Golden advice from a mining magnate - HARVEY SCHACHTER

Philanthropist Seymour Schulich has an MBA school named after him at York University. But when it comes to giving career advice, the former stock analyst who struck it rich with his gold company in Nevada is anything but academic.

In Get Smarter, written with The Globe and Mail's business columnist, Derek DeCloet, he ladles out homespun wisdom in two-to-four-page crisply written, anecdote-laden chapters aimed at 30- to 40-year-olds, but golden at any age.

He starts with the decision-making tool that he began to wield back in university days and continued to employ in the decisions that helped him to become a billionaire. It's a variation of the pro-con method, but with weighting that allows you to strip away emotion and examine the importance of all the points at stake.

Here's how it works: Start on one piece of paper listing all the positive things you can about the issue in question, giving each item a score from zero to 10 -- the higher the score, the more important it is to you. Then move on to the negatives, scoring them from zero to 10 as well, only this time 10 refers to a major drawback.

Now add up the scores on each sheet. If the positive score is at least double the negative score, you should do whatever is under consideration. But if the positives don't attain that two-to-one advantage, you shouldn't tackle it -- or, at least, you should think twice.

"Yes, it is ridiculously easy. But one of the great fallacies of modern life is that decision-making has to be complicated to be effective," he says.

Picking a field to work in is just as easy, to his mind. Go for a business with high profit margins since the jobs usually pay more, have fewer layoffs and bankruptcies, and are less stressful. He spent a good chunk of his life in oil and mining, where the great advantage is that you can double or triple the value of a company with one drill hole. "No other industry can create wealth as rapidly," he observes.

But stay away from foreign oil plays, where you can run into expropriation. Closer to home, given the poor margins, he warns against airlines, auto parts, retailing, biotechnology, grocery stores, chemicals, wholesaling, machinery manufacturing, paper and forest products, auto manufacturing, restaurants, appliance manufacturing, trucking, any manufacturing competing with China, and telecom service.

"Don't misunderstand: You may be able to find fulfilment and a rewarding career in any of the above. But you're more likely to find satisfaction and superior financial rewards in industries with superior economics," he says.

You also want to be wary of four enemies of business people:

Ego: This destroys more people than any other single thing.

Greed: It can lead you to lose everything, he warns, as with the dog in Aesop's fable clutching a lamb chop in its jaw that crossed a stream and lunged at his reflection, hoping to get the second chop but dropping the first.

Alcohol and drugs: These two can destroy many an executive career.

Assistants who are sexually attractive, or, as he crudely puts it, "assistants with big breasts":Men have lost their career and fortune by succumbing to this temptation.

At the same time, he adds an important rule learned during 50 years of observation: Don't take your spouse or "significant other" to business meetings out of town or on tours. They aren't interested, and don't want to be there. They also can be a giant distraction, and can create havoc if they interact poorly with others.

But it helps to have a partner as a sounding board, both on the home front and in the office.

Many of the greatest start-ups in the past 30 years -- think of Apple, Oracle, Berkshire-Hathaway, Yahoo, and Google -- started as teams of two.

Mr. Schulich has worked all his life with partners, and recalls the many times he woke in the middle of the night with a brilliant idea that the next day his partner patiently talked him out of by listing many factors he had ignored. "Good partners are a blessing!" he says.

To keep them, you need to abide by the Golden Rule of Partnership: mutual veto power. If you cannot agree on a major proposition, you don't do it.

In the introduction, he states his hope that each reader who invests time and money in the book will leave with 20 to 30 ideas -- some that can help transform or shape their lives.

That seemed like a bold statement, but, in fact, he delivers enough solid, diverse advice to meet that goal for many readers.

It's also an interesting approach to a memoir, since he confines himself in the main part of the book to offering business advice and leaves his own experiences with his mining company, Franco-Nevada Mining Corp., to the second appendix (the first appendix, showing his sense of what appeals to readers, lists his top 10 all-time movies).