What I'm Reading...

John Dewey:

Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.

The late Clayton Chrtistensen in How Will You Measure Your Life?:

The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions.

Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy:

It takes years for a formerly regulated company, or a former monopolist, to wring excess staff expense and other costs out of its system and to stop its accountants from making arbitrary allocations of overhead expenses to activities and products.

In the meantime, these mental and accounting biases mean that such companies can be expected to wind down some product lines that are actually profitable and continue to invest in some products and activities that offer no real returns.

Seth Godin, interviewed by LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky:

I think I started my first business when I was 13, and ran a whole bunch of them through high school. In college, I co-founded the largest student-run business in the country, but I never did it to make a dollar. It was just I didn’t want someone to tell me what to do. I wanted to make things better on my own.

(…)

School did not care about me. I definitely cared about school. There is a really big difference between being good at school and learning things. We get confused, just like there is a difference between being rich and being happy.

I didn’t care what my grades were. I had one notebook for four years. But I learned more than most people cause I wasn’t trying to do well on the test. I was trying to learn things. And the way you learn things is by doing them.

Nassim Taleb:

I know very few people who, when they say they want to do something, end up doing it.