If you are a normal person, you are not control of billions of dollars to invest in., but it makes good sense to see if those that do control billions are doing what you are thinking about on a larger scale. One of the biggest alternative asset managers is a company called Blackstone Group which has $544 billion under administration with about $148 billion of client capital which needs a home. The co-founder, chairman and chief executive Stephen Schwarzman has that problem, but he sees opportunity.

Recently Mr. Schwarzman wrote a book called What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence and with every writer, the next phase is a book tour. Andrew Willis wrote an article about him.

When Mr. Schwarzman founded the company, there were plenty of opportunities, he noted now there are thousands of smaller private equity and real estate funds searching for opportunities to invest, even though Mr. Schwarzman believes Blackstone can still find and buy very good positions. In the past year, the company bought $18.7 billion on US warehouses from Singapore based logistics company GLP. This was billed as the largest real estate transaction in history.

Mr. Schwarzman believes culture is an important element in the company and spends one morning or afternoon lecturing at the 3 week training program that is mandatory for every new employee.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, for most companies service and culture are considered to be very important, what makes it so and who keeps the culture alive? How does the President or CEO keep the culture to all employees? Blackstone is a very specialized company, but everyone takes a 3 week training program, think about when you joined the company or someone you know joins a company, what do they do?

There are more questions than answers, till the next time – to raising questions.