Sam Zell passed away earlier this year but left no shortage of wisdom and one-liners.

Sam shared many lessons in his book, Am I Being Too Subtle? Straight Talk From a Business Rebel.

But you won’t find any lessons on cap rates or property types.

Instead, they are foundational ideas on being a good investor, a good leader, and a good person.

Below, I’ve shared 12 of the best lessons you should take away.

If you are really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be who you really are

One of the biggest raps about me is that I’ve been known to use profanity. Sure, sometimes my real estate colleagues will make over/under bets on whether or when I’ll drop the f-bomb onstage at a conference. I simply don’t buy into many of the made-up rules of social convention. I think people often get distracted by these superficialities. For example, I’ve been wearing jeans to work since the 1960s, long before it was acceptable. And to this day, I’m usually the only one at a business conference or on CNBC’s Squawk Box set in jeans. The bottom line is if you’re really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be who you really are.

Bob and I originated the unique culture at EGI that became our company trademark. We abandoned all pretense and established a casual-dress office policy—which, believe me, was unheard of in the rigid world of finance in the 1970s. We invented business casual. Our thinking was that if you dress funny and you’re great at what you do, you’re eccentric. But if you dress funny and you’re just okay at what you do, you’re a schmuck. We were determined to show everyone that we could excel without conforming.

It’s hard to be an outlier. There’s comfort with consensus. And sometimes the risk of standing out has real consequences. But if you can find an organization and boss that does things their “own way”, you’ve hit the jackpot.

Much of the world is governed by adherence to stupid rules

Nevertheless, I did get a D one year in accounting. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the principles. I did. It was the adherence to stupid rules that drove me crazy. I remember one exam where I wrote “revenues” in a column related to “sales,” and the professor marked it as incorrect. “Why is it wrong?” I asked. “Revenues and sales are the same thing.” But he had no interest in the meaning of the words; it was about conforming. “If you don’t write ‘sales’ it’s wrong.” Well, to me, learning by rote was wrong.

We’ve all experienced this. We get something wrong, or get punished, because we didn’t follow the “convention”, even though we had the idea right. Don’t tolerate appearances and convention over substance.

Get to know people on their home court

Today I could probably get just about anybody to come to my office for a meeting, but that wouldn’t tell me much. Instead, I spend over a thousand hours a year on my plane traveling around the world to meet with people. I want to see what they are like on their home court, how they treat their people and the examples they set.

You don’t know people based on their resumes, their reputation, or contrived meetings. See people in their natural habitat to see the real person.

Get comfortable with rejection 

I drove a couple thousand miles, without air-conditioning, and it was hot. Every day, when 4:30 p.m. came, I’d have to decide—was I going to make one more call? And I always did. I was determined to get the best sales numbers those crappy accounts had ever generated. I also wanted to leave an impression, and to pay back the guys who gave me the opportunity of a job in the first place. While I was unaware of it at the time, my real compensation for that job wasn’t monetary. It was learning about and getting comfortable with rejection. And as I would later realize, indifference to rejection is a fundamental part of being an entrepreneur.

There’s a lot of rejection in life and if you get comfortable with it you’ll have a superpower most don’t have. Put yourself out there where you can be rejected and you’ll realize the feared consequences were never real.  

Know the numbers

I wanted to send something with more depth. Something that told people where our heads were at and how we viewed the market. So I created a simple Lucite block engraved with “We Suffer From Knowing the Numbers.” It relayed our frustration with a fundamental truth. We loved doing deals, but we weren’t deal junkies. The ultimate discipline was that we were always committing our own money. We weren’t going to sacrifice the outcome when the numbers said turn the other way. The building boom in the first half of the decade had been intoxicating, yet we had stayed home from the party. But “knowing the numbers” means having the discipline to listen to them—even if they’re not telling you what you want to hear. Some of the best deals, of course, are the ones you don’t do.

When you are disciplined in knowing the numbers, there’s less pressure to make a deal “work”.

Board members are not potted plants

I realized then the danger of boards that were beset by cronyism and inertia—as if an appointment to a board was a perk, a retirement benefit or a no-strings gift to golfing buddies. My philosophy on board composition and culture is the antithesis of what I saw on the Santa Fe board. As the chairman of public companies, I’ve always selected board members based on the assumption that they were cheap consultants to the business, not potted plants. I’ve never hesitated to use them—or to have management teams use them—to further the objectives of the company. Also, board materials are prepared with all relevant information prior to meetings. Board members are expected to read the materials in advance, and the real purpose of the meetings is to generate robust discussion. Our board meetings are often raucous, with frequent interruptions, questions, and commentary. As a result, our companies have always benefited from the combined wisdom of our directors.

When you have a board that has expertise and is willing to help (but not micromanage), you’re in a great situation. Not everyone has control of board appointments, but if you do, use that power to build an exceptional board.  

Alignment of Interests

Whether it’s in the boardroom or at the management level, I start with this: Don’t depend on people unless you understand their motivations and you are confident that your interests align with theirs. Be an owner, act like an owner, and when it comes to your investments, do everything you can to make sure everybody is aligned. A lot of Wall Street’s headaches—the executive compensation issues, the accounting scandals, the options backdating, the subprime mortgage mess—can be chalked up to misaligned interests created when there’s too much reliance on outsiders who don’t have a stake. Similarly, a lot of people who get burned by depending on Wall Street analysts, or hedge fund managers, or their local stock picker discover quickly that the advice they’re getting isn’t coming from a committed owner—it’s coming from a professional who is collecting a fee. After all, it ain’t their money.

Alignment is an issue that everyone raves about, but won’t do anything about it.  

There is no next fund

In total, the Zell/Chilmark fund made investments in ten companies in the grocery, radio, bedding, sports equipment, drugstore, and airline business sectors, and generated a 23.5 percent internal rate of return at 2.9 times invested capital from 1990 to 2000. After the fund’s last investment in 1998, people called and asked me, “What’s the next fund?” I said, “There is no next fund.” The market had turned; the window for finding distressed assets at high discounts to replacement cost had passed. I didn’t want to just be in the business of raising money. If I asked someone to give me money to invest, I had to have a specific thesis. I wasn’t out to gobble up as much money as I could. Instead, I shifted to identifying investment opportunities for my own capital and for those I invited to join me.

Zero times. That’s how many managers I’ve seen stop raising funds after a successful fund. Remember, their self-interest is always greater than the investor’s interest.

We’ve always done it that way

As we dug in, we heard a common phrase that sounded like a mantra: “We’ve just always done it that way.” The phrase makes me shudder. To me it is the antithesis of progress. But beneath layers of bureaucracy, I saw employees with creativity, drive, and passion. I wanted to infuse them with an entrepreneurial spirit—to accelerate evolution through innovation, openness, and accountability. I knew that if I went into my new leadership role sounding like another Wall Street guy, I would just blend into the scenery. To galvanize employees, I chose a strong, outspoken approach. I knew that some of our strategies might not be popular, but I had never shied away from the heat of taking a company or industry in a new direction.

There’s no better indicator of a bureaucratic organization than “we’ve always done it that way.”

No surprises

As a risk-taker, my greatest fear is not having information that might protect me from making a mistake. The only way I can do that is to create an atmosphere where there are no silos—where everybody knows everything that’s going on. I tell people “No surprises” and I mean it. I’m confident enough to believe that if I catch a problem early on, we’ll be smart enough to fix it. So, don’t hide things. Relax. We don’t kill the messenger around here.

Bad news isn’t such an issue when organizations sit down and agree that mistakes will be made and bad things will happen. Admit it, learn from it, and move on. Playing this game of hiding or massaging bad news is obvious to everyone and becomes a cancer on an organization.

More than brilliance is needed

There’s a baseline IQ level needed to work at my firm, but I don’t need rocket scientists. After that, what best predicts your success in my world is drive, energy, attitude, judgment, conviction, and passion. And an ability to cut to the center of an issue. I’d trade another twenty IQ points for those qualities any day. I’ve had a number of brilliant people working for me who didn’t make it because they couldn’t grasp how to think about a deal.

I remember walking into the office one night around 8:00 p.m. to find a guy working on a ten-year projection for a real estate project we were considering buying. I looked at what he was doing and I realized how many hours he’d spent laboring over his calculations. His approach was ass-backward. I said, “You’ve got to be able to look at the deal and know what it hinges on to know whether it works or not. If you realize that the key component works, then you use the numbers to test it. You don’t do the numbers to find out eight hours later whether it was worth starting.”

I’m sure his IQ was higher than mine. But that isn’t how we operate. You have to be able to effectively assess the initial picture and see where the greatest risk is most likely to be, or you’ll spend your life doing numbers just to find out if a deal will work. And all that time lost is time you could have been looking at other opportunities.

The ability to make decisions under pressure and handle uncertainty/ambiguity beats a big IQ.

If you want results, you need an owner

The fact that I never got that call from U-M made me realize that to make a meaningful impact, a philanthropic program—just like an investment—needs an owner. Someone who has a vision, is paying attention, asking tough questions, challenging, and pushing for more results.

Things get done when there is an owner with the authority and incentive to get the job done. Most organizational tasks don’t have real ownership or the right incentives, so things get done slowly, or not at all.