Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
There’s a good chance most of the problems in your life and work come down to insufficient slack. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it. Imagine if you, as a budding productivity enthusiast, one day gained access to a time …
Too often we reward people who solve problems while ignoring those who prevent them in the first place. This incentivizes creating problems. According to poet David Whyte, the key to taking initiative and being proactive is viewing yourself …
At the end of each year, the FS team takes time to reflect on the work we did and what we learned from it. Here’s a selection of our favorite articles from 2020 – and why we think they’re worth a second read. Much of what we do at FS …
We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what …
Career changes are some of the biggest moves we will ever make, but they don’t have to be daunting. Using mental models to make decisions we determine where we want to go and how to get there. The result is a change that aligns with the …
Better hiring leads to better work environments, less turnover, and more innovation and productivity. When you understand the limitations and pitfalls of the job interview, you improve your chances of hiring the best possible person for …
Performance reviews are designed to motivate and bring the best out of our teams, but they often do the opposite. Here’s how to bring out the best in your people. *** If you ask people what’s wrong with corporate workplaces, it won’t take …
We’ve written before about the legendary businessman Ken Iverson, the former CEO of Nucor Steel, who took it from a tiny steel operation to a true steel powerhouse in his own lifetime. To recap, in Iverson’s tenure, Nucor: …
In The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and The Common Good Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, takes on the debate of who was a better economist—Adam Smith or Charles …
A lot of people wonder how LEGO, selling a now un-patented product, can command both massive market share and sell at twice the price of the nearest competitor: Megablocks. Rhett Allain, in his WIRED article addressing why LEGO sets are so …
This quote was expressed over 30 years ago by the CEO of a textile company called Indian Head Mills. The objective of our company is to increase the intrinsic value of our common stock. We are not in business to grow bigger for the sake of …
From The Signal And The Noise: Successful gamblers – and successful forecasters of any kind – do not think of the future in terms of no-lose best, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely precise measurements. These are the …
“Though the free-market faithful have long preached that competition creates efficiency, as if it were a law of nature, nature itself teaches a different lesson.” No tree can afford to not compete in the height competition. …
I have posed at two different business schools the following problem. I say, “You have studied supply and demand curves. You have learned that when you raise the price, ordinarily the volume you can sell goes down, and when you reduce the …
In one of the most in-depth and wide-ranging Q&A sessions held by the Freakonomics blog, Daniel Kahneman answered 22 new questions about his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Three of the questions that caught my attention: Q. As you found, …
Jamie Dimon’s testimony at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (on what caused the financial crisis): I believe the key underlying causes of the crisis include: the creation and ultimately the bursting of the housing bubble; …
“They competed on the basis of raising prices. What other industry do you know that gets away with that?” Charlie Munger talks about how you can bribe the purchaing agent. I have one more anecdote: I have fun with this when I …
From Alice Schroeder’s new chapter: THE CRISIS: The decline of Berkshire Hathaway’s stock from Triple-A status in the updated (and condensed) version of The Snowball. As the financial crisis evolved, the lame-duck Bush …