From the “Quoted” archives…about six weeks ago:
“30-year-old billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried has been called the next Warren Buffett. His counterintuitive investment strategy will either build him an empire—or end in disaster” — cover of Fortune magazine
Quoted
All businesses have problems. It’s the problems that create the opportunities. If a business is easy, every simple bastard would enter it. My point is that a businessperson who complains about problems doesn’t understand where his bread is coming from.
This is the most important single business decision I ever made: to pay people well.
‘It is better to be vaguely right than exactly wrong.’ — Carveth Read
The most basic conclusion I drew from [Barbara Tuchman’s book The Guns of August] was that, if you adopt a reasonable strategy, as opposed to waiting for an optimum strategy, and stick with it, you’ll probably succeed. Tenacity is as important as brilliance.
Joe Coulombe as quoted in Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys
Facts & Figure
The daily rate to move a freight container across the Pacific was $2, 265 in early-October 2022, down from $13,706 at the beginning of 2022 and $20,586 in September 2021. — Source: Freightos Baltic Index
“U.S. retail [store] vacancy fell to 6.1% in the second quarter [of 2022], the lowest level in at least 15 years.
“[A]sking rents for U.S. shopping centers in the quarter were 16% higher than five years ago.
“More stores opened than closed in the U.S. [in 2021] for the first time since 1995.
“After peaking at 16.4% of total sales in the second quarter of 2020, the proportion of online sales fell [to] 14.3% [in 1Q22].” — Sources: Cushman & Wakefield / Morgan Stanley / Census Bureau / WSJ
Books
Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs — This book is dark, engrossing, mind-bending, deeply complicated, and well-crafted. I don’t have the words to do it justice, but I will be thinking about it for a long time.
Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys — This is on the short-list of great business (auto)biographies. Highly recommended. (I’d also include Shoe Dog, Made in America, Pride in Performance, Grinding It Out, and and Sol Price: Retail Revolutionary, among others).
Articles
Was Jack Welch the Greatest CEO of His Day — or the Worst? — This Malcolm Gladwell profile is a rambling, somewhat unstructured mashup of two recent books about Welch, but there are several interesting parts included.
The amazing true(ish) story of the ‘Honduran Maradona’ — If you liked the bizarre story of “the footballer who wasn’t” you’ll probably like this one too.
Megalopolis: how coastal west Africa will shape the coming century — A look at the explosive demographics of the Lagos-Abidjan corridor.
Time is Running Out for the Leap Second — An interesting article about measurement problems. (Subsequent to this article a decision was made to eliminate the leap second in 2035.)
“What was before just a way of measuring the flow of time is today essential for transportation, location, defense, finance, space competition,” said Felicitas Arias, former director of the time department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, known as B.I.P.M. from its French name and based outside Paris. “Time is ruling the world.”
The process of squaring these two time scales has become so unruly that the world’s time mavens are making a bold proposal: to abandon the leap second by 2035. Civilization would wholly embrace atomic time; and the difference, or tolerance, between atomic time and Earth time would go unspecified until timekeepers come up with a better plan for reconciling the two. A vote, in the form of Resolution D, is expected on Nov. 18 at a meeting in Versailles of the Bureau’s member nations.
“From a technical point of view,” said Patrizia Tavella, the current director of B.I.P.M.’s time department, “all the colleagues all over the world agree that we have to do something.”