extrait

The Bill Cook Story
The

BILL COOK
Story
READY, FIRE, AIM!
Bob Hammel
Indiana University Press
Bloomington Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
601 North Morton Street
Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA
http://iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders
800-842-6796
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812-855-7931
Orders by e-mail
[e-mail]
2008 by Bob Hammel
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hammel, Bob.
The Bill Cook story : ready, fire, aim! / Bob Hammel.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35254-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Cook, Bill, 1931-2. Billionaires-Middle West-Biography. 3. Businessmen-Middle West-Biography. I. Title.
HC102.5.H347 2008
338.092-dc22
[B]
2008014308
1 2 3 4 5 13 12 11 10 09 08
Following paintings by Keith Kline
To Bill and Gayle Cook
READY FIRE AIM!
Ready means preparation.
Get yourself ready to do something, then do it.
If you screw up, you go back and see what happened.
What I call aim is hindsight-you find out where you screwed up, and you can correct it much easier.
A lot of people would rather sit and prepare.
They can prepare all their life.
Bill Cook
contents
Preface
A Day in a Life
K IDNAPPING
The Life
1. Playing in Peoria
2. The Canton High Years
3. A Wide Gold Band
4. Road to Bloomington
5. Bedroom Beginning
Ain t but One Bill Cook
6. Moving Up
An Ow, a Bow-Wow, a Hoosegow
7. Team Taking Shape
Taking Flight
8. Foothold in Europe
9. Doctors
10. Stents and Suits
11. Health
12. The Guidant Fiasco
The Band Director
13. Philosophy
14. Religion
15. Politics
16. Cook Clinic
The Bill Cook Plan for America
The Day Revisited
K IDNAPPING R EDUX
17. The Future
Wealth
18. Power and Opportunity
19. Rising Stars
20. Restorations
21. A Good Time in Our Lives
Acknowledgments
Sources and Notes
Index
Color illustrations
preface
So there we were, talking across a desk, two guys averaging about two billion each in financial worth, discussing what we had done to keep ourselves as satisfied and happy as we had these last forty years of sharing the same small hometown-forty years when we knew of each other far better than we knew each other.
I spent those years writing about sports for a newspaper. He built a company. The next billion-dollar sportswriter will be the first. The financial worth in the room was, oh, maybe 99.9998 percent his.
To the man across the desk, I mentioned a close friend of mine who started on a sports-writing plane parallel with mine, then chose to rise in our profession in a way totally different from mine. He went into administration, ultimately became an editor and publisher, and made a whole lot more money than I did. I said that at times over the years when my friend and I had talked, I almost got the feeling that he envied me , because I had chosen to stay in the fun part of the profession-writing, covering things, writing, meeting people, writing.
Maybe I felt that way because in truth I more often caught myself feeling sorry for him than envying him, sorry for my profession, really. He was better than me-better than anyone I ever met in the newspaper business-at running a news staff, at using people. That s using as Tiger Woods uses a golf club, extracting the very best there is to bring out, without a bit of abuse. My friend could have been as good a working newspaper editor as there was out there, at any level, and there was nothing in the way of talent or judgment that should have kept him from doing it at the very highest level.
But he didn t stay solely with news management. He crossed over, in newsroom scorn, to include the business side, earning increasingly bigger paychecks with his ability to make increasingly bigger profits for his newspaper-while, it must be said, continuing to insist on excellent work from his writers and editors.
But still
One night when my friend and I were discussing where fate had taken us within the same profession, I know my eyes were sending out a pained message of How could you? If so, it was not so much in accusation of art profaned as in puzzlement, about how he could voluntarily make such a sacrifice: the inner satisfaction of a story or column well done in trade for money-making.
The money part it s a game , he said.
Yeah, billionaire Bill Cook said, nodding, totally understanding my friend. It s not the money that you work for. It s when you have an idea, and it comes to fruition, and it works!
One of the most recent examples for me is our Triple-A stent. That generates us millions of dollars a month. It is a large part of our sales. Not that I invented it, but it s the idea that I did the things necessary to make it all happen.
That s where I get my enjoyment. I don t even look at the P L. The only things I look at on the Profit and Loss report for this company are the sales total and how much we made as a result of those sales. I just got a quarterly report, and I spent a grand total of probably two minutes looking at it, looking at those two numbers.
All I could say was, I m satisfied. That s okay. That s good.
That s all that it meant, in the form of money, to me. They re just numbers that show you you re doing okay.
And competing.
And winning.
That s the refreshing thing that familiarity with Bill Cook brought to me. His is a personal world not nearly as foreign to me as I thought going in. Like the best of the people I covered who excelled in sports, he is above all else a competitor, and that s the quality he has most admired and most sought in building from scratch his worldwide company, his winning team-his frequent world champion in its vital field.
Bill is 77. He s had heart problems. He lost a kidney. He spent some time in early 2007 at Cleveland Clinic getting fine-tuned with his medications. He didn t come back talking of feeling better, or relieved, though each was true.
I can t tell you what it s like to go up to Cleveland Clinic and see all those boxes of our products up there-$50,000 worth of product in one box, going to one patient. And there are literally hundreds of boxes up there.

Bill Cook holds a Triple-A stent.
Those are the things that really bring excitement-several million dollars of your product, and it s going to be used quickly.
That is excitement . It gave me goose bumps.
Yes, my pragmatic mind interrupted, and it s saving lives.
That is a large part, he said. That helps.
But I think I would get a similar excitement if I were the developer of a new door lock and saw it in use. Recently I read an anecdote about the second-generation Kohler who s running that company now, Herbert Jr. He said one of his greatest excitements was when he saw a new toilet coming out on line-what a work of art it is, how much effort it took, and to have it coming out so nice-looking . So he gets the same kick that I do! He s talking about a toilet as a work of art.
To him, it really is. We take a toilet as a toilet, a functional device that we have to use. He was looking at the whiteness of the porcelain, and he was so proud that that thing was going to a customer who was going to say, I ll buy it. I can identify with that.
You see, Bob, in your field there is a certain proficiency you have to acquire before you can do any appreciating. In the case of Kohler and myself, we can look at a product, and it s tangible. There s nothing else you have to think about.
In yours, there are rules of construction-did it all come out explaining what you wanted to get across? In the case of Kohler and Bill Cook, we can look at our toilets and our Triple-A stents, and we really get a kick out of it.
And we don t have to read an article, either. It takes time to read an article.
And you also have a realization that you are so perishable. The damned newspaper ends up in the trash or at the bottom of a birdcage.
True.
And the excitement comes again the next day.
Also true.
Each of us came through it all happy. Each of us was blessed.
But there s a lot more of a story in what he did with his blessings and his opportunities-his ideas that, such a very high percentage of the time, worked.
A day in a life
KIDNAPPING

I t was big news, exciting news in town that October morning in 1988. Little Bloomington had its own man in the Forbes Magazine list of the 400 richest people in America.
Bloomington, Indiana, is a town of 70,000 with a hefty conceit quotient. Winston Churchill said of election rival Clement Attlee that he was a modest man with much to be modest about. Bloomington people feel they have much to be cocky about.
In 1988 it was a Bloomington of eminence in basketball, surely. Just