Jul

19

Jack Barnaby, the best rackets coach, never learned how to string rackets. He wanted to be a coach and mentor for the boys and not a stringer. My friend Larry Abrams decided not to let others buy his time but to do something he loves every day and became an investor. I don't know how tanki works or other computer games so I can't discuss it with Aubrey when he calls each day to talk about tanki. So I can talk to him about other important things. Life is short. Do what you love. Try to realize the things that you're best suited to do. How does this apply to markets? Don't take flyers in things that you don't know about. Study up on the field that you're involved in. Don't listen to experts?

Vince Fulco writes: 

One excellent lesson I learned from the Chair after too much time on the sellside was shut off the media message almost entirely. In most instances, they highlight/profile those who are available and especially with a sharp witted sound bite. Neither of which makes for successful speculation.

Anatoly Veltman writes:

So true. Specialization, niche, is what scores big. Anyone achieving monopoly/oligopoly is real — just try to hold on to it!

On a parallel subject, the greatest coups in marketing history were by leaders who cultivated a whole new consumer culture. Ford, Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Dimon…who else comes to mind?

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

A minor quibble about Anatoly's earlier comment about people who forged a whole new consumer culture. Ford and Hitler are not people who belong on the list. Ford created a new industrial culture but his "consumers" were as nostalgically retrograde as Dearborn Village. The customers for the Model-T were "country" people who used them as substitutes for mules and horses; the Model T was as mechanically simple as the small motor equipment that was already in use (cream separators, for example) so the farmers themselves could work on them. The car's greatest virtue were its high axles and body; it could navigate the mud of back roads in a way that other cars could not. The automobile consumer culture - automatic starter, changing body styles, pneumatic tires and brakes, dealerships and credit sales - were all invented by people other than Ford. But for Edsel, who managed to persuade his father to adopt some of these innovations, Ford might have failed even before the Depression (by 1940 it was bankrupt but was saved by WW II's war orders, rationing and tax laws which gave the family 6 years' relief from competition). As for Hitler the consumer culture of the Third Reich was even more backward-looking. The most successful industrial country in history was to become an empire of small-holding farmers - like the dairymen of the Bavarian alps. Women were not supposed to work (the most amazing single fact of WW II is that the Germans, unlike the British and Americans and, most of all, the Russians, never had any women doing any war work at all).


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