Insight
Stalk: Delivering 3x Faster Yields 3x Growth and Double the Profitability
“One that works very well is be faster than your competitors at providing your customers what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. And if a company can do that two or three times faster than its competitors, it'll usually grow two to three time…”
Assertion Partly supported
Stalk: Family companies underperform in upturns but outperform public peers in downturns
“The family companies were not as high performing on profitability in the up turns of the market, but nor were they as poor performing as public companies in the downturns.”
Opinion
Stalk: Public Companies Underestimate Private Competitors with Dry Powder
“I think public companies are under invested in understanding how private companies compete. And therefore they're vulnerable to private companies behaving differently than they do because they have a view of the world or they have the possibility because of th…”
Assertion Supported
1980s Japanese Factory Edge Derived From Low Overhead, Not Culture
“And what was really interesting that this isn't in the early 19 eighties, people attributed the Japanese productivity advantage to their culture and to the worker management relations. And if I look what we did, I looked into the numbers, all the productivity …”
Insight
Stalk: Quadrupling Process Speed Cuts Operating Costs by 20%
“Most often what we see is that if you could speed up a factory or any kind of process by a factor four, In other words, I take 20% of the time, 25% of the time I used to take. Productivity is about cost position is about 20% lower. Cause I take out overhead.”
Insight
Stalk: Agile development is time-based factory competition applied to code
“In fact, the whole agile thing that's going on is very much of a version of time-based competition at the factory translated to software.”
Assertion Partly supported
A Two-Week Supply Chain Has One-Eighth the Variability of Eight Weeks
“If you take two supply chains One that has an eight week time and one that has a Two-week time. The variability of the output at the one that's two weeks will be about one-eighth variability of the other.”
Opinion
Only Amazon, Walmart, and Toyota Control Cost, Quality, Time, and Variance
“At this point, I said that's only Amazon, Walmart, and Toyota are probably the only three companies I can imagine that are even closer to being able to do that.”
Insight
Stalk: Strategic Turnarounds Cannot Start with Changing Corporate Culture
“The culture is the hardest thing to change. It needs to be changed. It needs to be changed to S to freeze the benefit of a new strategy. But one can't start there.”
Assertion Partly supported
US Public Companies Halved in Number Due to Private Equity Buyouts
“The number of companies traded in the US stock exchanges that are public are down by half. Half of these companies are gone in numbers, and they've been taken private by the LBO firms.”
Assertion Partly supported
Stalk: Modern private equity firms hold companies longer than 1980s LBOs
“The private equity firms today actually do have a longer horizon than the ones did in the eighties, the seventies and eighties. And they're willing to stick with the business longer.”
Insight
Stalk: Unmanaged operations add value only 0.5% to 5% of total time
“Most organizations, if you, if we look at the time required to produce an output, either an insurance policy or a manufactured product, if they're not looking at time as a management variable, value is only being added between a half a percent and five percent…”
Assertion Supported
Stalk: Walmart Beat Kmart by In-Sourcing Trucking and Accelerating Supplier Pay
“They did that by having their own trucking, not outsourcing it. They did that by scheduling deliveries once a week instead of once every two weeks or once a month. They did that by incenting their suppliers to deliver to a very strict and ornerous schedule by …”
Opinion
Stalk: Walmart Cannot Easily Replicate Amazon's Dense Distribution Network
“If you're Walmart trying to catch up with the distribution system of Amazon, I can't really use much of my current distribution system because it's made up for dealing with large volumes, selling large volume stores. And I have to come up with a distribution s…”
Insight
Stalk: Most Companies Rely on Averages and Do Not Know True Costs
“Well, the one that always works is know your cost better than your competitors know their cost. Because most people don't know their cost. They think they do. They know the cost that gets between the revenues and the profit line. And those are all averages, an…”
Insight
Stalk: Per-Person Wealth in Family Businesses Declines Across Generations
“Families grow exponentially. Businesses don't grow usually exponentially. And so there's many cases where the pie gets bigger, but the per person share of the pie actually in absolute terms goes down because the business isn't growing fast enough to take care …”
Insight
Stalk: Batch processing accounts for three distinct thirds of operational waste
“Batches are the result of what people consider to be an economic order quantity, and of that 95% of the time it's wasted, about a third of it goes to being in a batch. About a third of it goes into being in a batch that hasn't been worked on yet. It's been sch…”
Insight
Stalk: Most leadership teams explain away operational anomalies rather than learning
“Anomalies are always a great opportunity to find a new way of doing business, but most management teams don't take the time to understand anomalies. They explain them away.”
Insight
Stalk: Compressing supply chain time insulates companies from systemic disruptions
“It turns out the time in the supply chain crisis is incredibly important because the longer is the supply chain time, the more exposed it is to these oscillations. And so, if I can become more time-based in my supply chain, I did basically insulate myself rela…”
Assertion Contradicted
Stalk: Average CEO tenure is currently under five years
“The average CEO tenure is less than five years right now.”
