Quoted
George Economou is the Greek billionaire CEO of a shipping company (DryShips) and an offshore oil driller (Ocean Rig). Asked why he listed his companies on Nasdaq he reportedly said:
Because Americans are the dumbest investors around, and there’s lots of liquidity in this market.
Economou went on to prove the accuracy of that thought — many, many times — and wrote the book for the current wave of legal grifters at AMC and elsewhere. (The comment was made in 2005, and Economou’s work in the ensuing 15+ years would be the first chapter in “The Insiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Devious Blueprint for Screwing Investors.” It was brought to mind again recently by Spencer Jakab in recounting the madness at Bed Bath &Beyond.
Facts and Figures
Zero — “Despite the increase in self-checkouts, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows the number of cashiers employed in the US has remained virtually the same over the last 10 years. And any reduction in low-wage workers has been offset by the need to pay technicians to maintain the kiosks…and the kiosks can cost as much as $150,000 for a single row.”
They’re not faster, either. “Despite what grocery stores and kiosk manufacturers claim, research shows self-checkouts aren’t actually any faster than a regular checkout line…'It only feels like it because your time is occupied doing tasks, rather than paying attention to each second ticking away.’” Oh, and they probably contribute to increased levels of shoplifting too.
Books
Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power — This is a fascinating look at the dark and messy gnarl of generational politics in Saudi Arabia. It came out in 2020 but it is aging very well.
Articles
Podcasts aren’t as smart as you think — “[P]eople are starting to conflate [podcasts] with the hard grind of learning. At worst, they substitute it for reading. People are willing to do almost anything other than read at length. It requires patience: an atrophied muscle in the smartphone age. At the same time, no one relishes being ignorant or incurious. The desire for self-improvement is real.”
99% of Big Projects Fail. His Fix Starts With Legos. An economist who spent decades studying ’megaprojects’ has some advice for getting them right: Think slow, act fast and build brick by tiny plastic brick. — This author has studied the “planning and management of ‘megaprojects,’ his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called How Big Things Get Done. [His work] can be distilled into three pitiful numbers:
• 47.9% are delivered on budget.
• 8.5% are delivered on budget and on time.
• 0.5% are delivered on budget, on time and with the projected benefits.”
One Company’s Trick to Getting 95,000 Hours Back? Canceling Meetings — A lesson in unintended consequences.
“When we went remote, bosses were thinking, ‘how do I know people will get their jobs done?’ and people were thinking, ‘how do I prove to my boss that I’m getting my job done?’ Meetings became an answer to both questions,” said Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s vice president of modern work and business applications. Now, “people are overloaded,” he said, and that has created tension between workers and managers, a strain that is mostly unresolved. [Workers are caught in] a frenzy of circling back, touching base, and bringing something to the table, unless there was a hard stop, in which case they’d make a plan to take it offline later.