Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Leah Zell


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) sst ✈(conjugate) 00:06, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Leah Zell

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This is a poorly sourced Biography of a Living Person. This article is full of false information, and, for that reason, the subject has personally asked for this article to be removed. For example, two different birth years are stated, and both are incorrect. Place of birth and the name of the subject's company are also incorrect. Many statements are lacking in sources or are supported by unverifiable/unreliable sources. Source 3 is an example of an unverifiable and unreliable source, as it gives false information. I would suggest that this article be removed until a reliable replacement article can be produced, as it is damaging to the reputation of the subject Lizardbb (talk) 22:03, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Businesspeople-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:21, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:21, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Poland-related deletion discussions. North America1000 22:21, 26 January 2016 (UTC)


 * Automated comment: This AfD was not correctly transcluded to the log (step 3). I have transcluded it to Articles for deletion/Log/2016 January 26.  —cyberbot I   Talk to my owner :Online 22:28, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete she is not notable. Curro2 (talk) 01:29, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Delete as certainly not enough solid in-depth third-party sources overall for the applicable notability. SwisterTwister   talk  05:21, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * When the article was nominated for deletion, it contained several reliable sources about the subject, including the two book sources I listed below. Did you review the sources in the article? Cunard (talk) 07:17, 30 January 2016 (UTC)

Keep per the significant coverage in reliable sources.  The book notes: "Lean Joy Zell is the kind of person who would succeed running a megacorporation, chairing a history department at an Ivy League college, or holding a Cabinet post. Her intelligence and confident élan radiate from her like a high-tension electrical line. In her role as manager of the Liberty Acorn International Fund, she has the job of finding ways to invest more than $2 billion across the world in small- and mid-cap companies. Like John Rogers and Bill Miller, she is largely a value player, but she focuses on overseas companies that have market capitalizations under $5 billion. She spends most of her time traveling between the countries where she has the top-five allocations: the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Japan, Germany, and Canada. She has more frequent-flyer miles than time to spend them. Taut with short hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Leah Zell takes her time to compose her sentences as if everyone one of them is to be written out in elegant prose. With continents to consider, she does the mental calculus of finding bargains across different economies, reading prospectuses in different languages, diversifying across several industries, and dealing with fluctuations of several currencies. Holding a Ph.D. from Harvard in modern European social and economic history, she's an unabashed expert on how Europe and Japan rebuilt after World War II. With that unique perspective, she knows the landscape with an academic, disciplined sense of history. Although she is brimming with investment ideas, Zell doesn't have to go far to discuss investing. Her husband and partner, Ralph Wanger, is the revered manager of the Liberty Acorn Fund, a small-cap domestic fund. Her brother, Sam Zell, is the legendary real estate mogul also known as 'the grave dancer' for his prowess in finding properties at fire-sale prices. Balance is a powerful theme in Zell's work. Her Harvard dissertation concentrated on finding a workable balance of economic growth and stability in the postwar era. As a value investor, she is consantly seeking the ideal medium between price and the intrinsic value of a company. Due to the objective of her fund, she has to look for that delicate combination outside the sphere of powerful international companies like Nestlé, Philips, Daimler, and Nokia. Instead, she focuses her research on lesser-known companies like the Serco Group, Li & Fung, Autogrill, and Capita Group. Her fund contains no more than 20 percent of its holdings in any one industry; it's diversifed across business services, consumer goods/services, financial services, broadcasting/media, and industrials."  The book notes: "Leah Zell aims small. She has laser focus, both in management and in her favorite pastime, dual slalom skiing, in which success rests on picking a course through the fall line and executing with precision. At her company, Lizard Investors, she exercises what she calls 'ruthless elimination' of stocks to create a top-performing portfolio of international small-cap stocks. Zell embodies keen concentration and determination. ... Originally, Zell studied European history at Harvard, where she earned her PhD. Then she discovered a love for getting more immediate feedback and doing entrpreneurial research, so she changed careers and took a job on Wall Street. Her famous sibling, Sam Zell, helped her make the decision. Sam is known in the business community as the 'grave dancer,' and was described in an October 2013 article in Forbes as a '72-year-old man with a penchant for both gold chains and profanity, as a corporate barbarian who callously ransacked great journalistic institutions in a greedy pursuit of short-term profit.' In contrast, Forbes dubbed Leah 'the queen of small caps' in 2002. Despite these different depictions, in many ways Sam and Leah are seeking the same thing: great entrepreneurs and companies they can buy at a discount and see grow over the long term. Zell uses her academic background to deeply research international small cap stocks. After leaving the investment banking world of Lehman Brothers in 1984, she joined the staff of money manager Ralph Wanger. From 1992 to 2003, Zell served as lead portfolio manager for Wanger Asset Management's Acorn International Fund, and through 2005 as lead manager for Wanger Small European Companies Fund. Zell spent five years in the top 10 percent of her asset management peers during her tenure as the manager for Acorn International before Zell and Wanger sold the firm in 2003. It is now a subsidiary of Ameriprise Financial under the Colombia brand. Zell is recognized as a pioneer in international small-cap investing, and in 2008, she set up her own shop. As founder and principal of Lizard Investors and the portfolio manager of Lizard International Fund, Zell and her team gather enormous amounts of information..." There is sufficient coverage in reliable sources to allow Leah Zell to pass Notability, which requires "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject". Cunard (talk) 07:17, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep Not only does Zell pass WP:GNG, but everyone here voting delete is saying that AfC is garbage and should be dumped as a horrible experiment because it doesn't work. --MurderByDeletionism</i><sup style="color:black;">"bang!" 05:57, 30 January 2016 (UTC)
 * Keep per WP:HEY. From what I see now, I see lots of reliable sources, in depth, starting with Forbes. Whatever she has done, she has sold her bio well. Bearian (talk) 20:30, 1 February 2016 (UTC)
 * If there is any incorrect information, such as her age, we can correct that through normal editing processes, as we did with Dan Savage and many other articles. AfD is not for clean-up. Bearian (talk) 20:34, 1 February 2016 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.