MNTS #36
[Week 3/ Year 2024] Book Notes, Men and Rubber, Managing Chaos, Unsung Hero, On the Brink, King of Madison Avenue, Fan Ho
Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week
New Post-Book Notes
Reading
Men and Rubber: The Story of Business by Harvey S. Firestone is the second book from Poor Charlie’s Almanack recommended reading list. I flew through this one and absolutely loved the chapters recounting his yearly camping excursion with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. What a bunch of beauties.
Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler - I picked this one up in the hopes of it helping me come up with a solution to an ongoing issue I’m having at my day job. More to come in a future MNTS.
Peter Kaufman’s An Unsung Hero Talk Transcript by KG - I’m deep down a Peter Kaufman rabbit hole at the moment. This is another incredible talk he gave at the University of Redlands.
When you combine top-down and bottom-up, you make correct decisions.
Go and talk to everybody. Get all the input from everybody. And what does that do? It designs the plan, doesn’t it? And then when you go to raise the money, everybody’s willing to contribute. Why? It’s their plan. They own it.
2024: A Pivotal Year on the Brink by Ray Dalio - I don’t know that I necessarily agree with this, but I do appreciate the attempt at articulating a macro view of all the wild and crazy factors heading into the election year. Weird times, folks.
Regardless of what happens in the US elections, the outcomes will have big implications for what will happen in the markets, economies, the domestic order, the world order, geopolitical and economic issues, the handling of the climate, and technology issues because each of the sides has very different views about these issues. The amounts of economic regulation, taxes, immigration, trade agreements, and tariffs as well as social issues will be handled very differently, depending on who is elected. For example, if Donald Trump is elected there is a good chance he would leave NATO, put 10% tariffs on all imports, reduce income and corporate taxes, greatly reduce regulations, reduce green initiatives, pursue much stronger policies of the right, and become more isolationist and nationalistic. If President Biden (or the Democrat who will replace him if the strains of the job impact him) wins, he will pursue diametrically opposed policies. The ideological fight of the extremists is real. If things continue going as they are, voters might eventually be faced with the question, “If forced to choose, would you prefer a fascist or a communist?” In any case, there is no doubt that 2024 will be an important, pivotal year for determining how the domestic order and all that it influences will go.
Listening
I can’t get enough of David Ogilvy; this one was so good. h/t
Random
Channeling some Fan Ho
Until next week!
Stay spirited, stay resilient.
Andrew