Timeless Ideas | October 31, 2021
Here’s your weekly dose of timeless ideas to sharpen your mind, make smarter decisions, and live better.
Quotes
I.
Those who believe they can move mountains, do. Those who believe they can't, cannot.
― David J. Schwartz
II.
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone.
― Margaret Wheatley
III.
The way to create something great is to create something simple.
― Richard Koch
Ideas
I.
Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.
Peter M. Senge in The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
II.
As the economist John Maynard Keynes once pointed out, buying stocks is like trying to anticipate who will win a beauty contest. You want to choose not the person who you think is the most beautiful but the person you think everyone else will see as most beautiful. So it is with stocks: prices rise not just when a company turns in great performance but when a lot of investors believe that the future will bring even better performance.
Karen Berman in Financial Intelligence, Revised Edition: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean
III.
Too often, however, greed gets confused with positioning thinking. Charging high prices is not the way to get rich. Being the first to (1). establish the high-price position, (2). with a valid product story, (3). in a category where consumers are receptive to a high-priced brand, is the secret of success. Otherwise, your high price just drives prospective customers away.
Al Ries in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: The Battle for Your Mind
Articles Worth Reading
I.
Anna Wiener | The New Yorker
Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, has fans and followers. What are they looking for? Part of his appeal must be the endless opportunities he presents for decoding, deciphering, and hypothesizing. He offers readers the anticipation of revelation. Then again, the truth could be much simpler: when money talks, people listen.
II.
Eight Things We Learned From The Facebook Papers
Russell Brandom, Alex Heath, and Adi Robertson | The Verge
For months, Facebook has been shaken by a steady leak of documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen, beginning in The Wall Street Journal but spreading to government officials and nearly any outlet with an interest in the company. Now, those documents are going much more public, giving us the most sweeping look at the operations of Facebook anyone not directly involved with the company has ever had.
III.
What If People Don’t Want 'A Career?'
Charlie Warzel | Galaxy Brain
The pandemic has left people sick, tired, exhausted, and rattled. It has also changed peoples’ priorities and upended their notions of what is possible. For the first time in a while, they’re starting to ask big questions about the status quo. People in charge ought to be listening.
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