The Ledger, every show

“I don't think that he, like most business academics, he doesn't know much about business, right? Like he hasn't gone out and practiced a lot.”

“The training aspect of it, the knowledge aspect of it, which is what's taught now in strategy in business schools generally sucks. It's gone on a crazy theoretical bent. The strategy academy as a whole has fallen in love with a theory called the resource-based…”

“The strategy consulting firms, the so-called strategy consulting firms do almost no strategy anymore because it's a little business compared to post-merger integration, digital transformation, and a bunch of other, other other things.”

“If you took the other, the 49 other top business schools in America, and if asked the question, do you swear allegiance to the resource-based view of the firm? If you don't answer an enthusiastic yes, you have no chance of being hired. Zero.”

“He gave a example of Procter and Gamble. I've been consulting at Procter and Gamble. And know everything about Procter & Gamble, basically. And what he said about Procter & Gamble had zero to do with reality, like zero. It was just completely, utterly, absolut…”

“I think in 2020, now America has got a capital market that is a detriment to American competitiveness because it is causing companies to behave in ways that aren't good for the company, its employees, America over overall.”

“I think we're going to look back, twenty-fifty, we'll look back on this period, 19, 40 ish, 35, 40 ish to say 20, 20, 25 or 30 as this insane period where we thought the widely held publicly traded corporation was the optimal form. And we're going to look back…”

“The idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. And that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and the widely held publicly traded companie…”

“The only reason they would be in that chair is that they're not particularly good at rating bonds, right? Because if they had a skillset that made them good at rating bonds, what chair would they be sitting in? ... They'd be either sitting in a chair at Goldma…”

“All the apps complain about what cut Apple is taking, but they made a choice, a value chain choice. We are going to design something that will appear on an iPhone or an Android device if that is. And then good luck to you. You can complain like crazy that they…”

“If you want to be the cost leader, it is rare that you can be the cost leader without having dominant scale in the territory in which you're operating. So if you want to be a niche. Cost leader, you know, good luck to you. That's almost never going to happen.”

“So to me, if Google thinks they can, because of their power and the fact they're got a multi-trillion dollar Market cap, and they've got a near monopoly position on, on something they can hold back the tide. You see, the water finds a way to flow, right?”

“We dramatically, vastly overuse science.”

“Analyze data, collect as much data, analyze it rigorously to determine causes of effects in this other part of the world. Imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling argument can be made. And he said, the job of human beings in that …”

“I think the only useful reason for wanting to be on a board is is that you think a well-functioning board is integral to the success of democratic capitalism. Now, how many people think that that's the reason for being on a board? Not, not many. Like, and most…”

“The economy is underpinned by delusion in, in, in that we do know that nine out of 10 kind of startups expire with a hundred percent of the resources kind of wasted. If anybody Thought those were the odds that they personally were facing. They wouldn't do i…”

“So I'm a big believer that people down organization have to make really important strategic choices or bad things are going to happen. If they make really great ones, good things are going to happen and they get trained to be a CEO someday. So I'm with your th…”

“I've only seen it used a minute. Consulting companies for 42 years, and I've seen it used once.”

“Mike Porter never in his entire life has said competition is stable. He's repeatedly said the opposite”

“So Mike Porter says you have to be either differentiated or low cost. Good. And if you look through competitive strategy is landmark seminal book to say, how would you do that? There is no answer.”

“And now it's number one in passenger seat miles in, in America and the only airline that's earned its cost of capital over the last half, half century. All the rest are losing money for their shareholders over, over time.”

“The right measure of share, in my view, in that industry is your share of minutes spent staring at a smart screen. Like that, that, that's what the share of operating systems that you should care about.”

“I mean, I think the education System, you know, has got a fundamental assumption that the job is to, you know, unzip the top of your head and pour knowledge in rather than to teach you how to think.”

“Business schools do not teach the fundamental problems of business. I mean, that's pretty bad, right? What they teach are finance. What they teach is marketing to teach us HR. And as the great, greatest management thinker of all time, Peter Drucker said, there…”

“I think business education draws in Lots of people who would have succeeded without it. They're the ones, that small percentage of people who can integrate, who just learned early on in their life, one way or another, long before they got to business school, h…”

“These girls who were grade 10 girls, so they had definitively six fewer years of formal education, right? Grade 11, grade 12, four years of undergrad compared to our MBAs and our MBAs on average have about four and a half years of work experience. So they have…”

“They come in indoctrinated into the notion that my job as a business person is to figure out into what category this problem that I'm facing falls and then apply that tool. Ah, this is a finance problem, so I will apply the capital asset pricing model, or this…”

“When you do a case study the case has been written to illustrate a tool. Right? The answer comes from applying a given tool, like, and you, and we're made to think, oh, these are just general business situations. No, they're not. The writing of Harvard Busines…”

“There are a thousand partial equilibrium economists for every single general equilibrium economist. And so we have economists who kind of know everything about, you know, whatever fiscal policy, but nothing about labor policy or labor economics or environmenta…”

“Part of the CEO's job is to create enough of that discretion. So that they can do those things, right? That that they know are going to be in the interest longterm, like in your case, building up some slack, you know, for the bad times because if they don't bu…”

“There's only one thing you can know absolutely positively without a shadow of a doubt about a stockbroker. The only thing that's for sure, you don't know if they're male or female, young or old, but what you know is that they're crummy at picking stocks.”

“Strategy involves making choices to do some things and not other things. And it is often intimidating to say, you know, oh dear, I have to cut these things off and not do them and actually make a decision that I'll be held accountable for potentially, or I'll …”

“He's wrote, written a very, I think, useful book That would in some sense fit into my how to win box, right? I say strategies about where to, how to win. And he has a category, what I call a categorical model.”

“If customers come into that channel and they look at the two products and say, eh, I could flip a coin on this one, right? You are not effectively playing to win. Maybe you thought you were winning, but customers don't think you're better.”

“Tesla got a 10 year head start. Not because the OEMs couldn't. They could have. And of course GM did many, many years ago, right? Great fully functioning electric vehicle, but they couldn't figure out how the hell you make, make a buck on it. And so they didn'…”

“When you think about the costs of differentiation, it's often spending on branding, spending on R&D, R&D sort of innovation. Those two are of the most scale sensitive elements of anybody's cost structure, right? You know, and so being a niche differentiator is…”

“Tide. So, 77 years isn't a long time, I guess, either, because they've been the number one detergent for 77 consecutive years.”

“If Estee Lauder would have taken their Clinique brand and brought it into mass, they would have killed what we were doing. Simple as that.”

“The bottom line is, is that they don't need to be untaught anything, right? So that's their gigantic advantage. They're easily smart enough, and they don't have a view already built up that life is full of either or choices, where it's the devil or the deep bl…”

“Rather than saying, let's think about something in between right away, you say, let's push those to the extreme, the completely exclusive film festival, the completely inclusive film festival, right? And then you lay out how they work. How do that do each of t…”

“The most powerful question in strategy is what would have to be true? Not what is true. What would have to be true for that to be a great idea?”

“If the choice is, is between kind of lying on the beach or getting kicked in the groin, You don't need to use integrative thinking. I'll take lying on a beach, right? But it's when you feel like, oh, I hate the fact that I have to, that I apparently have to ch…”

“Because you have to commit Assets irrevocably to decisions to be great as a company. You can't just say, well, we'll do a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and we'll shift and change.”

“I just don't know any, what I think of as great, great leaders who don't love other people. I mean, if you think people are annoying and you have to put up with them and put up with their foibles rather than you genuinely love them, then I think you can only b…”

“The failure mode I see probably more than anything else is Somebody who is what I think of as not strategic, right? Which is that they believe that they need to always keep all their options open, not make big choices and sort of see what evolves and then just…”

“Well, I think about strategy as a set of choices that enables you to invest in a given place. To win, whether that's geography or business or whatever. So it, it's that set of set of choices. And what do I mean by winning? I mean, in the field of play that you…”

“Another is, is kind of bad strategy is just trying to do the same as everybody else and assume that you're going to win anyway. You know, that's the great managerial conceit. We don't have to do anything unique or different and we will have unique success.”

“No new idea in the history of the world has been proven in advance analytically. Why? It's linked to what Aristotle said, right? You can't prove something new and different that hasn't happened yet, analytically. And most innovation processes in the world …”