Farnam Street
Mastering the best of what other people have already figured out
“Get it right, get it fast, get it out, get it over.” *** In an interview with Jeff Cunningham, Warren Buffett hits on two principles that elude most of us. Interviewer: I was reading a Lincoln quote the other day, “With …
“Life is a struggle.” — Karl Marx *** In The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz describes the struggle. Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for …
If you’ve ever worked in an organization, you’ve no doubt come across someone in senior management and asked yourself how they ever got promoted. The Peter Principle, coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their …
In The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See, Harvard Professor Max Bazerman, opines about how the failure to notice things leads to “poor personal decisions, organizational crises, and societal disasters.” He walks us …
Fight the Good Fight The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just. Try Honey Before Vinegar If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are …
“If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.” *** Naval Adm. William H. McRaven delivers an amazing University of Texas at Austin 2014 Commencement Address. Returning to his alma mater last …
The problem with most business books is they present a formula for problems that ultimately have no formula. You’re reading something with no practical value and you’re not really learning anything. There is no formula for …
“We like to equate leaders with values we admire, but the two can be separate and distinct.” *** Say what you want about General Stanley McChrystal and the Rolling Stone article that led to his premature retirement from the …
During a recent interview Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger had some interesting comments on how to outsmart people who are smarter than you. Munger: We’ve learned how to outsmart people who are clearly smarter [than we are.] Buffett: …
William Swanson’s unwritten rules of management is full of pithy advice. Swanson is the former chairman and CEO of Raytheon Company. Originally a part of a presentation to engineers and scientists at Raytheon, someone asked him to …
Joel Podolny, who was at the time the vice president of HR at Apple, sat down with James March for an interview published in Academy of Management Learning and Education. As always, March offers counter-intuitive thinking and fascinating …
“Leadership is a gift. It’s given by those who follow. You have to be worthy of it.” —General Mark Welsh *** The video is 50 minutes long, but it might be the finest piece of public speaking you’ll see all year.
In an effort to improve performance we often turn to the simple answer of trying to hire a star from another organization. This sounds like a great idea, is hard to argue with, and offers the promise of an instant performance boost. In …
Ray Dalio, the sixty-one-year-old founder of Bridewater Associates, the world’s biggest hedge fund, offers the following management advice. Dalio says “Taken together, these principles are meant to paint a picture of a process for the …
After reading The Ambiguities of Experience, I set out to read another book by James March: On Leadership. The genius of March takes a while to appreciate. I assure you, however, this thought-provoking book is packed full of wisdom you …
The HR department’s long run on gut instincts may be coming to a close. Recently, Google applied their engineering (data-driven) mindset to building better bosses and the counter-intuitive findings suggest that promoting the best …
William Deresiewicz delivered a stunning lecture on Solitude and Leadership to the United States Military Academy at West Point. In the lecture, Deresiewicz convincingly argues that We don’t teach leadership; Excellence doesn’t …
There are many ways companies compete with one another. Unfortunately, a lot of those ways seem like nothing more than an expensive route to commoditization. Companies are relentless in their pursuit of finding their weaknesses. They hire …