MASTERMIND: Warren Buffett

Learning from Warren Buffett
"While much of Mr. Buffett's methods can't be duplicated - genius is genius, after all - The Snowball usefully emphasizes a few core Buffett imperatives: taking a close look at an investment's intrinsic value, making a brutal evaluation of its risks, and calculating a margin of safety. The book also underscores the importance of learning from failures. The Buffett-Munger approach is to invert, always invert. Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backward. What's in it for the other guy? What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where don't we want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of looking for success, make a list of how to fail instead." - Paul B. Carroll, Why Panic Passes Him By: All You Wanted to Know About Warren Buffett and More, The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 2008

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently." - Warren Buffett

"The business schools reward difficult, complex behavior more than simple behavior, but simple behavior is more effective." - Warren Buffett

"In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen." - Warren Buffett

"The investor of today does not profit from yesterday’s growth." - Warren Buffett

"A public opinion poll is no substitute for thought. - Warren Buffett

"Never ask the barber if you need a haircut." - Warren Buffett

"A pin lies in wait for every bubble and when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons." - Warren Buffett

"Coca-Cola was Roberto Goizueta’s painting. It was never finished, and he was never totally satisfied with it. But he had the Sistine Chapel in his head, and he was always working on it." - Warren Buffett

"Our prototype for occupational fervor is the Catholic tailor who used his small savings of many years to finance a pilgrimage to the Vatican. When he returned, his parish held a special meeting to get his first-hand account of the Pope. 'Tell us,' said the eager faithful, 'just what sort of fellow is he?' Our hero wasted no words. 'He’s a forty-four medium.'" - Warren Buffett

"A good managerial record (measured by economic returns) is far more a function of what business boat you get into than it is of how effectively you row. Should you find yourself in a chronically-leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks." - Warren Buffett

"When the whorehouse burns down, even the pretty girls have to run out." - Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, Keeping America Great
Transcript: Keeping America Great with Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (PDF)

From Berckshire Hathaway, Inc.
Warren Buffett's Annual Letter to Shareholders: 1977-2008

ODDS & ENDS: Warriors, Fear, The Bible, Wisdom, Spiritual Evolution, Happiness

On Warriors
"The most effective way to live is as a warrior. A warrior may worry and think before making any decision, but once he makes it, he goes his way, free from worries or thoughts; there will be a million other decisions still awaiting him. That’s the warrior’s way." - Carlos Castaneda

"The humbleness of a warrior is not the humbleness of the beggar. The warrior lowers his head to no one, but at the same time, he doesn’t permit anyone to lower his head to him. The beggar, on the other hand, falls to his knees at the drop of a hat and scrapes the floor for anyone he deems to be higher; but at the same time, he demands that someone lower than him scrape the floor for him." - Carlos Castaneda

"The Indian did not think of the wolf as a warrior in the same sense as he thought of himself as a warrior, but he respected the wolf’s stamina and stoicism and he encouraged these qualities in himself and others. The wolf, therefore, was incorporated into the ceremonies and symbology of war." - Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men

On Fear
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
- Bene Gesserit, Dune

"Never turn your back on fear. It should always be in front of you, like a thing that might have to be killed." -Hunter S. Thompson

"True terror is to wake up one morning & discover that your high school class is running the country." - Kurt Vonnegut

On the Bible
"And the truth I see is that the Bible is populated with people like you and me. People who are flawed and imperfect. People who have crooked teeth and bad skin. Who have stinky breath and dirty feet. Who don't always know the difference between right and wrong. Who are self-serving and capricious. People caught in the conflict and dichotomy between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane, between beauty and ugliness, and between the bright and the moronic. People who hope - and many believe - that they are made in the very image of God." - Barry Moser

"I think when people have illustrated the Bible, most of them have been devout Christians. Because they're devout Christians they can't separate themselves from the work. They get mired in piety, so they can't see the darkness. They only see the light of salvation. But if you don't have the darkness to contrast with the light, then what are you offering but cotton candy for Sunday school children? I think that some of the images in this Bible will be disturbing to a lot of people. The Bible is a very disturbing book." - Barry Moser

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little star-bursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music." - Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine

"I have spent a lot of time searching through the Bible for loopholes." - W.C. Fields

"There's nothing written in the Bible, Old or New testament, that says, 'If you believe in Me, you ain't going to have no troubles.' " - Ray Charles

"I've read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right." - Billy Graham

Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World


Barry Schwartz, Practical Wisdom and the Remoralization of Professional Life


George Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution

From TED
Technology and Faith with Billy Graham (Video)

From The Atlantic
What Makes Us Happy by Joshua Wolf Shenk (Article on George Vaillant)

FOCUS: Life Lessons from the Poker Table

Life as Poker. Poker as Life.
"Never play poker with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called 'Mom's.' Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." - Nelson Algren, Algren's Law

"You got to know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away and know when to run. You never count your blessings when you're sittin' at the table, there'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done." - Kenny Rogers, The Gambler

"The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent." - David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants

"Poker reveals to the frank observer something else of import - it will teach him about his own nature. Many bad players do not improve because the cannot bear self-knowledge." - David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants

"Limit poker is a science, but no-limit is an art. In limit, you are shooting at a target. In no-limit, the target comes alive and shoots back at you." - Jack Strauss

"Industry executives and analysts often mistakenly talk about strategy as if it were some kind of chess match. But in chess, you have just two opponents, each with identical resources, and with luck playing a minimal role. The real world is much more like a poker game, with multiple players trying to make the best of whatever hand fortune has dealt them." - David Moschella

"It never hurts for potential opponents to think you’re more than a little stupid and can hardly count all the money in your hip pocket, much less hold on to it." - Amarillo Slim

"Look around the table. If you don't see a sucker, get up, because you're the sucker." - Amarillo Slim

"No matter what our character, no matter what our behavior, no matter if we are ugly, unkind, murderers, saints, guilty sinners, foolish, or wise, we can get lucky." - Mario Puzo

"Last night I stayed up late playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died." - Steven Wright


Jim McManus, Cowboys Full: The Story of Poker


Annie Duke, Professional Poker Player, Interview


From USA Today
Know Yourself, Know Your Rival by Annie Duke

From the Harvard Business Review
Are “Great” Companies Just Lucky? by Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, and Andrew D. Henderson

From Deloitte
The Persistence Project: Discovering the Causes of Superior Corporate Performance

From The Boston Globe
Luck Inc., The 7 Secrets of Really, Really Lucky Companies by Drake Bennett

From The Economist
The Three Habits of Highly Irritating Management Gurus by Schumpeter

MASTERMIND: Clayton Christensen

The Innovator's Dilemma
"The innovator's dilemma is in his head. Well, first it's in his eyes: not seeing what you don't believe is possible is the first problem; not believing what you're seeing is the second; not being able to imagine it as a threat is the third; not responding to it in time is the fourth." - Clayton Christensen

Different Takes on the Innovator's Dilemma
"The lion does not turn around when a small dog barks." - African Proverb

“As the doctors say of a wasting disease, to start with it is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose. After a time, unless it has been diagnosed and treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.” - Machiavelli, The Prince

"Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others. It leads to sterility." - Pablo Picasso

"The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ideas, of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions." - Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

"The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the things he ought to do, and so the expert is not prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do and it often catches the expert out and ends him on the spot." - Mark Twain

"Genuinely believing that your enemy is irrational, as opposed to pretending to do so for propaganda purposes, will almost certainly ensure that you cannot defeat him. You can only defeat an antagonist whose ways of seeing things you can make sense of. Some of the British People may have believed that the IRA had no goals other than to maim and slaughter, but British Intelligence took a different view. There is nothing irrational, as opposed to morally repulsive, about killing people to achieve your political ends. It is not on the same level as believing that you are Marie Antoinette. If one’s enemy really is metaphysically evil, then the chances of defeating him look rather small. Not even the SAS can stand up to Satan." - Terry Eagleton, Holy Terror

"The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always." - William Faulkner

"The future enters into us in order to transform itself into us… long before it happens." - Rainer Maria Rilke

“Nothing is more dangerous than an idea when it's the only one you have.” - Emil' E Chartier

"The laws of life and death are as they should be. The laws of matter and force are as they should be, and if death ends my consciousness, still is death good. I have had life on those terms, and somewhere, somehow, the course of nature is justified. I shall not be imprisoned in a grave where you are to bury my remains. I shall be diffused in great nature, in the soil, in the air, in the water, in the sunshine, in the hearts of those who love me, in all the living and flowing currents of the world, though I may never again in my entirety be embodied in a single human being. My elements and my forces go back into the original sources out of which they came, and these sources are perennial in this vast, wonderful, divine cosmos." - John Burrough, Accepting the Universe

Clayton Christensen, The Innovator's Dilemma


From MIT World
The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution to the Healthcare Crisis, Clayton Christensen (Video)

From The Gartner Fellows
Interview with Clayton Christensen - Part One

Interview with Clayton Christensen - Part Two
.