Chapter 2
Why Not? The Powerful Question
If you’ve never heard my name pronounced, you probably think it rhymes with rod.
When my father immigrated to the United States, he added the a to his Lithuanian surname, Brod. He thought the extra vowel would make Brod seem less strange. Unfortunately, neither he nor the rest of his family—who happily adopted the new spelling and rod pronunciation—could foresee just how much fun the guys in my junior high school would have calling me “broad.”
Then I had an idea: Why not change my name?
Broad, however, was my family’s name. It was the name on the sign above the Detroit five-and-dime my father owned. Legally changing my name would also involve a trip to court, which would trigger more ridicule when the other kids found out I had done something so drastic just to avoid teasing. So, I thought, why not alter just the pronunciation? “Broad, rhymes with road,” I started telling people, from teachers on down to my classmates. I told my parents about the switch one evening at dinner. They just smiled and shook their heads. They knew even then that there wasn’t a lot they could do to change my mind—and I learned the advantage of reframing the facts in a way nobody had considered before.
The name stuck. I became “Eli Broad, rhymes with road.” Some of the teasing continued, but it didn’t really sting anymore. I had changed myself. I liked my new name. To me it seemed strong and refined. I still say, “Rhymes with road,” when I introduce myself to people for the first time, and I’m still happy with the way it sounds. I even enjoy the association with the word road, which always suggests a way forward—my preferred direction.
It all started just because I asked a simple question: “Why not?”
“Why Not?” as the First Step to Success
Children instinctively ask, “Why not?” Adults soon lose the habit, in large part because they have accepted the status quo. But that’s exactly when you need to ask the question with greater force. The questions you’re willing to ask when others think they have all the answers are doors to discovery.
Asking “Why not?” worked for my parents. Both were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. My mom’s family was in the timber business back home and had some money, but my father had nothing in the old country and even less when he arrived in New York. They often needed extra money, so they decided to open, of all things, a Christmas store. They had no experience, they had never run a store, and they were Jewish—but why not? They rented an empty storefront for two months every year. I helped them stock shelves and sell cards, strings of lights, stockings, wrapping paper, and last-minute gifts. My parents worked long hours right up until Christmas Eve, when everyone else was with their families. All of a sudden, what started as a strange idea—one the conventional wisdom said my parents had no business pursuing—became a major part of getting our family through the Great Depression.
My first business also began with “Why not?” when I was 13 years old. I had been collecting stamps since I was 5, living in a walk-up apartment in the Bronx with my parents. My Uncle Misha lived upstate in Peekskill and collected stamps from around the world. I often spent weekends at his house, flipping through his grand old leather volumes of stamps—learning how to pick out the good ones, how to store them properly, how much they were worth. I continued collecting even after we moved to Detroit when I was 7 years old. I bought stamps whenever I had some spare money, getting sheets of them at the post office the first day a new set came out. I started reading stamp collecting magazines and spent weekends riding the streetcar to downtown Detroit, where stamp dealers would set up shop in empty storefronts. I once discovered an early American stamp on the floor at a convention. (I suppose it helped that, at my age, I was the closest to the floor and shyly looking down.) It was more valuable than any other stamp I owned.
I loved the atmosphere around the weekend stamp dealers—trading, haggling, looking for that perfect find. It was my first taste of the excitement I would come to love in the business world, the constant urge to do more and better. I decided I wanted to experience that rush as a seller and not just as a casual buyer.
As a 13-year-old, though, operating out of a storefront was out of the question. Then, one weekend, I saw an ad in one of the collectors’ magazines. Chrysler International, the auto company, was selling boxes of stamps that had been clipped off the envelopes it received from around the world. Each box weighed 2 pounds and cost a few dollars. Although I was already good with numbers, I couldn’t quite calculate how many stamps that would be for a very low price, but I knew the figure was significant.
That was the moment I had to ask, “Why not?” I could already imagine the obstacles and objections I’d have to overcome: the office workers at Chrysler asking me what the heck I was doing wandering around their headquarters, my parents asking why I needed to go to the offices of one of the Big Three automakers, and other stamp collectors just not wanting to do business with a kid. But there was no really good reason why not, why it couldn’t be me, as long as I had the idea and the money—and the follow-through.
I took the streetcar by myself to Chrysler. I walked through the lobby, pretending I was meant to be there. I asked the first adult I saw for directions to the mailroom, where my stamps awaited. Once I found my way, I handed a man two crumpled dollar bills and took the box. No one gave me the slightest trouble.
I went home and put some ads in magazines, advertising a hundred stamps for $1.95. Orders came in from around the country—a bunch of checks made out to me. Everyone assumed I was a grown-up with a bank account. I made more than $10 off my $2 investment in that first box. The money was so good that I stopped saving for more stamps and started saving for a car, although I was still too young to drive. When I was 16, I bought a 1941 Chevy for $200. It was old and beaten up and the tires were worn. But it ran. It was the ride that stamps bought.
Nothing Sets Me Off More Than Being Told I Can’t Do Something
Too often, age and experience become an excuse for accepting the status quo without question. Instead of asking “Why not?” you become overwhelmed with all the reasons something can’t be done. “Of course not” becomes your automatic response. You grow fearful of making mistakes. You rely on conventional wisdom because that’s what everyone else does, and there’s safety in consensus.
I fell into that trap when my high school teachers made it very clear to me that they found my constant questions annoying. Without answers or encouragement, I stopped asking—and stopped paying attention in class. I threw myself into my after-school jobs, such as selling women’s shoes, and my grades fell. As graduation approached, I applied only to Michigan colleges and decided to pursue a pre-law major. It just seemed like the thing to do. I had let myself slip into autopilot, just going along.
Michigan State University (at the time it was Michigan State College) changed all that—and taught me vital lessons beyond the classroom. When “Why not?” disappears from our vocabulary, we often need something to jar us—inspiration from teachers or friends, new places, new challenges.
What first kicked me out of my stupor was a rule I didn’t like. Michigan State prohibited drinking beer in the dorms. I didn’t care that much about beer. It was the restriction that rubbed me the wrong way—and besides, I hated the dorm food. I could have done what many others did and just eaten off campus and broken the rule on beer. That, however, would have put my status as a student at risk. I wasn’t willing to do that. My parents hadn’t gone to college, and I wanted to get a degree, for me and for them. So instead, I thought, why not just live where I could do what I wanted?
Moving out of the dorms wouldn’t be easy, I knew, because freshmen were supposed to live on campus. Getting to and from campus would be an additional burden. In any event, I told the school a little white lie—that I was living at home and commuting from Detroit—and moved into the local YMCA. It was brand-new, and I’d never lived anywhere brand-new. More to the point, I could eat and drink whatever I liked.
Not long after the move, I discovered I liked college. My professors appreciated questions, so I started asking them again. In 1952, during my sophomore year, I had a particularly fine economics instructor, Walter Adams, who would later become president of Michigan State University and write many books. He was only 11 years older than I was, and he could hold the attention of a bunch of teenagers like nobody I’d ever seen. He taught us from future Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson’s famous economics textbook. He also had us read what would become one of my favorite books, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections, the memoirs of Marriner S. Eccles, who was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s choice for chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.
I credit Professor Adams with interesting me in accounting. It was a perfect field for me because I was good with numbers. I was—even then—a pragmatist and couldn’t envision a future in the esoteric pursuit of higher mathematics or theoretical economics. If I switched from pre-law to accounting, I could finish school early, get right to work, and maybe even eventually own my own store like my parents. “Why not?” I thought, as Professor Adams inspired me to make one of the most important choices of my life. That was the moment when asking “Why not?” became a lifelong habit.
“Why Not?” Should Be Something You Ask Every Day
Big decisions shouldn’t be the only ones you reach by asking “Why not?” If you can make that question part of your routine thinking, you will find unexpected and beneficial ways to improve the status quo.
Before Kaufman and Broad went public, for example, I decided I wanted to employ the best accounting firm and I wanted first crack at its attention. My background made me a stickler for smart accounting, which is much more than totaling columns of figures. Rather than bumping elbows at the end of every calendar year with all the other companies trying to close their books, I simply asked, “Why not move the end of our fiscal year?”
Most firms close their fiscal year on either December 31 or June 30 or the last day of another quarter. We simply decided to end our year on November 30, which allowed us to hire the best accountants at the best rates and without a hint of the burnout that comes from working the financials of so many companies at once. To this day, more than 20 years after I stopped running the company, KB Home’s financial year ends on November 30. Anyone, in any line of work, can use “Why not?” to make this kind of relatively small but significant change in day-to-day operations.
“Why not?” also helps me navigate options—weeding out the foolish while not shying away from the challenging. It’s a question that helps sharpen my convictions and break down my unexamined prejudices. Over the years, it has become something of a personal mantra. When doubts assail me at crucial moments, I remind myself of all the things informed opinion told me I couldn’t do but that I went on to accomplish. Then I ask myself, “Why not prove ’em wrong again?”
I suspect my inclination to ask “Why not?” was planted during what was, in many ways, a solitary childhood in which there were few adults to tell me no. Perhaps it also came from a childhood experience that I remember profoundly: Visiting the 1939 New York World’s Fair right before my family moved from the Bronx to Detroit. I recall we paid a little more than a dollar to get in. I saw whole planned cities and towns. I saw my first fax machine and my first television set, which I watched for a long time, totally spellbound, even though the only things on the screen were images of people walking right by me. I could have just turned around. But that screen, that box, and every other object of realized imagination at that wonderful fair had begun, I instinctively knew, with a “Why not?”
One of Robert Kennedy’s favorite quotations, like the inscription on my paperweight, was from George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say, why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?”
One of the things you’ll discover when you ask “Why not?” is that life is richer when you live it among the dreamers.