Kingpin Revised Edition: Legal Lessons from the Underworld

By Sarah Bartholomeusz

Who are the most innovative and creative business leaders of all time?

Names such as Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla and Bill Gates usually come to mind, but Kingpin proposes an alternative. What if the most innovative and creative entrepreneurs operate on the fringe of business culture, outside the genera

• Language: English
• Publisher: You Legal Pty Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9780648470502

Sarah Bartholomeusz

Sarah is the founder and managing director of You Legal, a new category of law firm, providing top-tier corporate and commercial legal services and corporate governance support to ASX listed companies as well as growing businesses at all stages of their life cycle. As Australia's leading online legal counsel, Sarah has over a decade of experience and is committed to ensuring businesses have access to legal advice that minimises their risks and maximises their potential. As well as making the law straightforward, practical, and accessible for her clients, she regularly speaks at business and industry events and in 2015 was a finalist in the Telstra Business Awards and the Telstra Business Women's Awards.

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PREFACE

Who are the most innovative and creative business leaders of all time?

This book presents a novel approach to answering this question.

While names such as Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Nikola Tesla and Bill Gates are commonly bandied about, and examining the lives of these visionaries certainly provides a context for analysing success and failure, this book proposes that we consider the possibility that the most innovative and creative business leaders of all time do not operate within the usual confines of the business world.

What if they operate in the underworld?

This book will provide an examination of the lives and careers of eight highly notorious but nonetheless successful drug Kingpins.

These eight people have been chosen because they are all high achievers in their field. In terms of real-world impact, they have all made a difference (though certainly not in terms of positive social contribution). This makes them interesting for business leaders to study. While the Kingpins as leaders operate within a similar rule set to executives, they come from widely differing experience bases and they build their businesses in an environment of extreme volatility. Their responses to compliance situations are not curtailed by the law, best practice or – at times – even logic. This makes them some of the most innovative and creative business leaders in the world, for better and for worse, and they therefore provide us with lessons that are simply unavailable through the study of mainstream leaders.

Considering the lives, successes and failures of these Kingpins provides us with an innovation and creativity scope that is far broader than analysing Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Nikolas Tesla and Bill Gates, and provides a lens to enable us to see successes and failures with far more clarity.

Kingpin will identify both business and legal lessons that can be learned from the highs and lows of these people, and also discuss the benefit of implementing relevant business policies to satisfy the objectives of those lessons. The power of the analysis comes from the fact that these underworld executives and entrepreneurs operated parallel to the mainstream economy, but had to respond to similar market forces in far more creative ways. Each of them has experimented wildly, and this means that their victories were amplified, and their mistakes were at times quite literally fatal.

Some business industry experts have recognised that successful drug dealers and legitimate entrepreneurs share many similar traits. In a 2002 article published in the Journal of Labour Economics (‘Drug Dealing and Legitimate Self-Employment’), economist Rob Fairlie contends the same characteristics compelling individuals to become drug dealers as teenagers also compel them to become entrepreneurs as adults. Common characteristics include low risk aversion, entrepreneurial ability and a preference for autonomy.

William Baumol is an influential American economist who has dedicated his career to expanding the role of the entrepreneur in mainstream economic theory. In an article entitled ‘Entrepreneurship: productive, unproductive and destructive’, Baumol argues that incentives or payoffs by society for different entrepreneurial activities is the key factor in deciding whether entrepreneurship will be allocated in productive or unproductive directions. The allocation of productive entrepreneurship significantly affects the strength of the economy’s productivity growth. Accordingly, policy makers have an interest in developing and implementing business policies that provide incentives or reward structures to individuals or companies involved in entrepreneurial