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"There is always a better way of doing everything than the way which is standard at the moment. It is a good thing for a man to be pushed into finding that better way." -Harvey Firestone (via Men and Rubber: The Story of Business)

Howard Marks on CNBC (Video 1, Video 2)

Hot-Stock Rally Tests the Patience of a Choosy Lot: Value Investors ($) [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Wells Fargo: What It Will Take to Clean Up the Mess [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast: Show 60 - The Celtic Holocaust (LINK)

Julius Caesar is our travel guide as he takes us through his murderous subjugation of the native Celtic tribal peoples of ancient Gaul. It sounds vaguely like other, recent European colonial conquests...until the natives nearly win.

The Tim Ferriss Show: From Long-Shot to $50 Billion Empire – Bill Rasmussen (LINK)

Bill Rasmussen is the co-founder of ESPN. He turned a massive gamble into an opportunity to create the 24-hour programming cycle used universally by networks today.

Revisionist History Podcast: "McDonald's Broke My Heart" (LINK)

McDonald’s used to make the best fast food french fries in the world — until they changed their recipe in 1990. Revisionist History travels to the top food R&D lab in the country to discover what was lost, and why for the past generation we’ve been eating french fries that taste like cardboard.

These Scientists Took Over a Computer by Encoding Malware in DNA - by Ed Yong (LINK)

"The mind, unconquered by violent passions, is a citadel, for a man has no fortress more impregnable in which to find refuge and remain safe forever." -Marcus Aurelius (Source)

No business can succeed unless it is constantly revising its product...

Here's another example of the importance of companies needing to continually innovate, and be willing to invent something that will upend a current successful product when the future is going to require something new (think Apple with the iPhone upending the iPod, Netflix with streaming upending DVD-by-mail, Amazon with Kindle and AWS to an extent, and others in more recent times). In this case, it was the tire business back in the early 20th century. From Men and Rubber: The Story of Business:

The easy course was to take for granted that, having established a fair solid-tire business, that business would expand and continue, and there would be no need to go into new fields. But the gasoline car was developing rapidly—although only Mr. Ford at that time had any notion that the automobile would be what it is today. It seemed to me inevitable that the automobile would come into wide use. That would mean an enormous tire requirement, and these tires would be pneumatics. By no means all our stockholders agreed with me, and one man holding a large block of stock disagreed in so personal a way that I had to arrange to buy out his stock. I saw clearly that, if we limited ourselves to solid tires, our business would slowly die. No business can succeed unless it is constantly revising its product, not only to meet the actual demands of today, but also the potential demands of tomorrow.  

A product can never really be standardized—that is not in the nature of things. The real point is that changes should not be made lightly or for catch-penny purposes. They should be made only to improve convenience or durability or appearance. Some changes may be made in the interests of more economical manufacturing, but this is dangerous ground, for it may lead one into thinking more of the factory than of the public.

No one making and selling what he knows to be a poor thing can hope to continue to succeed...

From Harvey Firestone in Men and Rubber: The Story of Business:

If our tires were better than any others manufactured, and I believed they were, then we could sell them at a price higher than out competitors charged. The public is always willing to pay for quality. If we were just fooling ourselves about the quality being better, then the public would not pay us an extra price and we should fail. The real test was of product. Cutting the quality was urged on me, but it did not impress me as being an alternative. If we lowered our quality and frankly turned out poor tires, then we should eventually have to fail, because no one making and selling what he knows to be a poor thing can hope to continue to succeed.  

It all gets around to the service you are trying to render. I believe in keeping prices low, for, regardless of service, there is no real profit in high prices, because high prices automatically cut down volume. But the only possible way to lower prices and still keep business is to save in the cost of manufacturing by improved processes. Quality must go up, not down, and if a competitor lowers his quality, that is exactly the time for you to raise yours. Our competitors did not lower their qualities--they did not have to do that in order to get under our prices, for their manufacturing facilities were better and their volume so much larger than ours. We met the test; we were selling the highest-priced tire on the market, but our sales kept up steadily. We were not put out of business. Competition rarely puts any one out of business--a man usually puts himself out of business either by not making a good article or by wrong methods in sales or finance.

Harvey Firestone on salesmanship...

From Men and Rubber: The Story of Business:

A man of affairs does not want to be bothered in the evening. A great many salesmen make the mistake of thinking that pestering a man is the same as selling him, and they get their prospects into such a state of exasperation that they would not buy a gold dollar from them at 50 percent off. Just getting to a man is not enough--it is when and how you get to him. There are more wrong times to sell a man than there are right times, and if I ever should write a book on salesmanship I should give about one third of the book to the topic "Common Sense." I have been buttonholed thousands of times by salesmen who, if they had just exercised a grain of common sense, would have known that, while the moment might be a very good one in which to make my acquaintance, it was no time at all to persuade me to buy anything. A good salesman will never intrude. In the first place, he will know that intruders do not make sales, and in the second place he will have brains enough to arrange for the right kind of a meeting with his prospect--no man likes to be panhandled, and some selling comes close to panhandling.

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Related previous post: The first principle of salesmanship...

Harvey Firestone quote

From Men and Rubber: The Story of Business:

Sometimes it seems that it might be better to go back to those simpler days, that one might get more out of a less complex life. But it cannot be done. One changes with prosperity. We all think we should like to lead a simple life, and then we find that we have picked up a thousand little habits which we are quite unconscious of because they are a part of our very being--and these habits are not in the simple life. There is no going back--except as a broken man.

The first principle of salesmanship...

From Harvey Firestone in Men and Rubber: The Story of Business:

Thereby, quite unconsciously, I turned up the first principle of salesmanship--which is, that you must thoroughly believe in what you have to sell. Then selling becomes merely a matter of showing how your product will help a prospect. I have always been more of a salesman than a manufacturer--it has been hard for me to learn factory methods. But selling has always come easy to me, simply because, since those patent medicines, I have never attempted to sell anything which I did not thoroughly believe in. Therefore, I have never really had to sell at all--only to explain the favour I expected to do the prospect. The principle holds true, whether one is selling a tangible thing, like a rubber tire, or whether one is selling something intangible, like the future of the company, either in the shape of capital stock or in the shape of credit at a bank. Persuading a man to buy is not, to my notion, salesmanship. It is just persuading him to buy and nothing more. 

Salesmanship has to establish a continuing relation in which the seller helps the buyer. Going to great lengths to sell a man something he does not want is a clumsy way of trying to get money--it is much simpler and just as honest to knock the fellow on the head and take the money away from him.

Thought, not money, is the real business capital...

From Harvey Firestone in Men and Rubber: The Story of Business:

Business is founded on thought. Optimism and enthusiasm are valuable in keeping up the morale of an organization--they are lubricants which help to overcome friction--but they cannot be the driving power, and they cannot substitute for well-thought-out business principles, any more than a machine will run just because it is well oiled. Power has to be transmitted before a wheel will turn. We give various names to the thought which has the power to turn the wheels. Sometimes we call it management. But there is another kind of management which is not based on thought and which is not management at all; for instance, there is the kind of management which operates solely on records. Records will guide thought, but they will not substitute for thought. Good management--that is, management with real thought behind it--does not bother trying to make its way by trickery, for it knows that fundamental honesty is the keystone of the arch of business. It knows that you will fail if you think more of matching competitors than of giving service; that you will fail if you put money or profits ahead of work, and that there is no reason why you should succeed if what you do does not benefit others.

This is not idealistic philosophy; it is the hardest kind of hard common sense. If you ask yourself why you are in business and can find no answer other than "I want to make money," you will save money by getting out of business and going to work for someone, for you are in business without sufficient reason. A business which exists without a reason is due for an early death. The single reason for the existence of any business must be that it supplies a human need or want, and, if my experience is worth anything, a business which has this reason for its existence will be bound in the end to prosper if thought be put into it. Thought, not money, is the real business capital, and if you know absolutely that what you are doing is right, then you are bound to accomplish it in due season.

I say this not because I read it somewhere in a book, but because I have lived it.

Harvey Firestone quote

"...a man ought now and then to get far enough away to have a look at himself and his affairs. Otherwise, he gets lost in the details and forgets what he is really doing." –Harvey Firestone, Men and Rubber: The Story of Business

Harvey Firestone quote

"The test of a business man is not whether he can make money in one or two boom years, or can make money through the luck of getting into the field first, but whether in a highly competitive field, without having any initial advantage over his competitors, he can outdistance them in a perfectly honourable way and keep the respect of himself and of his community." –Harvey Firestone, Men and Rubber: The Story of Business

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Related quotes:

Charlie Munger on competitive destruction

Harvey Firestone on surplus