Simon Sinek: Great Leaders Eat Last

As the old saying goes leaders are chosen by the people. In a highly competitive environment, employees tend to be egoistic and afraid. Why not create a great and complementary team based on trust and cooperation? It's not a coincidence that Patagonia's owner Yvon Chouinard hired friends and friends of friends to his company in its early innings. It's all about creating a great environment so people feel comfortable to give their best efforts for the company and his co-workers.


If you have the time, watch the complete speech.



If you are still interested, check his most recent book Great Leaders Eat Last.

Learning By Thinking

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest." - Confucius

According to a very recent HBS paper titled Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance, Di Stefano, Gino, Pisano and Staats argue that by "reflecting on and articulating the key lessons learned from experience, a person boosts her self-efficacy, which in turn has a positive effect on learning. In this respect, (...) the process of transforming a tacit into codified knowledge requires a cognitive investment that generates a deeper understanding of this knowledge."

In other words, reflection is as important as experience and is often underrated. If you haven't read the post on sense-making, you should, as both subjects (learning and sense-making) are correlated.

Learn smarter, not harder.

Is Patient Capital The Ultimate Competitive Advantage?

"Recently, when Page was challenged on an earnings call about the sums he was pouring into R&D, he made no effort to excuse it. "My struggle in general is to get people to spend money on long-term R&D," he said, noting that the amounts he was investing were modest in light of Google's profits. Then he chided the financial community: Shouldn't they be asking him to make more big, risky, long-term investments, not fewer?"

The struggle to build a long term capital base coupled with patience and the right incentives might be the ultimate competitive advantage.

Barry Schwartz Framework Re-framed: Profile Of An Outstanding Investor

"A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule… A wise person knows how to improvise… Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician — using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you’re serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers". - Barry Schwartz

Substitute the term "wise person" for "investor". There you go!

Dare to be Great - Howard Marks

Howard Marks latest piece made a commonsensical though forgotten in our day-to-day: overperformance requires differentiation. He breaks down this tenet in 3 more basic principles:

1. Define an explicit investment creed with sound principles;
2. Define what success is for you;
3. Are you willing to be different? And wrong?

As a Brazilian investor, I`m used to hear from potential investors that portfolios of local funds look too similar despite somewhat different investment thesis on the same company. At the end of the day, skill defined as intellectual capability is on average very similar across different investment firms. 

Although, as Marks cleverly puts it, "there's only one thing in the investment world that isn't two-edged, and that's alpha: superior insight or skill." Even not being a big fan of what the term 'alpha' coins as my principle guides me towards great absolute long term performance, i.e., mid-teens, insight or skill as he frames it is perspective for me, not higher IQ (or EQ). This "eternal preparation" B.S. definitely works, though in the longer term. Our minds are biased towards shorter timeframes, so it's nearly impossible for human beings speak out they are long term investors and indeed become one. As the old proverb says, "easier said than done". 

Another way to be different is through concentration. Without preparation though it is nearly impossible (imprudent would be the best fit here) to have a concentrated portfolio. With experience and mental models lacking, one can't overperform in the long run. So if you want to dare to LOOK wrong, better be prepared.