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I would rather have a first-rate management team running a second-rate business than a second-rate management team running a first-rate business. The business will eventually reflect the quality of the people running it—for better or worse.

— Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (2011)
3d ago
readtheprofile.com
The Profile: The CEO trying to save Xbox & the king of Halloween

Sharma has cut nearly 1,900 jobs, doubled down on blockbuster franchises like Halo and Minecraft, and begun overhauling Xbox's hardware and subscription strategy. But with console sales lagging far behind PlayStation and Microsoft pouring billions into AI, some insiders wonder whether Xbox is being prepared for a sale or spinoff.

3d ago

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.

4d ago
readtheprofile.com
Who Is Lip-Bu Tan?

He joined Intel's board in 2022, quit in 2024 after disagreeing with the board and then-CEO Pat Gelsinger over strategy, and came back as CEO in March 2025. Since then he has cut staff, cancelled factory projects in Europe, brought in the U.S. government and Nvidia as major shareholders, and bet Intel's future on its newest manufacturing process.

5d ago
noahpinion.blog
Farewell, my Captain

Picard realizes that the highest application of intelligence is not to thwart your enemies, but to design a world in which you and they can live in mutually beneficial coexistence.

5d ago

The best protection against the future is a present worth protecting. Most managers spend their careers preparing for contingencies that never arrive while neglecting the compounding damage of small, daily decisions they consider beneath their attention.

1w ago
readtheprofile.com
Meet Neil ‘Buddy’ Shah, the Most Powerful Man at Anthropic You've Never Heard Of

Most founders spend their careers fighting to retain control of their companies by creating dual-class shares, negotiating board seats, and structuring voting rights in a way that make sure no one can tell them what to do. Anthropic's founders, on the other hand, have given a group of outsiders the power to help decide who gets to oversee them.

1w ago
readtheprofile.com
Who Is Jeff Bezos?

Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.

1w ago

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday's logic.

2w ago
noahpinion.blog
Why are we ruled by barbarians?

There are many reasons Trump is amenable to the New Right, and became their beloved leader and standard-bearer, but he is fundamentally not of them, and when he is gone, it is that ideology, rather than another charismatic figure, which will flow into the vacuum his exit creates. The New Right will lack Trump's charisma, but it will also lack the baggage of his corruption and (possibly) the lingering stink of his policy blunders.

2w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 125

The biggest empire the world has ever seen was run by a small elite who partied all night, drank liters of port, and stayed in bed until the afternoon.

2w ago

The human race is governed by its imagination. A leader is a dealer in hope.

3w ago
noahpinion.blog
The second Trump presidency is a world-historic failure

The blunt fact is that Trump's second term has already failed in the court of public opinion. This is an incredible, world-historic failure. And it didn't have to be that way — Trump simply made a bunch of avoidable errors, for a mix of ideological and personal reasons.

4w ago

It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race larvae that a man can help them to rise. The help that is wanted is the sort that costs the helper something.

4w ago
oneusefulthing.org
The Dot and the Swarm

A lot of what we call management exists to solve problems that come from organizations being made of people. People have their own goals, and those aren't always the goals of organizations. We call this the principal-agent problem and a lot of the machinery of organizations, from bonuses to management structures, is based around solving it.

4w ago

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal, led by a chief; and if he has no chief, he makes one up and idealizes him.

1mo ago

The ability to destroy value is not evenly distributed. Most managements are better at talking about capital allocation than practicing it. The ones who are truly good at it treat every dollar retained as a solemn obligation, not a convenience.

1mo ago

The best CEOs I know are teachers, and at the core of what they teach is strategy. Most companies deteriorate because they compromise on one or two key strategic choices under competitive pressure. A business that stands for something specific — and refuses to stand for everything — is a business that can actually win.

1mo ago
platformer.news
Can Muse make us forget the metaverse?

It wasn't long ago that Zuckerberg had deployed the metaverse in developer-conference keynotes the way he did with Muse this week: as a bright spot to rally the company around amid never-ending litigation and social backlash related to the company's core products, which went all but unmentioned on Wednesday. It wasn't long ago that Zuckerberg told us that the metaverse would be where billions of people were spending their time. And so, when he says that — never mind — it's actually Muse where everyone will be spending their time, there's more than a little reason to doubt him.

1mo ago

The best way to achieve a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear. Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us. But in business, the dangerous gap opens when you begin managing the reputation rather than the underlying reality.

1mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Gulf Game Theory Edition

The danger, when you're playing for credibility, is that it can become detached from the interests you were supposed to protect. Governments start taking risks not because the prize is worth the cost, but because leaders fear that further restraint might start to communicate weakness.

1mo ago

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we spend our lives praising the horse and forgetting to plant the field.

1mo ago

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

1mo ago

The best businessmen I've ever known were all great simplifiers. They had an uncanny ability to cut through the noise and find the one or two variables that really mattered — and then they just ignored everything else. Most people drown in complexity they created themselves.

1mo ago

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood.

1mo ago

The job of the CEO is not to make good decisions. It's to make a small number of decisions, make them slowly, and make them well. Speed is irrelevant if you're going in the wrong direction.

1mo ago

It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles.

1mo ago

The good lawyer is not the man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.

1mo ago

We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For ours is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.

1mo ago
fs.blog
Steve Jobs in Exile

NeXT spent years losing money. His co-founders left. His investors lost faith. His fortune nearly disappeared. At one point, he was a weekend away from shutting the company down. Somewhere in those failures, Jobs learned how to become the leader Apple would eventually need.

2mo ago
25iq.com
A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

2mo ago

It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.

2mo ago
ftav
The silicon god delusion

Chatbots are the C-suite's ultimate yes-men — able to buttress egos by condensing information their users don't care to fully understand while avoiding questions they don't want to consider. They'll never say the plan is dumb.

2mo ago

The biggest misconception in business is that insight is rare and execution is common. In my experience, it's exactly the opposite — workable ideas are everywhere, but people who can execute even a single step beyond the obvious are vanishingly scarce.

2mo ago

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

2mo ago

It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race larvae that men are to be helped.

2mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Jonny Gannon

Ironically, the 'Ugly American' in the novel is not the arrogant, culturally tone-deaf official the phrase has come to mean, but a man named Homer Atkins — a practical engineer who earns trust by living among local people, understanding their needs, and solving problems with humility rather than bureaucracy. The book's enduring message is that lasting influence comes from building durable relationships and developing local knowledge.

2mo ago

It is not the clear-sighted who rule the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm fog.

2mo ago
upstartsmedia.com
They Knew He Was A Scammer, So They Offered Him A Job

So in a plot twist of a decision that went all the way up to co-founder and CEO Daniel Yanisse, the Checkr team did something a little crazy. "Let's continue playing the game with him," Yanisse told the team. They decided to offer Ulysses a job.

2mo ago

The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. But there is a second, less-discussed corollary: institutions that survive longest are those that deliberately audit their habits before those habits calcify into dogma. Most companies wait until the weight becomes a crisis.

2mo ago
fs.blog
The Mindset Behind Building Billion-Dollar Companies | Brad Jacobs

Brad Jacobs has built eight billion-dollar companies, completed more than 500 acquisitions, and created extraordinary returns for shareholders over four decades. Brad explains how he spots trends before they become obvious, why psychology matters as much as strategy, and how he thinks about acquisitions, hiring, capital allocation, decision-making, and building organizations that consistently outperform.

2mo ago
ftav
AI people need people

The intelligences we care most about are still organic, not artificial. The fortunes of the company that invented the large language model remain, perhaps more than any other in the trillion-dollar club, all about its people.

2mo ago

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. And yet we always speak of the man who does the work, and forget the man who makes it possible for him to do it.

3mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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