Originally published in Nikkei Asia's “Henry Kravis: My Personal History"
Chapter 3
An extremely shy boy, I avoided raising my hand in class
I was born in 1944 and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, until I entered Eaglebrook School, a junior high school in Massachusetts, as an eighth grader.
I was free-spirited and always curious. I learned a lot by trying new things without knowing the outcome. When I was in fifth or sixth grade, a friend and I had the brilliant idea to change the color of our hair using hydrogen peroxide, a chemical compound used as a disinfectant or bleaching agent. It seemed easy enough. While my friend succeeded in bleaching his hair blonde, as he intended, my hair unexpectedly turned orange. Stunned at what had happened, my parents declared, "You're not leaving this house, not even going for dinner when the rest of us all go out, until you get that dyed back!"
When I was in seventh grade, I liked to throw firecrackers into a cement pipe just to find out what kind of roaring sounds they would make when they went off. Miss Harrington, our history teacher, did not appreciate it when my friend Donny and I put a firecracker in her mailbox and then made our getaway on our bicycles.
I was also extremely shy. People who know me now find this hard to believe.
In classes, I was afraid to raise my hand to speak. I was embarrassed I might not be able to give the right answer to a question when a teacher called on me. I used to sit in the back of the classroom to avoid drawing attention because I did not want to be picked by the teacher even when I knew the answer.
Overcoming my shyness required putting myself into uncomfortable situations or being forced to do things that made me uncomfortable. I was also very competitive and wanted to do my best whether on the sports field, in class or even selling magazines. In seventh grade, there was a magazine subscription contest at my school. Participants had to visit houses and solicit subscriptions. I signed up and came away with the top prize for knocking on doors and asking strangers, "How about subscribing to Time magazine?"
Years later, when I was a college student, I worked for Goldman Sachs as an intern for three summers. The first summer I was a runner taking stock certificates and the next I was in the research department working for an insurance analyst.
In the third year, I worked in the corporate finance department. One of the partners asked me to make phone calls to chief financial officers (CFOs) at companies to gather information, starting at 9 a.m. Initially, I could not make a single call by 11:30 a.m., fearing that the person at the other end of the line was going to ask me questions I couldn't answer. But I knew I had to do it so I got up my courage and I called more than 10 CFOs one day. I had no other choice. This experience helped me overcome my shyness and it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be.
One of my most impressionable experiences was my time at the Madison Fund, an investment fund in New York where I started working before going on to graduate school. Ed Merkle was the chief executive officer. "Kid, I want you to follow these two industries," he told me. One was the fast food franchise business and the other was furniture retailing. "I want you to buy stock in those two industries."
But I was a complete novice. "Mr. Merkle, I've never bought a stock in my life," I told the boss. "It doesn't matter," he replied. "I want to see what you can do."
At one time, Merkle asked me to call on Roy Disney. He actually ordered me to meet with the co-founder and CEO of The Walt Disney Company. "Who is going with me?" I asked. "No one; you're going by yourself."
Extremely nervous, I did a meticulous job of preparing my questions before traveling to Los Angeles. I thought 15 minutes of the busy Disney CEO's time would be the most I could hope for. As I kept asking questions, however, he was apparently impressed by my preparation. "You sure know a lot about my company," he said. Then, I was flabbergasted when he said, "I'd like you to spend the whole day with me. I want you to go to every one of my meetings."
Merkle threw me into the river and forced me to swim. Disney also gave me an opportunity. We try to maintain this at KKR today. We want people to jump into the water and swim. We want them to be brave and try new ideas -- even if the real opportunity is making a mistake and learning something from it.
The best thing you can teach people is that it is OK to get out of their comfort zone.