Related link (book PDF): Maritime Economics 3rd EditionBusiness Wars Podcast: Boeing vs. Airbus (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7)
Related book: Stillness Is the KeyThe Positive Side of Shame (LINK)
Related book (to be released in November): Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend SmarterMutual Fund Observer, September 2017 (LINK)
I want you to think about the following question, because it can mean the difference between just getting through the day at work, and doing the best work of your life.
What's the most important thing you can get done today?
Sheryl Sandberg recently spoke to Inc. to share some lessons learned over the years. One concept she spoke about really resonated with me.
It's called:
Ruthless prioritization.
"I think the most important thing we've learned as we've grown is that we have to prioritize," said Sandberg. "We talk about it as ruthless prioritization. And by that what we mean is only do the very best of the ideas. Lots of times you have very good ideas. But they're not as good as the most important thing you could be doing. And you have to make the hard choices."
Related book: Competing Against Luck
Related previous conversation between Christensen and Andreessen: a16z Podcast: Disruption in Business… and LifeProf Scott Galloway’s 10 Rules for Your Career (LINK)
Related book: The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of LivingNow is never (but here comes tomorrow) - by Seth Godin (LINK)
"The word theories gets a bum rap with managers because the word theory is associated with the word theoretical which connotes impractical. But a theory is a statement of causality. It's a statement of what causes what and why. And when you think about it in those terms, you as technologists or managers are voracious consumers of theory. Because every time you take an action it's predicated upon a belief that if you do this, you'll get the result that you want. And every time you put a plan into place it's predicated upon a set of theories which tells you that if you do these things, you'll be successful. But most of the people aren't even aware of the theories they use. And many times the theories that you use are destructive rather than productive."
"I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with life unless I could acquire a better theory-structure on which to hang my observations and experiences. By then, my craving for more theory had a long history. Partly, I had always loved theory as an aid in puzzle solving and as a means of satisfying my monkey-like-curiosity. And, partly, I had found that theory-structure was a superpower in helping one get what one wanted. As I had early discovered in school wherein I had excelled without labor, guided by theory, while many others, without mastery of theory failed despite monstrous effort. Better theory I thought had always worked for me and, if now available could make me acquire capital and independence faster and better assist everything I loved."
Related books: HERE1970 article on Colonel Sanders and Kentucky Fried Chicken [H/T @uncapwisdom] (LINK)
Mark Hart of Corriente Advisors has been betting that China’s currency will collapse. He’s not about to give up now.Books:
Related book: The Everything StoreClayton Christensen: What I’ll Miss About Andy Grove (LINK)
Strong investor demand allowed the company to tighten yields on the offering. The longest part of the sale was $2.5 billion of 3.125 percent of 10-year bonds offering yielding 1.3 percentage points more than similar-maturity Treasuries, according to Bloomberg data.Investor orders for Berkshire Hathaway bond sale hit $34bn (LINK)
Investor orders for a piece of a $9bn Berkshire Hathaway bond sale eclipsed $30bn on Tuesday, as the conglomerate headed by Warren Buffett sought to repay bank loans used to finance its $36bn takeover of Precision Castparts.
Berkshire Hathaway Energy Valuation Indicators (LINK)The deal, spread across seven tranches, underscored the accessibility to the market that high-grade companies have enjoyed over the past several weeks, and stands in sharp contrast to the experience of junk-rated groups which have struggled under heightened volatility and erratic fund flows.
Three hours a day is quite enough,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. The essay continues to tantalise its readers today, thanks in part to a forecast that is looking magnificently right — that in advanced economies people could be up to eight times better off in 2030 than in 1930 — coupled with a forecast that is looking spectacularly wrong, that we would be working 15-hour weeks.
Bitcoin and Diversity - by Ben Thompson (LINK)In 2008, economists Lorenzo Pecchi and Gustavo Piga edited a book in which celebrated economists pondered Keynes’s essay. One contributor, Benjamin Friedman of Harvard University, has recently revisited the question of what Keynes got wrong, and produced a thought-provoking answer.
Related book: The InnovatorsIs Disruption Still a Thing? (Clayton Christensen)
Related books, HEREBinary Truths with Peter Thiel
Related book: Zero to OneAffirm's Max Levchin Makes Some Predictions
Related book: The Innovator's Dilemma..............
Irving Fisher was one of the country’s leading economists who made his fortune by inventing the Rolodex, known then as the Visible Index Card System. He invested a large amount of his money in stock, and even months into the crash, he continued to reassure investors that the market was secure. Unfortunately, he lost most of his fortune and reputation before the market began to recover in 1932. In 1930, he wrote The Stock Market Crash and After, discussing real growth in the manufacturing sector of the country. This may explain his continued investment in stocks and his optimism over the performance of the market. According to one source, what Fisher considered an increase in manufacturing was actually an increase in manufacturing efficiency (how much each worker could produce), due to improvements in technology manufacturing practices.
Lifespans of top companies are shrinking, according to an Innosight study of the S&P 500 Index:
- 61-year tenure for average firm in 1958 narrowed to 25 years in 1980—to 18 years now.
- A warning to execs: At current churn rate, 75% of the S&P 500 will be replaced by 2027.
- To survive and thrive, leaders must "create, operate and trade" their business units without losing control of their company.
Related books: Clayton Christensen's books, which you can find HERE.
When the New Yorker this week published Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s sharply written dismissal of “disruptive innovation,” it was an attack on one of the most widely cited and celebrated ideas in modern business. As first laid out by its creator, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, in his 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, the theory holds that established companies, acting rationally and carefully to stay on top, leave themselves vulnerable to upstarts who find ways to do things more cheaply, often with a new technology. The book became a bestseller in 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, as it seemed to describe the threat e-commerce posed to established companies. Christensen expanded on it in a series of sequels, including The Innovator’s Solution, The Innovator’s Prescription, about health care, and Disrupting Class, about education.
Disruption, as Lepore notes, has since become an all-purpose rallying cry, not only in Silicon Valley—though especially there—but in boardrooms everywhere. “It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence,” she writes. In the article, she accuses Christensen of poor scholarship (handpicking case studies that conform to his theory); misreading history (some companies he casts as doomed continued to perform well); and myopia (missing, for example, the role unions played in the collapse of U.S. Steel). Lepore also notes that a fund manager who used Christensen’s theory as an investment strategy lost even more than most in the Nasdaq implosion of 2000.
Christensen hasn’t responded in writing to the essay, but when I reached him by phone on Thursday afternoon, it was clear he’d been thinking about it. Consistently described by those who know him as a generous and thoughtful and upbeat person, he is also capable of fury. “Keep asking me questions,” he said, “it’s helping me.”...............
Porter was interested in how companies succeed. The scholar who in some respects became his successor, Clayton M. Christensen, entered a doctoral program at the Harvard Business School in 1989 and joined the faculty in 1992. Christensen was interested in why companies fail. In his 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” he argued that, very often, it isn’t because their executives made bad decisions but because they made good decisions, the same kind of good decisions that had made those companies successful for decades. (The “innovator’s dilemma” is that “doing the right thing is the wrong thing.”) As Christensen saw it, the problem was the velocity of history, and it wasn’t so much a problem as a missed opportunity, like a plane that takes off without you, except that you didn’t even know there was a plane, and had wandered onto the airfield, which you thought was a meadow, and the plane ran you over during takeoff. Manufacturers of mainframe computers made good decisions about making and selling mainframe computers and devising important refinements to them in their R. & D. departments—“sustaining innovations,” Christensen called them—but, busy pleasing their mainframe customers, one tinker at a time, they missed what an entirely untapped customer wanted, personal computers, the market for which was created by what Christensen called “disruptive innovation”: the selling of a cheaper, poorer-quality product that initially reaches less profitable customers but eventually takes over and devours an entire industry.
JOURNALISTS, AS 2013 ended, were busy declaring the death of MOOCs, more formally known as massive open online courses. Silicon Valley startup Udacity, one of the first to offer the free Web-based college classes, had just announced its pivot to vocational training — a sure sign to some that this much-hyped revolution in higher education had failed. The collective sigh of relief from more traditional colleges and universities was audible.
The news, however, must have also had the companies that had enthusiastically jumped on the MOOC train feeling a bit like Mark Twain. When newspapers confused Twain for his ailing cousin, the writer famously quipped, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Undoubtedly pronouncements over MOOCs’ demise are likewise premature. And their potential to disrupt — on price, technology, even pedagogy — in a long-stagnant industry is only just beginning to be seen.