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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

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

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

2w 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

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

Organizational culture is not about perks or ping-pong tables. It is the answer to the question: what behavior gets rewarded and what behavior gets punished when no one is watching?

3mo ago
stratechery.com
2026.28: XBOX On the Rocks

the Game Pass initiative that was the last great hope for XBOX has been a failure. I'm not a gamer, but Ben's rendering of the XBOX story — and the Game Pass story — is a great case study of both internet economics and management mistakes (and analyst ones!).

3mo ago
lennysnewsletter.com
How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model

After two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.

8mo ago

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

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