Buy the Book: Humans handle uncertainty poorly. Richard Heuer explains how inherent biases in our thought process work against us, that knowing about the biases is no help, but processes can be built to improve our critical thinking.
How John Patterson Used Cash Registers to Transform Business Forever
John Henry Patterson took a company that three previous owners failed to make profitable, built it into a global success, and changed how businesses worked. He did it selling cash registers.
There was just one problem. Nobody had a clue why they needed a cash register.
The cash register was invented in 1879 by a man named James Ritty. Ritty tried to make it into a business but failed. So he sold to another guy. He failed too and sold it to a local group of investors, who also failed.
When Patterson bought the company in 1884, not much had changed in those five years. Other than a few sales to saloon and store owners, most people were skeptical of the machines. In fact, local business owners mocked Patterson for buying a horrible company that had no demand for its product.
So Patterson set out to create demand. Continue Reading…
John H. Patterson: Pioneer in Industrial Welfare by Samuel Crowther
Buy the Book: Print
John Henry Patterson was an American industrialist. He bought a floundering cash register company and turned it into a global success while pioneering advertising, sales, and other business practices still used today.
The Notes
Charlie Munger on Mental Tricks and Overcoming Stupidity
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s 95-year-old “sidekick,” shared some of his mental tricks to staying rational, and other bits of wisdom, in an interview at the end of January of this year.
The video was making the rounds on Twitter this week. If you’ve never had the experience, it’s worth watching.
For those who have listened to Charlie Munger more than a few times, much of it will sound familiar but it’s always a good reminder none the less. I’ve highlighted a few parts below. Continue Reading…
Howard Marks: Lessons from the Nifty Fifty
The advantage of market history isn’t so much to see how assets have performed but to see how people reacted to the performance.
Knowing what stocks or bonds returned over the last 10, 20, or 30 years can be helpful. It shows how a perfectly rational being would have performed over those periods.
What it doesn’t show is how an actual person might react to a sea change in technology near the end of the longest bull market in history. Or how that person might respond to a 22% drop in a single day. Or what that person might expect from their bond funds after the greatest 35-year performance ever. Or how they might react to a 5% interest rate spike — a roughly 50% drop in the 10-year bond price — over a measly 16 months. Continue Reading…
Quarterly Reading – Summer ’20
My second quarter reading is short on books but long on pages. It was dominated by another textbook with a couple of lengthy books thrown in.
Here’s what I’ve been reading the past three months: Continue Reading…
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