Articles

Below is a selection of content that we found thought provoking.

Modern Sardine Management

Modern Sardine Management

Mr. A had a can of sardines. He sold them to Mr. B for $1. Mr. B sold them to Mr. C for $2. Mr. C sold them to Mr. D for $3. Mr. D opened them and found they were rotten. He complained to Mr. C that he wanted his money back. Mr. C said "No, you don't understand. There are eating sardines and trading sardines. Those were trading sardines."by Samuel Zell Premise: The current oversupply of real estate is different from past cyclical excesses. The present situation is a result of commoditization...

Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules for Investors

Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules for Investors

September 1998 Farrell spent decades as the head of market strategy at Merrill Lynch and gain universal respect and admiration his insights and market wisdom have stood the test of time. Markets tend to return to the mean over time. Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction. There are no new eras - excesses are never permanent. Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways. The...

Gen Colin Powell’s Thirteen Rules of Leadership

Gen Colin Powell’s Thirteen Rules of Leadership

October 18, 2021 As we reflect on former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s legacy, we are reminded of his thirteen rules of leadership which have guided so many of our colleagues and principals. We are grateful for his love of the State Department and his legacy that we still feel in the workplace. Secretary Powell’s 13 Rules: It ain’t as bad as you think! It will look better in the morning. Get mad then get over it. Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position...

Clay Christensen:  How Will You Measure Your Life

Clay Christensen: How Will You Measure Your Life

Editor’s Note: When the members of the class of 2010 entered business school, the economy was strong and their post-graduation ambitions could be limitless. Just a few weeks later, the economy went into a tailspin. They’ve spent the past two years recalibrating their worldview and their definition of success. The students seem highly aware of how the world has changed (as the sampling of views in this article shows). In the spring, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor...

Hubert Joly and Best Buy

Hubert Joly and Best Buy

By Hubert Joly When I joined Best Buy BBY -0.25% on September 4, 2012, the mood was grim. The previous CEO had been fired, embroiled in a scandal, and the share price was plummeting. Founder Dick Schulze had just launched his offensive to take the company private. Article after article predicted that the company would die, unable to weather market changes and low-cost online competition. I had spent my career in technology, videogames, travel and consulting so I was new not only to Best Buy,...

George Shultz:  The 10 most important things I’ve learned about trust over my 100 years

George Shultz: The 10 most important things I’ve learned about trust over my 100 years

George P. Shultz is a former U.S. secretary of labor, treasury and state, and was director of the Office of Management and Budget. He is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Dec. 13 marks my turning 100 years young. I’ve learned much over that time, but looking back, I’m struck that there is one lesson I learned early and then relearned over and over: Trust is the coin of the realm. When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the...

Rudyard Kipling:  If-

Rudyard Kipling: If-

by Rudyard Kipling (‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies) If you can keep your head when all about youAre losing theirs and blaming it on you,If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,But make allowance for their doubting too;If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;If you can think—and not make thoughts...

Mark Andreessen:  It’s Time to Build

Mark Andreessen: It’s Time to Build

Written by Marc Andreessen Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared —...

Sam Walton:  Running a Successful Company – Ten Rules That Worked For Me

Sam Walton: Running a Successful Company – Ten Rules That Worked For Me

Running A Successful Company: Ten Rules That Worked for MeFrom Sam Walton, Made in America, June 1992 This isn’t the first time that I’ve been asked to come up with a list of rules for success, but it is the first time I’ve actually sat down and done it. I’m glad I did because its been a revealing exercise for me. The truth is…I do seem to have a couple of dozen things that I’ve singled out at one time or another as the “key to the whole thing.” One I don’t even have on my list is “work hard.”...

The University of Georgia’s Corsair Society

The University of Georgia’s Corsair Society

Written by Lori Johnston (ABJ '95 UGA) and Jeremy Bales (AB, ABJ '01 UGA) and published in the December 2014 issue of GEORGIA MAGAZINE The Statue of Liberty looms in the distance through the floor-to-ceiling windows on the 27th floor of Citi’s Greenwich Street offices in the Tribeca neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. Bethany McCain (AB, AB ’13), surrounded by fellow University of Georgia alumni, takes a final few moments to savor the view of the Hudson River before she and the others head off to...

Jim Grant:  Perspective on US Fiscal Position

Jim Grant: Perspective on US Fiscal Position

Written by James Grant, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer America’s deteriorating public credit is the cold-button issue of the 2018 midterms. With rare bipartisanship, Democrats and Republicans compete to pretend that the country isn’t going broke. In 1992, the third-party presidential candidate Ross Perot likened the widening gap between federal receipts and federal spending to “the crazy aunt tucked away in the room upstairs nobody talks about.” The old gal’s dottier than ever. It took the...

Lewis Grizzard:  Great moments in a would-be father’s life

Lewis Grizzard: Great moments in a would-be father’s life

To my son, if I ever have one: Kid, I am writing this on Sept. 3, 1984. I have just returned from Athens, where I spent Saturday watching the University of Georgia, your old dad’s alma mater, play football against Clemson. While the events of the day were still fresh on my mind, I wanted to recount them so if you are ever born, you can read this and perhaps be able to share one of the great moments in your father’s life. Saturday was a wonderful day on the Georgia campus. We are talking blue,...

Howard Marks:  Memos

Howard Marks: Memos

Since 1990, Oaktree Capital's Howard Marks has been routinely publishing memos to memorialize lessons he has learned, insights he has had, and effects of current events on the markets. His memos provide unique clarity into the world around us as it relates to financial markets and the investments we make. Click this link below to view his memos archive: https://www.oaktreecapital.com/insights/howard-marks-memos

Mark Leonard:  On Effective Boards of Directors

Mark Leonard: On Effective Boards of Directors

Our current policy is to invest all of our retained investor’s capital (and then some) when we think we can achieve our targeted hurdle rates. When we can’t find enough attractive investments, we plan to maintain our hurdle rates and build cash for as long as our shareholders and board will allow. We believe that long-term shareholders and boards should set those policies, which segues nicely into discussing shareholder democracy and the role of boards. Almost half of our shares trade each...

Warren Buffett:  Berkshire Hathaway Chairman’s Shareholder Letters

Warren Buffett: Berkshire Hathaway Chairman’s Shareholder Letters

Since 1977, Berkshire Hathaway has been delivering exceptional returns for shareholders, through the continued execution of a logical, rules-driven value investment strategy. Their annual shareholders are regarded as candid and insightful glimpses into how the company sees the world and in turn makes investments. Click this link below to view their shareholder letter archives: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

Fernando del Pino:  The Five Experiments

Fernando del Pino: The Five Experiments

By Fernando del PinoDecember 2015 When I was kindly invited by our founder to make a presentation in our first meeting, I thought it would be interesting to bring out some global views on what I believe is a multi- generational decline of the Western civilization rather than talking about the very interesting but narrower field of investment. I must start with two disclaimers: the first is that I am not a historian, so I do not pretend all my data to be utterly accurate or exhaustive (although...

Remembering a Hero:  Welles Crowther

Remembering a Hero: Welles Crowther

Written by Peggy Noonan What do I think about when I think about that day? The firemen who climbed “the stairway to Heaven” with 50, 60 pounds of gear. The people who called from Windows on the World and said: “I just want you to know I love you.” The men on the plane who tried to take the cockpit of Flight 93 before it went down in a Pennsylvania field: “Let’s roll.” And I think about Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandanna. He was 24, from Nyack, N.Y. He played lacrosse at Boston...

Leo Tolstoy on Abraham Lincoln

Leo Tolstoy on Abraham Lincoln

TOLSTOI HOLDS LINCOLN WORLD’S GREATEST HERO. Bigger Than His Country. Bigger Than All the Presidents Together: a Christ in Miniature. STILL TOO NEAR TO APPRECIATE HIS POWER. Great Russian Tells of Reverence For Lincoln Even Among Barbarians. Of all the great national heroes and statesman of history, Lincoln is the only real giant. Alexander, Fredric the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Gladstone and even Washington stand in greatness of character, in depth of feeling and in a certain moral power far...

Morten Hansen: How to Succeed In Business?  Do Less.

Morten Hansen: How to Succeed In Business? Do Less.

By Morten T. Hansen Most Americans work impossibly hard. We put in long hours and maximum effort, but better performance often eludes us. I’m no exception. I remember being in my 20s and landing my dream job as a management consultant at the posh London office of the U.S.-based Boston Consulting Group. I strode through the front doors on my first day wearing an elegant new blue suit and equipped with what I thought was a brilliant strategy for impressing my bosses: I would work crazy hours....

Greg Kaplan’s Note to Son Zach Upon Starting a Summer Internship

Greg Kaplan’s Note to Son Zach Upon Starting a Summer Internship

My 19 year old son Zach just finished his first summer internship. Back in May, a few days before he started his internship, I sent him this email... Zach, as you begin your first serious internship, I wanted to share some advice. When I started my first job, I wish someone would have sat me down and explained to me how to be successful in a workplace and what people expected of me. While home and college were great preparation for learning and rigorous thinking, they were not good preparation...

Byron Wien: Lessons I Have Learned in My First 80 Years

Byron Wien: Lessons I Have Learned in My First 80 Years

I was scheduled to speak about the world outlook at an investment conference recently and shortly before my time slot the conference organizer said the audience was more interested in what I had learned over the course of my career than what I had to say about the market.  I jotted a few notes down and later expanded and edited what I said that day. I have since been encouraged to share my thoughts with a broader audience. Here are some of the lessons I have learned in my first 80 years. I...

Admiral James Stockdale:  Courage Under Fire

Admiral James Stockdale: Courage Under Fire

Testing Epictetus's Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human BehaviorJames Bond Stockdale I came to the philosophic life as a thirty-eight-year-old naval pilot in grad school at Stanford University. I had been in the navy for twenty years and scarcely ever out of a cockpit. In 1962, I began my second year of studying international relations so I could become a strategic planner in the Pentagon. But my heart wasn’t in it. I had yet to be inspired at Stanford and saw myself as just processing tedious...