Coburn Ventures Podcast: Recent Episodes
Brynne Thompson
Last week, we discussed Decision Making Prisons with Dr. Morris Pickens, and today, we continue the discussion with Greg Parsons. Greg has held many positions inside corporations as Creative Director, CMO and as a Design and Strategy consultant at Stone Yamashita Partners. This background has given him a view into many stages of the creative and strategic process inside corporations. Greg will discuss common prisons he has seen teams get into and importantly, offers us some key questions to help us work our way out. Let's jump in.
One of the more under-the-surface questions we get from clients is: Can we help them understand why their decision-making processes do not exactly seem to be serving them and their team? They know they can do better but can't quite identify what's in the way. Today we have Dr. Morris Pickens to discuss what he calls decision making prisons, and how to get out of them. Let's jump in.
What's one way to become the world's greatest investor? Break investing down into its component parts, understand very specifically our roles and responsibilities, and then puruse the elements to great really, really good at. Today we bring you our working definition of the component parts of investing: the four jobs of stock picking. For the 200th (!) time, let's jump in!
Today, we are talking problem solving for investment teams by way of a conversation with our friend Matthias Hollwich, architect and founder at HWKN. We'll start with highlights from one of our most recommended books: Roger Martin's The Opposable Mind, and then Matthias will offer practical exercises that can put any of us on a more expanded path toward the problem-solving investors are looking for: seeing the uncommon investable insights amidst the noise. Let's jump in.
Why are we talking about turnarounds today? We have been examining some periods in which money is made or lost very, very quickly and therefore we are sharpening our tools to more accurately, helpfully gauge where companies and then stocks may go. Turnarounds certainly fit this bill: they are typically very high degree of difficulty, the timing of the investment is important, and the hero's journey they present is so tempting. We are fortunate to have our friend Dan Papes with us today to tell us more about decisions he made to help steer a massive turnaround at Digital Realty. Let's jump in.
We have been having conversations about "stock disasters" over the last few months, so now let's balance the scales a bit by discussing some of the elements that can lead to stock successes. As usual, we're going to start below the ground level, at that point when you're first asking yourself that very important question: "I think I'm onto something here, but could the market really be so wrong?". Let's jump in.
Last week we discussed forming and building up great investment teams. Today we're discussing a few tactics and strategies that we have seen activate and advance those teams and their investment work really powerfully, and that's in the design of investment meetings. Let’s jump in.
What can we do to build great investment teams? Today, we walk through six questions that we ask ourselves and work on with others when aiming to build a team from scratch or more likely, make enhancements as we go. There's something in here for everyone, and this conversation may be one of the most "worth it" we've explored: a great team is so much more than the sum of its parts by far-- it brings people alive, and produces uncommon value, and that's the kind of leverage we really like. Let’s jump in.
Investing is a practice of constant adaptation… adaptation to changes in our world, society, the economy, the market, and our own industry. Today we are looking closer at just how the game has changed in the last decade or so, and some potential pathways for constructive, ongoing adaptation. Let’s jump in.
Today we’re back with a fourth stock disaster. We will sprinkle these in sporadically throughout the year for you in the hopes you can learn from our mistakes and our responses to those mistakes. Interestingly enough, we all might acknowledge that stock disasters are not commonly shared internally even though we are in an industry with a high failure rate: we are not engineers building bridges who need the failure rate approaching zero, we are more like baseball players at bat: 1 in 3 will get the job done and be considered high performing! Beating the market can be done while also striking out repeatedly! Perhaps ignoring the strike outs just isn't a complete way to look at the work we do! In that vein, lets jump into today's beast offered up by Pip: General Instruments.
For our third edition of Stock Disasters, join us in a reflection that uncovers the dangers of hubris, (sometimes anointed by your very own manager), guardrails to help when you want to trade and run, and finally, seeing clearly when you have a management team that is taking the company in one direction and one direction only... whether you see it or not. Let's jump in.
We seem to be in a time in which the pressure is on. In high pressure times, "practical" solutions that no one can argue with often rise to the top. This is useful to an extent, but it can also result in becoming tight, and small, and this is out of step with our job descriptions, which presume some ability to generate uncommon investable insights.
Today we’re pulling up a piece from our library with Dr. Morris Pickens, who describes determining what your “athletic moment” may be, in order to build a routine that is consistent and supportive, in any and all environments. Let’s jump in.
We are near calendar year-end which means that "review season", --the less-festive second cousin to the holiday season-- is here or coming up for many. It can take up a lot of time (and energy), which is why, perhaps, at this time of year, we field a lot of questions on efficacy of reviews and review systems. To gain inspiration, we turned back to this conversation we had last year with behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert. Matt helps us distinguish between coaching, 1 on 1s, and reviews, which often get all bundled up into one year-end conversation but really are meant to accomplish very different things. Not only that, treating a review as a review of the person, or a coaching session, can create a lot of confusion and quickly demotivate. Matt helps us with a few ideas of how to spend this valuable time with our teams more effectively. Let's jump (back) in with Matt.
We are calling up a conversation we had in 2021 with Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist, about abundance vs. scarcity. Why are we highlighting this now? When we look to work, leadership and investing in the next few years, it seems that a more holistic, abundance-oriented mindset is formulating quickly (Porter's Shared Values), leaving behind a mindset purely about scarcity and power asymmetries (Porter's Five Forces). This conversation has helped us internalize abundance vs. scarcity over the last few years in order to see it as a useful lens for evaluating businesses and we thought it might be helpful for you, too. Let's jump in!
Part of what we know about AI is that, when we look back in a few months, our understanding of how to use it today is going to seem so elementary. But for now, we want to continue pausing, getting our bearings and being very aware of our questions and our thinking on it, so we continue this week placing waypoints. This episode includes just a few thoughts from us and then moves into contributions from our community. I hope you enjoy it!
If there was a Hall of Fame for investing, what would we look at to choose who got in, and why? Sure, we can look at long-term performance, but what about the attributes that contributed to that performance? What would we look at instead of home runs, tackles, and interceptions? Trading decisions, management of tracking error, AUM? We turn to the technical, knowing that the layer beneath the technical outputs is where Hall of Fame performances come from.
We will talk about this with sports psychologist Dr. Morris Pickens, who distinguishes routine and preparation from the athletic moment, the point of performance that does or does not advance you toward your target.
We end with a neat spotlight on the impact of Mo's athletic moment at the very end, so hang tight to hear it. Let's jump in.
This week was supposed to be an off-week for the podcast, but yesterday morning, I read something that changed my mind. I thought about what so many of us are aiming to do professionally, and that it has a lot to do with the combination of tenacity, (or a bit of fight), and sustainable processes, which become the steady drumbeat of great and effective work.
When I read the following, I realized that gratitude is the virtue that ties together tenacity and the energy and motivation to do great work. It’s the underlying sustenance for all of it:
This is from the Lakota author Doug Good Feather, originally printed in Fr. Richard Rohr's newsletter from the Center for Action and Contemplation:
"Gratitude moves stagnant energy when we’re feeling stuck in life. The simple act of practicing gratitude disrupts negative thoughts and changes our mindset to see the world in a positive way.
When we engage with the world from a place of gratitude, it’s the difference between trying to make something happen and allowing something to happen. The defining difference between effort and effortlessness is the virtue of gratitude."
So many of us know the feeling of hitting a wall and losing purpose in our work at one time or another, so I thought this was so valuable to our work that I would give this week over to gratitude.
Thank you to everyone who participated, and for those of you who celebrate, a very happy thanksgiving.
Today we’re back on the topic of decision-making biases. We will go through three more of the most common: representativeness error, search satisfaction and commission bias. Before we jump in, I’m going to do a brief explanation of each one, so that it's easier to listen to the rest of our conversation, you’ll have the definitions in mind. Also, a point of context I've been thinking about...if we jump into examining our biases before we have a bit of experience under our belt, it might cause a low-grade analysis paralysis! For our newer investors, please do listen, but don’t worry if you feel like you want to treat this as something for the back of your mind rather than an inspiration to make changes or adjustments. For the rest of you, these two conversations and the piece on biases are actually designed to provoke and provide a few slight changes, if you’re willing… so let's jump in..
Welcome back! We're here for part two of our conversation with Jeff Cardon and Steve Salopek.
This week we discuss what they would be doing in today’s market, more on comp and culture, and the stories behind certain decisions that influenced the creation of their teams and companies. Finally, we end with a topic that may be interesting to many of you, so keep listening all the way to the end! Let's jump in...
For the past few weeks, we have been discussing distinct elements of the investment process, and now we get to sit down with two friends and industry veterans to talk about it all. Many of you know both Jeff Cardon and Steve Salopek, both happen to come from the small-cap world and are long-time investors, portfolio managers, and leaders in the industry. They are both now retired, and with some time and space away from the industry, they have some interesting insights. Our conversation covers a whole lot, with great stories interwoven. We move from investment decision-making to structuring money management firms to teams, compensation and culture. What are we waiting for? Here’s Part 1 of our conversation... let's jump in.
A discussion on shorting might seem odd to qualify in a series on just three topics on the investment process. Still, it is one of the topics that we wondered if long-only investors may under-appreciate, not only for how it all works (there are fascinating math problems with shorting) but also how it can make you a better investor overall. Let’s jump in.
This is a five-part series on investment process. If there was a passion project at Coburn ventures, investment process might be it! We’ll walk through a few tools and concepts that we hope might spark ideas or tweaks or even affirmations for your own investment process, and then we get to sit down with some friends for additional conversation. Thanks for listening.
THE INTEGRATED DECISION ENGINE
Last week we discussed competition for capital, a philosophy that can lead to tools that increase completion, competition for our time, and clearer decision making. Today we introduce the integrated decision engines, which builds on that last tenant of clear decision making. We’ll walk through how the tool was developed, but listen for what the tool provides beyond the spreadsheet: the simple ordering of key factors in the portfolio, a common language for the portfolio manager and analyst, and just enough understanding for the analyst to better understand what the portfolio manager is looking for and needs to succeed.
This is part of a five-part series on investment process. If there was a passion project at Coburn ventures, investment process might be it! We’ll walk through a few tools and concepts that we hope might spark ideas or tweaks or even affirmations for your own investment process, and then we get to sit down with some friends for additional conversation. Thanks for listening.
This is part one of a five part series on investment process. We’ll walk through a few tools and concepts that we hope might spark ideas or tweaks or even affirmations for your own investment process, and then we get to sit down with some friends for additional conversation. Thanks for listening.
One of the most energizing moments as an investor seems to be when we discover insightful, sometimes one or two-degree changes that open up those amazing, uncorrelated insights that make the whole decision-making and portfolio management process seem clear.
With that in mind, we slow down for this conversation to walk through a couple of processes we use to create friction and create a competition for capital, an idea that I think shoots focused energy through an entire investment process, start to finish. The processes include:
- a layered, qualified funnel,
- weekly rounds with completion and decision-making at the end of the week, a
- benches and trackers to capture companies that didn’t win in the competition for capital at that time.
These are methods to counter rabbit holes, a low return on time, and to increase team communication and focus. The purpose of presenting this is to, as always, offer up methods that you can then tweak as you like or let them go on their way.
Let’s jump in.
Rolando Morillo has been doing ESG at Rockefeller Capital for most of his career, well before we were even calling it ESG!
When he started, the world was still in negative screening and SRI, but he and his mentors were working with a small community of companies and investors focused on deeper engagement around sustainability.
Fast forward 20 years…in today's increased enthusiasm (and resulting confusion) around ESG, standards, and regulations, Rolando provides an example of what integrating ESG into the foundation of his fundamental research can yield. In this conversation, Rolando naturally, almost unwittingly, bakes in a long view to all of his thinking, so helpful to many of us who are earlier on in the journey. Let’s jump in.
**This is part of the Day to Day ESG Series: conversations meant to illuminate the day-to-day elements that build up an ESG process.
When it comes to assessing the S in ESG with a data-oriented lens, we turned to longtime friend Sasha Dichter. Sasha ended up co-founding an entire company to solve a problem he had: when it came to understanding if their programs were affecting their clients in the way they wanted, they never had the robust data they really wanted.
So they asked themselves,
“What if we went and got the data? There are people on the other end of this problem, what if we went and talked to them?”
...and 60 Decibels was born.
Let’s jump in.
**This is part of the Day to Day ESG Series: conversations meant to illuminate the day-to-day elements that build up an ESG process.
Invisible ESG is meant to give a name to the infinite little or big day-to-day practices inside organizations that will never specifically check a box in the formal ESG mechanism but really do the actual work that ESG is supposed to accomplish: remedying that gap between capitalisms efforts to build businesses and a better understanding of the negative (and positive!) externalities that may pose.
An even better way to think of “Invisible ESG” is all the stuff that was deeply multi-stakeholder in spirit before “multi-stakeholder” became a thing. It’s an acknowledgment that many businesses have degrees of ESG already embedded. It's a great position to start from: rather than looking for everything that is WRONG, let's begin by acknowledging so much that is right.
Invisible ESG is about working from our base. As a bonus, we have questions for management at the end of this short conversation. Let’s jump in.
**This is part of the Day to Day ESG Series: conversations meant to illuminate the day-to-day elements that build up an ESG process.
Today we have a little something different: sometime last spring as I was editing, I started to save pieces of conversation that didn’t fit with the topic. Maybe they were afterthoughts, side topics, or maybe just fun conversations.
The result? We have meaty topics in small bites today, from our conversations earlier in the year with JP Rangaswami, Rudy Karsan, and Rolando Morillo. We went from blockchain to the meaning of language, from materialism to investing with kids. It's a small taste of all that we cover as we make these podcasts for you! I hope you enjoy it.
Rob Rose works at high levels with marketing and executive teams. He has a seat observing how these teams adapt to interesting times and to new challenges, so we were delighted to dig in with him on the topic of adaptation. That would be meaty enough! But what this conversation then reveals are some major learnings regarding teams and divisions that have inflated and perhaps lost their purpose... but not their budget. What a helpful thing for an investor to be able to ferret out. Rob also offers us a fascinating hack from a nurse handling decision-making in the hospital system, a couple of great questions for management, and some helpful "tells" for those of us on the outside looking in to better determine the health of an organization and its ability to change. Let’s jump in.
It’s fun to talk about sports a bit, but how does it relate to investing? Oh boy, there is change all over this topic, which matters because this dip into the sea change that the sports world is undergoing is likely a strong harbinger of what is to come in the broader business world. Sports so often plays that role in our society.
Our friend Jack Elkins was so helpful to talk to about all of this change! He will offer up his observations, that stem from a mix of experience with many professional sports, a love of sport, and deep knowledge of how the business of sport works. He put these skills to work as Director of Innovation at the Orlando Magic for many years and now teaches and does this work privately.
So maybe a quick spoiler, Jack is going to present that it is the WILD WEST in sports right now, and since we recorded this conversation, the American college football scene has exemplified just about everything Jack is talking about: two major California schools joined the Big 10, charting a course away from regional leagues with long-standing rivalries (and great fight songs that speak to these rivalries!), and important histories tied to region, to a super league based on the strongest, wealthiest, powerhouse programs.
Let’s jump into the wild wild west of sports…
In this series we discussed meetings, and we discussed qualities of collaboration worthwhile to pursue, so now we must give you something even more specific in case you’re looking for more chances to implement new methods: enter the Rocks meeting.
A "rock" is a question or problem that IF you had the solution, you would alter what you are doing right now significantly. As an example for investors, you would dramatically change your position size, or get in or out of a position altogether.
The method of rocks meetings is counter-cultural, so with that in mind, we are only going to go over the first piece of it, because it's CRITICAL to get that right to have the methodology work any better than any other ordinary investment discussion.
If used well, I really do think you will come away with better questions leading to much more valuable investment insights. (And p.s. - the Rocks methodology has meetings and collaboration BUILT IN)
Some parts of the methodology will sound a little tough. That’s the counter-cultural element. Over time, it really starts to flow, but first, let’s jump in...
Well, we are back again with a few more thoughts on the current market environment. We thought we were done with this last week but great questions keep coming so here’s a bit more. Today we start with a delineation between the different jobs of stock picking. It can be a fantastic orienting tool that you might want to have handy in your investor backpack when you find yourself feeling lost in the woods. We revisit a very nasty pattern from the last two market downturns just in case we see it again we will all have a gentle reminder about it here, and chat a bit about market psychology readiness to evaluate any type of “green shoots” or other catchy terms.
We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you some thinking on the current market environment and how that relates to process. This is a light spin on our conceptualization of the "Other Room" of the 2010's. Now, we look for signal in the noise about what investing looks like inside a world of increasing inflation, so we also want to know what the signs are for looking through that period to the "Other Side". We'll discuss a few ways to approach this through the investment process, so let's jump in.
We all want to get the best out of our team and contribute deeply to our teams. We understand that 1+1 can equal three. We know we don’t know everything and have a sense that working and thinking with others makes us all better…
But there is so much about what we experience about conventional collaboration that doesn’t work: group projects steeped in hierarchy and powerlessness, or a group of people around a table feeling forced to be nice and never really getting to the heart of the matter.
Instead, we want to route around conventional collaboration and design for something we call Capital C Collaboration.
We’ll define what that means to start. Be sure to stay for the last third which is all about things we can do individually or unilaterally to get "Capital C Collaboration" going.
We work pretty deeply with most of our clients on the investment process which means we work a lot on team collaborations. Inevitably, the discussion turns to investment meetings.
One of the questions we start with to gauge how things are going is,
“Would you be proud to have your clients attend these meetings? Would they be impressed and want to put more money with you?”
It’s a helpful rubber meets the road question about how we are spending our time and getting to great investment insights.
This episode aims to convey some of the principles and tactics that might help you have meetings you are really proud of.
Let’s jump in.
A few years ago we were doing some active consulting work with a handful of amazing not for profits. This work was so interesting and so valuable for all the reasons you can imagine: applying skillsets honed in investing that actually help real people with real problems, getting to know a whole host of new brilliant people from other sectors, but also, because, standing in these two worlds, one foot in one, one foot in the other, revealed greatly where the thinking in their industry overpronated on intentionality and goodwill, at times, and when the thinking and m.o. in our industry overpronated on exertion and knowledge building at times.
The result of being this bridge between two worlds? A lot of great insights on how to effect change. After a lot of discussions about it, Pip figured this formula out on his whiteboard one weekend. It brings each element into its own powerful place. We have been using it ever since. It’s called the Housefly Formula.
What better way to mark our 100th episode than to spend time with one of our friends for the last 25+ years, Angie Dalton of Signum Growth Capital. Today we get to ask Angie about what’s going on in web 3 and new media technologies: specifically, what’s going right, and what is totally off-kilter.
The conversation turned out to be one for me that offers loads of new breadcrumbs to track through the forest of web 3: what might be a real focal point of monumental change, where the fraud and disingenuous activity will show up, and some critical differences in mental models between the web 2 world and web 3. This is such a gift! It is ONLY through new mental models and new lenses that we can hope to accurately assess and make predictions on how these shifts will affect business, society, and the movement of capital.
Let’s, (for the 100th time), jump in!
Selling gets a bad rap, but we’re here to talk about it today because I really feel it's an underestimated power for investors for their toolkit AND an underestimated shift in society. For investors, this tool is a double whammy of personal efficacy and investor foresight!
On the first topic: understanding selling gives you a better antenna to determine signal from noise. More on that in the conversation.
On the second, how selling happens and why it is or is not effective is changing dramatically, which means revenue visibility, and retention and long term cash flow visibility would also be changing,
Let's jump in.
In our conversation on digital transformation, Rudy Karsan presented us with the question: "what wrong, outdated or unhelpful lenses am I using to see the world?" Today, we are here with Zak Dychtwald, Founder of The Young China Group to help bring clarity and perspective to our own (mostly) western lenses. Our goal is to improve our ability to interpret changes in China just a little more adeptly. Let's jump in.
This episode is for those of you attending Sundance 2022. We'll cover helpful logistics and introduce some themes we may be working on. See you soon!
“Data is never the whole story…there is always a gap between the data and reality.” -- Irwin Kula
Just when we think we know what we think about data, Irwin Kula is here to help us uncover the tensions and handle the polarities data brings.
There are so many tensions fundamental to the role of data in our lives, just think about how the most valuable data doesn’t actually confirm what we already know … it brings us something new, probably throws us into a more uncertain rather than more certain frame of mind, and may induce change when we weren’t looking for any type of change at all.
Still, from the outset, when data is mentioned in business it's not usually about the discovery of unintended results but about certainty. But on our quest for certainty, we are often given less of it.
Let's jump in.
We have identified two sources of Rogue Waves: the Quantum Change in Connectivity and Quantum Change in Information. These are core facets of human existence and therefore a big deal. But from these comes an interesting element we will discuss today, and that is, that with connectivity and information we have an all-out war for our attention. Any tool kit to ride the rogue waves is wise to be equipped for the media rogue wave, not only how we handle it individually in terms of our time, but how we understand how it is impacting all businesses and impacting our investment processes. Let's jump in.
If you’ve listened to the series on digital transformation, you may be wondering how to pick companies that will adapt well, and avoid companies that are going to get run over! We need some new tools in our toolkit, and today, cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken is here to help us with the first potential tool to hone: today, we learn about Assumption Hunting.
We begin with some revealing signals that unearth the foundational assumptions of a corporation and end with helpful questions to pose to management teams or your internal teams to gain conviction in the company's ability to weather the storm. I hope you enjoy it.
After all that has been presented, Rudy Karsan is here to offer his perspective on digital transformation. Rudy’s lens is of a former HR software CEO and current venture investor who has an incredible ability to zoom in on operations and zoom out on strategy, technology and reflections on decision making.
We are going to start with a part of the conversation that most podcasters would have edited out, but I think is probably one of the most useful portions of the conversation to guide us into the space of stepping back. And as we close out this series for now, Rudy takes us to the more fundamental questions surrounding the time and place we are in. It provides an excellent balance to the specific frameworks we have been offered by Tim, John and JP over the past month. And reminds me that as investors, our job requires this toggling between the seemingly certain prescriptions for the future that we base our investments on, as well as the aggravatingly uncertain reality that there is so much systems change happening all around us. To pick out the correct decision making tools for our time, its so helpful to get perspective from someone like Rudy, so let’s join him…as he jumps right in.
John Dillon has been a tech executive for over 40 years. When we asked him about digital transformation, he compared it to the advent of the steam engine or electrification…so that is certainly compelling. John's real-life examples put a finer print on this picture. Let's jump in.
Last week Tim Mattison helped us understand the different levels or phases an organization might go through as they experience digital transformation. Now, JP Rangaswami is going to help us understand the larger context that is required to assess whether any technology is about to be a major part of digital transformation or a real head fake.
JP reminds us that digital transformation is not about the technology being ready, but also whether less talked about factors like social norms and legal infrastructure will act as barriers or tailwinds.
Last week we introduced our series on digital transformation. Now that we have some context on its importance for investors, let's get some inputs from our friends who are practitioners and decision-makers with regard to technology inside organizations. Today we are happy to have Tim Mattison, an active practitioner of all things digital transformation at AWS, the company that first showed many of us what digital transformation is going to look like. (You will see he is representing his own, general ideas here, including a few on parenting, and not those of his company.) He will offer up his reflections including five levels or phases of digital transformation. I think it will help us identify and categorize digital transformation and how it shows up in companies that are either building competitive advantage from digital transformation or just falling further behind.
Let’s jump in.
Welcome to our series on digital transformation. We are in a period in which every product or service we touch has already been defined in some digital way: each grain of wheat, each picture on our phone, each manicure, each life insurance policy has a digital marker, trail, story, or a digital facilitator.
"Digital transformation" can become a statement of the obvious, of the time and space we live in....except we don't see or experience many of these digital markers. We don't feel them so much, we don't sense them, all the way, really. Digital doesn't always "live" in our physical world as something easy to point to for concrete changes happening all around us. Instead, we have abstract ideas like the "cloud", (which is really one of the best uses of language we have thus far to describe something abstract in a way we can understand for this new age), and we have trouble translating what's happening digitally to our very physical world. This sounds like an opportunity to discover blind spots.
We are doing this series on digital transformation because we think it is grossly underestimated. Sometimes, we can’t always characterize the very water we are swimming in. Sometimes, we don't even know we're swimming in water. Over the next few weeks, we will put some concrete examples around this very big topic with a series of interviews. I hope you enjoy it.
In times of heightened uncertainty, what can we do to prepare for and handle the uncertainty rather than be tossed around by it? Is there anything we can adjust so that we can do our jobs well in these times?
Today we are speaking with behavioral scientist Matt Wallaert on this exact topic.
Matt will help us zoom out today and understand what the experience heightened uncertainty looks like from a behavioral perspective - it's not just the obvious looks of overwhelm or the on-edge feeling of anxiety – and we will discuss how it shows up in work that sets us up for falling prey to decision-making biases or just plain old mental paralysis.
There is good news: there is much we can do from the individual standpoint and for our teams and organizations, so let’s jump in.
Special note: While this topic is perennial, we did ask Matt for his thoughts in light of so much uncertainty, fear, and dread recently, especially geopolitically. Thank you for being available on short notice to do this for our community, Matt. I hope that the conversation helps to re-center us so that we can do our part to be more effective in all our roles: investors, leaders, family members, and maybe even humanitarians. Thanks for listening.
Today we flip the script as our friend and collaborator Jorgen Van der Sloot decides he wants to hear more about some of Coburn Ventures work on process and collaboration: what we do to help organizations go through change or make change last, and what is the difference between a community and a network that might hint at the future of work and collaboration for many businesses. By talking through the genesis of Coburn Ventures work on process and gatherings, you'll hear threads that are more universal and hint at the escalating need for investors and all types of businesses to improve and understand collaboration, community, and process in order to compete and thrive.
Thanks for listening.
At Coburn Ventures, the investment philosophy and process grew out of change investing. But to understand change investing, we might want to understand change.
One of the first steps of change investing is a simple recognition of how much we subconsciously anchor to what's going on today staying the same, whereas, in reality, change is happening all around us, all the time, in ways that we do and do not immediately recognize or want to recognize. We can really use change frameworks and pattern recognition to better understand what shifts are going on that we want to invest in, avoid, or cycle out of.
In that vein, today we are going to slow down and break change investing into some component parts. When we put it back together, we will be able to talk about what change investing is and can be. I think it will illuminate some elements of change investing that you might already incorporate and maybe even some new perspectives to add to your particular process. Let's jump in.
Today’s conversation is with Mike Cahill, a longtime friend, and investor who has been so kind to walk through his thinking on the market, especially as it relates to the very important topic of inflation. The debate about whether inflation will be transitory or structural has been in our ear a lot lately, but it has not always been very helpful, as pundits ping pong around recent data rather than getting underneath the surface to examine the longer term forces at play. This is where Mike comes in. His framing is clear, succinct, and understandable, and will help all of us have much more nuanced and helpful conversations on the topic. We will cover so much in the conversation, from CPI to ESG, I hope you enjoy it.
Today, our last topic in our series on The Dark Side of the Moon is "de-professionalizing" valuation.
What on earth would we mean by de-professionalizing investment work on valuation?
Isn’t "professional" investment what holds up our trust in great money management?
We will get into that and much more. Let’s figure out together how some professional elements of investing may or may not be serving us well.
I hope you enjoy it.
Today in our series the Dark Side of the Moon, we are exploring value, and in particular, what to do with stocks that are perceived to be excessively valued. There are so many that fit this category and have fit this category for years now.
As business models have changed with connectivity, networks, and the information age, there are more businesses that defy laws we thought applied to every business, laws like diminishing returns. But, professionally, we prefer to rely on concepts and measurements that we feel are certain, or at least proven, somehow. We don't want to have to reevaluate things we’ve been taught and the methods that we think help us.
So are we at a crossroads? An evolution? An inevitable correction?
To explore, we talk with investor Scott Booth, who brings loads of experience in both the equity markets as well as private markets, and whose clear-mindedness has often provided really insightful conversations over the years. I hope you enjoy it.
In reviewing our investment process, it can be helpful to look for where we get trapped, where we feel on our heels in scenarios we didn’t anticipate and feel forced into making a decision on selling. Sell discipline is one of the areas ripe for costly errors, so let’s dig into it today and see if we can’t find a few incremental steps to take to possibly circumvent more of these situations.
This is part of a series we are calling The Dark Side of the Moon: the elements of the investment process we don’t always like to spend time on but have a huge cost if we avoid them.
We’ll cover risk, selling disciplines, and red flagging, all along with our friends. I hope you find it a useful trip... See you on the other side.
Today we’re with Steve Salopek, small-cap and tech fund manager turned University Professor at THE Ohio State University. We’re here to explore how we can better approach thesis threats, discussions, and investigations into what can and will go wrong with a thesis or a stock position.
Pip starts us off with some ideas for methods and then Steve will tell us more about building red-flagging right into their process, so that it seeped into the foundation, saving them valuable time and pain.
Stay tuned to how Steve’s techniques in his second career as a professor can be parlayed into investment meetings.
I hope you enjoy it.
This is part of a series we are calling The Dark Side of the Moon: the elements of process we don’t always like to spend time on but have a huge cost if we avoid them.
We’ll cover risk, selling disciplines, and red flagging, all along with our friends. I hope you find it a useful trip... See you on the other side.
Sometimes our most valuable work is done when we review that which we think we know for sure.
So to start off this new year, we have a short but potentially really important conversation on one of the most fundamental concepts in our work: risk. What is it, fundamentally, and what are we doing to incorporate risk that is worthwhile, and what are we doing that may be wasteful?
Let’s jump in.
This is part of a series called The Dark Side of the Moon: the elements of process we don’t always like to spend time on but have a huge cost if we avoid them.
We’ll cover risk, selling disciplines, and red flagging, all along with our friends. I hope you find it a useful trip... See you on the other side.
As we close out 2021, we wanted to offer a topic that is both interesting and supportive of year-end introspection and is also thought-provoking beyond investing as many of us step away from work over the holiday.
We’re talking about the difference between scarcity and abundance. To help us explore the concept, our conversation today includes Amber Gentry, a nutritional psychologist. I think you see how this clearly compliments the discussion. If you haven’t read Amber’s piece on scarcity and abundance, please reach out and we’ll get it to you. I hope you enjoy it.
In the last in our series on Leadership, Pip and I apply the concept of collective consciousness to leadership and especially, our new workplaces and habits of work. The upshot? The more collectiveness consciousness an organization has, the more options the organization has.
As workplaces are now “blended” between offices and home and other spaces, it might be helpful to step back and consider the level of collective consciousness on your team, as much as you can assess it from the inside. We explain this much more in the conversation, which I hope you'll find useful. Though it wasn’t planned this way, this concept really ties together so much of what we learned in this series by talking to Lisa Baird about adaptability, Matthias Hollwich about the future of workplaces and Jennifer Salopek about leadership and value creation. This will be a wrap on this particular series on leadership. I hope you enjoy it.
How is it that value is actually added to a company? We sometimes assume we have the playbook to answer a question like that, and, well, for many of us this is the goal of our jobs as investors or leaders.
But of course, like everything, it's quite dynamic.
In this deep dive on leadership with Jennifer Salopek, we explore “value” much more...what might be next beyond the pyramid structure of business organizations, what the new career goals may be, and how they would be facilitated and managed to create lasting value.
We also reveal a new format in which we gave Jen a sneak peek at the other leadership podcasts in this series, so we’re all able to riff off of those contributions and spend a little more time with the important ideas from Lisa Baird and Matthias Hollwich. I hope you enjoy it.
Matthias Hollwich, founder of the architecture firm HWKN, is back with us today to offer another perspective in this series in our podcast on leadership.
Now, Matthias lives at the intersection of the future of work and leadership and he does this with his toolset of architecture and design. So his perspective lives a few years ahead of us, because by nature, he is designing buildings and spaces that take time to come to fruition and must serve future needs and future generations. Let’s hear more of what the future may hold.
It's Thanksgiving today in the United States, so this is a special edition of our Coburn Ventures Podcast, which will also be an inaugural edition of a new monthly series over at the Change Makers podcast coming in 2022. That podcast is for the Coburn Ventures Community for Change and the over 300 members who contribute to that community.
In this special edition, we knew we wanted to present some kind of take on gratitude. And we noticed that conversations about gratitude today circle around habits and practices...cute little books and journals to remind oneself to be grateful… and that seems wonderful but somehow not critical, and it seems to be missing what we were suspecting may be a really crucial element of gratitude in making not only our lives but our work, better.
So we held discussions over the course of the last month with a broader group and called in "Gratitude meets process" and here, I would say process is the scaffolding for doing great work, however you want to define that.
Well, we often look to linear methods of doing and creating our work, a lot of the structures and tools we use: calendaring by the hour, thinking in units of dollars, or pages written, these are linear constructs. But we understand that insight generation is not a linear phenomenon. What could gratitude, which is also nonlinear, its transcendent, what can gratitude teach us about how we are living and working?
You'll get a special surprise after a brief introduction, so please, join us in a special deep dive on gratitude.
Happy Thanksgiving, in the very broadest sense, to all. Thank you.... for listening.
As a midpoint in our series on leadership, we are dropping in a short but simple concept that I think could be valuable just because it's a valid candidate for a real blind spot for us, the lens we see through as investors and business leaders, and for the management teams we interface with and depend on to have a strategy that syncs up with reality. So, this podcast is about growing our awareness and being able to see things we may have been missing, by learning about this concept of being mis-aged. Let's jump in.
Today we kickoff a series on leadership, and what better way to do that than to visit with Lisa Baird, our friend and leader of Heidrick & Struggles Global Human Resources Practice. We dive right in, and start with hiring: What are corporations looking for in their leadership and more importantly, why? What attributes are required to meet the moment? We end with Lisa's own questions for management that she uses for assessments and interviews, so stay tuned for that. Let’s jump in.
What does it take to identify a company that is a true guardian of an increasingly valuable, durable brand?
Now that we have learned more about brand character with Veta, we will focus on assessing if the company is actually acting consistently with brand character as one of the key ways to preserve and build brand value. If we, as investors, are going to purport that a company has “a great brand” or a brand that translates to an intangible asset, I think we will benefit from understanding how Veta builds brand character as a key to generate durability and long term success. Let's jump in.
Today we get to dive in on the topic of brand with a day-to-day practitioner, advisor, and creator of brand value, Veta Bates.
Veta gives real-life examples of products and then helpfully pairs them with analysis behind what each company is doing with their brand development that is or isn’t adding value.
As we start, Veta is recounting a conversation she and Gavin Ivester had about a very specific yet-to-be-named product. We start there because it takes us right to the heart of how product design and brand character can come together for powerful effect. Let’s jump in.
After our intro to assessing brands, we now add a new dimension: values-based branding, that attempt that can hit or miss that aims to tightly tie brand and behavior to value signaling and an offer of being “values-aligned” with a product, service, or company.
Why does this seem to be fertile ground, and is it, really? That question is why we brought in Irwin Kula for his perspective on how we belong, believe, and matter has morphed… making these values-based offerings so easily exploitable for companies. How will this play out? Let’s jump in.
Today we start a new series on branding, and especially how to consider the value of brands in assessing the broader corporation and its competitive advantages. We start with one idea that I want to highlight because I think it's not the standard idea of what a brand is to a corporation: it is that the brand resides in the buyers' mind. It is NOT owned by the corporation and DEFINITELY NOT controlled by the corporation. So with that, we’ll discuss five different elements of the brand and then some questions and live examples to help with assessment.
Let's jump in.
The G is in ESG, which stands for Governance, is often seen as the point of relief for our clients. It’s the part where they tell us: we know we have a lot to learn on Environment and Social, but Governance, we’ve got it. We’ve been doing that really well for a long time.
But what if the G in ESG is different from the G of the past 3-4 decades? When we step back, I don’t think anyone would think it surprising that maybe what's expected out of G today is different. Let’s jump in.
One of our goals in this series of ESG podcasts is to take the abstract idea of ESG and bring it to life with concrete examples. There are leaders out there in both the investing world and of course, the business operators, who are defining and iterating on the standards of ESG, and we want to hear more about it. That’s why today we’re speaking with Jasper Van Brakel, CEO of RSF Social Finance. Jasper gets to sit in the middle of business leaders, their stakeholders, and their investors, of which he is often one, and he offers us a view of how a multi-stakeholder, ESG focused investment event or regular quarterly meeting might go down. I hope you enjoy it.
Today we are talking about the history of the money management industry, and how values that were "baked in" in the 1980s when this industry really took off are dictating a lot of what we think is possible and right in the industry, and why the emergence of ESG and ESG related investment philosophies can seem so incongruent.
But to do this, to go through unearthing the founding values of an industry, we start in an interesting place, with a discussion about the concept of the commons, and how this thought-provoking piece of political theory applies to our struggles with ESG today. The idea of the commons starts to address all the externalities that investors say are outside of our domain. How long will we be able to draw that line? What do our industry's "founding values", implicit or explicit, have to say about these externalities? The forces all around the industry are changing, so let's take a look at it from these two angles today.
We are in a time in which ESG or multi-stakeholder investing, the real process of it, the real ‘how to” is actively being defined. Its defined by doing it. And though the marketers already have great tag lines out in the market and Regulators are having their say in what they want to highlight, investors will also create the market by putting their stake in the ground, by having their own process and their own philosophies.
This is why speaking with Jags today is so helpful, so inspiring, and so grounding.
Jags is really a great pioneer: he is so willing to explore what ESG investing really implies for how he does his work. This has led him to incorporate ESG in ways that most of you might not anticipate. He meets with people you may not have ever considered vital to your process. He has a clear understanding of his core beliefs which guide his decision-making.
Notably, Jags is not considered an ESG specialist! He is a portfolio manager.
We’ll discuss so much in this conversation, from core beliefs, to his voting record, to why he doesn't use the term engagement anymore and finally, how all of this comes down to the day-to-day business including communicating his work to clients. I think it will give you a view into how he does multi-stakeholder in a more holistic sense than many, and hopefully it might spark some ideas that are resonant for your ESG philosophy and process. I hope you enjoy it.
As investors, we are outsiders, so when we hear from management that the company has an interesting opportunity in a new market or a plan to improve its market share, it can be tempting to think that company can make that strategic move effectively.
But whether or not that company can succeed is largely due to the weakness or the strength of the culture. Because here’s the important part: explicitly or implicitly, many new company goals, even those that are seemingly only product-oriented, actually require changing some part of company culture.
So, what do we mean by assessing company culture? In this conversation, we discuss attributes of strong and weak culture and why sometimes, a weak culture could be exactly what you want. I hope you enjoy it.
We’re back with Gavin Ivester, who we got to talk to last month about caring and what companies are asked to do to become a truly modern company. Today, we dive in on Gavin’s most recent thoughts on emerging marketplaces of a very distinct flavor: these communities are springing up organically around the world, and fix themselves around an extremely personalized or customized preference, like flying planes or youth ice hockey. What is going on here? Let’s jump in.
Our thoughts and mental models determine how we see the world, so as change investors, we like to make sure we have a few different ways of seeing. It's one of the neatest things humans can do -- intelligence plus empathy = vast possibilities. We use change frameworks to do this, and today, I suppose we’re introducing a new change framework. I found this one in the work of Robert A. Johnson, so it comes from a mix of psychology and medieval religion, a combination I never thought I’d attend to as an investor, but it helped me think of marketplace changes in a very new way, so I hope you find it useful too.
Today's conversation is our chance to go even further below the surface on one of our 11 Unavoidable Changes: Empowering the End Nodes. JP Rangaswami wrote the piece that grounded this idea, and we are happy to be together today to go deeper on the topic.
At about minute 15 there are a few ideas that are so striking to me that I want to call them out for you. The ideas are about engineering interactions in order to increase the data set you have… in order to then be in a position to make better decisions. I hadn’t thought so clearly about the impact empowering the end nodes has: it can add a new layer of intelligence, actively iterating and coursing through the whole enterprise.
JP walks us through a few different ways to do this, and we surmise that empowering the end nodes will be one of the competitive advantages of great businesses that can move to “smart” end nodes, rather than the “dumb” end nodes created by more traditional top-down business models. I hope you enjoy it.
The 11 unavoidable ideas are one of the oldest components of our process. For those of you who have been around for a while, the Unavoidable Ideas are a variation of what we used to call our Node 1 Societal Shifts. These shifts were the starting point for every company we would analyze for our portfolio. At the very top of our funnel, the first filter was this question: Is this company benefiting from or negatively impacted by one of the societal changes that we’ve identified? It increased conviction from the beginning that we had a company that was in the midst of major change, and that is where we wanted our portfolio to be positioned, in monumental change!
Here are "11 Unavoidable Ideas" that are in play right now, and we believe are worth noticing and thinking through at a deeper level. I hope you enjoy it.
There’s a big difference between believing you understand a concept and really internalizing it. If I know anything about the community surrounding Coburn Ventures, I know that we always want tools to adapt, change and learn new things in our work and life. But more than that, we don't want to create new blind spots by thinking we understand something that we really don't.
Pip and I have developed pilot projects and working groups with clients that helps embed internalization in investment process, but we’ll go deeper on those specific tools another time because today we include a friend later in this conversation whose profession demands internalization of every piece of his act such that to his audience, all motions are effortless: he needs to be particularly beguiling to his audience...its magician and mentalist Ryan Oakes. I hope you enjoy it.
ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) presents pressure to go from one mindset to another about what investing is and to whom all of the benefits accrue and why. A change like this leaves open a lot of opportunities for confusion, and for jumping to conclusions…both enemies of a strong and clear investment process on a high-functioning team. Today, we are aiming to bring awareness up around common misunderstandings arising with ESG. We start with misunderstandings between investors and marketers, and then between investors and... investors. I hope you enjoy it.
Jennifer Brown helps organizations understand what Diversity, Equity and Inclusion means in real life. What kinds of listening needs to happen, what programs work, how to go beyond the surface level… so that employees can come to work as their full selves. Jennifer acts as a guide in this sometimes rough terrain. Today we start with some knowledge-building, and basic definitions like equity vs. equality. After that Jennifer helps us see more of what DEI looks like in an effective organization and why its so important for building trust, belonging and in that, productivity. Let’s jump in.
As I listened back to this recording, I was shaking my head most of the time. This is about the least summery summer book list that has ever been released. I mean, my best "beach read" is a study of Old New York and Pip has a recommendation that profiles families in North Korea.
That being said, the goal is to take in some new inputs this summer...and especially uncommon or unconventional inputs, and I am constantly amazed by the power of research and writing, but especially world literature, to open up new considerations, new perspectives, and broaden my imagination. For an investor, there is so much value in widening the aperture and letting a writer hold hands with the reader's imagination to do the thing we humans can do: consider the many different ways of looking at the world and our collective past and future. It's a skill, but with the help of a good book, it's also play. We looked for books that had a combination of new ideas and great fun, and that is how we created the so-called summer book list. I hope you enjoy it.
We're here for Part Two of our conversation with Mike Lee of The Future Market and Alpha Food Labs. This week we'll get deeper into a systems-level approach to understanding our current food system to have a better view of where it may be going next. We start at the layer of culture, observing how our regional preferences create regional bonds and identity, and that this is ever more present in multi-national brands aiming to plug in directly to our cultural and political identities. Finally, Mike walks us through a couple of compelling examples of why "sustainability" cannot be yanked out of the context of the whole food system.
What's more fundamental than food? This week and next, we have two discussions with our friend Mike Lee, founder of The Future Market and Alpha Food Labs. Mike and his team help large corporations see into a future where everything from how we get our food to what it consists of, is different, and he helps young brands navigate a very established food industry. In today's conversation, Mike helps us understand why the future of food may not be what we first imagine.
Today we’re talking about getting back to the office, a topic that many of you have been bringing to us fervently over the last six months. Beyond the obvious reasons, I think you are all asking about it precisely because it is up for discussion and review, and that itself is meaningful! Additionally, I think you are sensing that the role of the traditional office for knowledge workers and more has been in the rearview mirror for a while.
And now, office as a daily necessity for the doing of work, the office as we've defined it for the last 80 years or so, is just not part of our zeitgeist. It is likely now post zeitgeist, which is not so scary an idea as post zeitgeist only means that its classical period has passed. It does not cease to exist, but it loses its place as the de facto standard to define when work is done and how, both individually and in the context of team. So what might happen in the coming months as organizations sort out coming back to a physical office? Let's jump in.
We’re here with Gavin Ivester, a product and brand executive with a background in industrial design. He has global experience in both tech and lifestyle products at Apple, Nike, Puma, and Bang & Olufsen. Our topic today is care. More specifically, what is it that modern companies can do to incorporate care, at scale, into their product or service experience? Let’s jump in.
Today we’re talking about play and play science, inspired by the work of our friend Dr. Stuart Brown. So, why this topic, on this podcast? Well, play, may not be exactly what you think. We know how to describe play and its benefits for children but we think we leave many types of play behind when we grow up. Spoiler alert: may we don't, we just don't fully realize what play is. Play is much broader and more powerful than we give it credit for. Dr. Brown writes that in a play state, we are organizing our thoughts, and rapidly creating. It’s how we’ve evolved to solve problems. Without play, we are depressed, prone to burnout, and our thinking becomes stuck and rigid. Now, doesn't "play" sound intriguing? Let's jump in.
Two weeks ago, we all learned about the Colonial Oil pipeline ransomware attack on the East Coast of the United States. It was a high profile hit, but was then followed by an odd comment from the ransomware group saying in effect, “Sorry, we didn’t mean to actually disrupt the pipeline!” in other words, we’re here to be quiet and not make too much of a problem but we are still going to steal your money.
While we know conceptually that ransomware attacks are pervasive, we called JC Herz to get her deeper and experienced perspective. We know there has been a significant underspend in security that has created a massive systemic arbitrage for ransomware attacks. We know that the bias and competitive pressure for tech spending is around innovation and speed, not fixing vulnerabilities. We also know that the “attack surface”, grows bigger with every application we connect to the network. Finally, an Executive Order in the US from May 12 may increase reporting requirements if and when companies are breached and pay ransom. It's an attempt to start to deal with the problem collectively, but it may have some unintended consequences. As investors, what do we do with all of this? Today we start with a big download of context and perspective from JC.
Today we compliment a piece Pip is writing on formulating a valuable arbitrage in investing. For Coburn Ventures, we use change as the lens of our arbitrage, so we talk about pattern recognition as it relates to change, and how it can develop into high conviction positions. Of course, investment philosophy --such as change investing-- and process are intertwined. A potentially valuable question to have in mind while listening: which parts of your process seem most important in developing that arbitrage opportunity over the long term? Thanks for listening.
What can we do to assess where companies are positioned among the fast-moving currents of Digital Transformation? What do we mean when we say "Digital Transformation" anyway? In this conversation, Pip will give some background on why this is so important right now and then we jump in with Michael Stich, now of Court Avenue, where he helps marketers understand how to use innovation to create value for their companies and for end customers.
Michael has been on both the agency side and the client side with roles that demanded an understanding of new technologies and how to best translate these inevitable changes and evolutions into value for clients marketing to consumers. Stay until the end when he offers an ever-so casual two-minute summary of the past two decades of innovation and the waves of adaptation businesses and customers have absorbed.
Lastly, in the closing I do repeat Michael's attributes of creating value for customers and for improving businesses internally. I hope you'll find these points useful in assessing where a sector or company may stand in addressing the rush of innovation coming their way.
PS: This podcast pairs well with the Questions for Management with John Dillon, a CEO who knows firsthand many times over what it takes to absorb new digital innovations into a company culture.
We are hearing the term "resilience" or "resiliency" so much this year.
Biologist Maria Souza continually reminds us that, “Without disruption, there can be no resilience.”
So we thought it worthwhile to go under the surface on this topic. Pip starts us with seven factors or attributes of resilience. It's an attempt to get more specific and granular as to what we mean by "being resilient", so that we can then use this clearer definition as a litmus test or marker to "measure" your resilience or that of your team, or to be able to recognize resilience in company culture or management teams.
About five minutes in, Dr. Morris Pickens joins us and offers his usual clear and simple examples of where common slip-ups may be, and some interesting observations from his world about reframing the mental process to be more resilient.
This week the Super League of Premier League Football was announced: a collection of the best and brightest franchises to come into their own, potentially even more profitable league. Just as quickly, the league was extinguished completely. From fan outrage to JP Morgan finding itself in the spotlight for underwriting the concept, this week has been a dramatic one for the league and football fans all over the world. We take the opportunity to zoom in on the news, as it so quickly and thoroughly collided old-world single-stakeholder thinking with new world multi-stakeholder ESG sensibilities. The Super League provides a helpful case to keep in mind when we think about the intrinsic and intangible value that we are tasked to get curious about when it comes to ESG. I think more business leaders will be tuning their antennae to the topic, because when fans hear about a power move announced in the dark of night, they just might surround your team bus with those ever-so valuable players inside of it or hang banners on your stadium with signs that say “Super Greed” instead of Super League and “Fans not Customers”. Are they one or the other? Or both?
About 10 years ago, we started talking about “The Future and History of Asking Questions”. It was an acknowledgment of the exponential growth of our ability to ask questions and receive answers about them. We are seeing so many derivatives off of this phenomenon. One of those derivatives that we’ll talk about today is that as the expectation increased that we can ask just about any question and get a reasonable answer, we take that into all areas of our life. What used to be seen as “demanding” is now normal, what used to be seen as table stakes for great customer service, is now insufficient. This future and history of asking questions may seem like a simple concept, but it's reverberating throughout our marketplaces and individual behaviors and results in profound changes in business.
Today we have Zak Dychtwald, Founder of Young China Group, joining us to help us understand the global young consumer and specifically, all the ways we may be misunderstanding the global consumer with regard to "Young China".
Zak wanted to know what the future held, he found himself living in China. With that experience and his lens on demographics, he has become a bridge for decision-makers, many in the western world, to understand the rapid pace of change in China. Zak will walk us through a framework to reveal more of what we may not be fully understanding, and he offers a multitude of important observations along the way. I hope you enjoy it.
Joseph Tainter said, “Complexity is the cumulative effect of reactionary decision making”. Well, we can do better than that, can't we? The investment process is the specific domain we use to reduce complexity and improve decision-making, and through our deep work over the years, we created the pre-determined game plan as our tool to get centered and focused on what we believe are the most relevant needs of the investment case.
Like all of our tools, it's meant to be customized, so if you listen for the high-level abstract points, you’re likely to find a few elements that might help your team's work to sharpen up too. I hope you enjoy it.
In this conversation, JP Rangaswami is going to help us slow down our thinking, breaking apart our tendency to literally jump to conclusions. He’s going to talk about the four stages of data development. So that you have a bit of background before we start, here they are:
- Observation: What just happened?
- Diagnosis: Why did it happen?
- Prediction: What’s going to happen next?
- Prescription: What should I do about it?
JP has some great examples to illustrate these four stages in real-world decision-making. Just listening to this conversation helped me heighten my awareness of when I conflate these steps, I think you're likely to find some new insights too. Enjoy.
The thesis statement, in the context of investing, is our best effort to create a testable hypothesis. Of course, it is not a scientific process, but we can surely borrow from the discipline of science to create a richer process!
If you find sometimes that your work is voluminous but unfocused, or the communication on your team or with outside parties is muddy and you can’t figure out why, then the process of forming and re-working a thesis statement can be a good place to start.
In this episode we will go into the process we used to sharpen our thesis statements, (they were a little unwieldy at first). This process let us get clearer on what really mattered, strengthened the signal and quieted the noise, and provided a roadmap for analysts that let us use our time far more precisely. We also include some examples so you can see how it works. I hope you enjoy it.
Today we are discussing Profit and Purpose with Omar Shaikh, co-founder of the Global Ethical Finance Initiative. We asked David Kim, who many of you know, to join as well, because this topic can’t be torn apart from philosophical underpinnings of commerce, business, history, and law, and David has such a strong ability to put big concepts into context. This is such an interesting discussion that I hope will be absorbed into how you are currently crafting your ESG process, or even more clearly defining a few things that you learned in business school that are "just not so". I think this episode has the highest frequency of citing or referring to major philosophical theories or thinkers, from Adam Smith, Hume and Hutchinson, to Narrow banking to the up-to-date work the Global Ethical Finance Roundtables are doing. I’ve included links to Omar’s Global Ethical Finance Initiative, as well as the Economics of Biodiversity paper David mentioned. That link will take you to a highlight report, but there is a 610-page version as well for reference. Thanks for listening.
Today we are examining business strategy, and especially, strategies that are weak, becoming "Tactics Masquerading as Strategy". And then, we tie that to a key philosophical underpinning of many business strategies that we may be adapting away from: Porter's Five Forces. This is a philosophy that fits very well with the last four decades. It would be a largely successful framework to start strategic thinking… but just as we want to be able to identify when a strategy is really just a reduction into tactics, we want to be able to understand the underlying building blocks philosophy a strategy rests on. So it's important to consider that this framework is now being reevaluated, even by Michael Porter himself and his colleagues, who starting in about 2011 now write mostly on Creating Shared Value. So, some kind of change is afoot. Let’s get into it.
Polly Labarre is an author, thinker, collaborator, and journalist. I first met her through Pip as she was working on her book Mavericks at Work, which is a fascinating look into the most original minds in business. You may know her as a co-Founder of Fast Company. Any of you who enjoyed our very first Sundance Gathering know her as the first to utter "you are the program", an ethos of creativity and contribution that is inherent in almost all of our work at Coburn Ventures.
Polly's special ability lies in examining what’s happening at the edges of organizations and culture to see what might be an indication of future change in business and management. We dive into what it means to have a company that understands how to bring out the best in their employees, how institutions frame our work experience, in sometimes limited and very outdated ways. Polly has this great phrase about building organizations where systems and structure "go with the grain of humanity". Imagine that.
We will get into edge cases that take us to real-life examples from China to Sweden and back again. I hope you enjoy it.
We are often asked to help teams in some way refine their communications, especially so that they can get better idea flow between the analysts and the portfolio manager.
So Pip stepped back to see if he could better define each role required in investing. You could probably break this down further, or differently, but here are the four jobs of stock picking.
- Business Analysis
- Security Analysis
- Market Psychology
- Portfolio Analysis
So who does what? We’ll walk you through, in hopes that communicating around these four “jobs” might help analysts and PMs get clearer on how to work more powerfully together. I hope you enjoy it.
We promised to pick up where we left off from last week's Episode #1 on the Reinvention of Real Estate. If you remember we have three guests for this conversation, from different but highly related disciplines in real estate: we have real estate investor Glenn Lowenstein, Matthias Hollwich, co-founder and principal of architecture firm HWKN, and Jennifer Salopek, advisor to major retailers on navigating change.
In this episode, we go deeper into the transformation happening with mixed-use real estate. If you remember the great perspective from Matthias in Part 1, that after this year of massive pressure and change we are already really living in "2035", we apply that idea to specific changes that blur the lines between retail, commercial, residential, and office space.
We are bringing you a big topic today, so big that it matters to every corner of our lives and our economy: real estate. We’re interested in what is changing, at what pace, and why. To think through such a vast topic, we are bringing in three friends with three very different but complementary vantage points. We have Glenn Lowenstein, a real estate investor who has a very holistic approach to looking at the markets he invests in. We have Jennifer Salopek, who knows the business of retail at a large scale, and has served on Boards of large national retailers, and we have Matthias Hollwich, architect, founder of Architizer, and principal of the architecture firm HWKN. Today we start with commercial and industrial and end with some paradoxical thoughts on retail. All the while we will be working to go under surface level. Next week we will continue with many more thoughts about retail and residential.
What do we do when valuations of stocks and markets become so high as to defy our most careful assessment of the value of the business and its future cash flows? Today we are going to present some options for layering in a process or method to use during these times. Our purpose here is to provide a few ways to help you think about addressing the question directly, especially since valuation is one of the most potent triggers to take our conversation into the world of the abstract, to launch us directly into the mess of our own investment biases, to get into conversations that just swirl around and don't go anywhere, or to amp up the fear and confusion... all of which get in the way of making great decisions. After listening to this you may come up with your own framework. The design principle here is to have a process that will keep you on shore, rather than being swept away into the swirl.
Today we are happy to spend time with John Dillon, longtime CEO of private and public companies, currently at data company Aerospike. We often turn to John for reality checks: what’s it really like running a company from hiring the right head of sales to meeting with investors? Today we zoom in on the shareholder-executive relationship, and ask John what questions he would ask a CEO if he were in our position. John offers a number of illuminating questions but one of my favorite parts of this conversation, besides the great stories, is when John starts to unearth a major source of competitive advantage or weakness in our current time. I’ll give you a hint, it has to do with IT departments. I hope you enjoy it.
Part of our job as investors is to find or design uncommon inputs that will lead to uncommon investable insights. One of the important inputs is how we spend our conversations with management teams. At Coburn Ventures we focus so much on designing questions for management because it can meaningfully alter the probability that we will walk away with something insightful to act on. Now you'll hear a bit more about that process, and a few methods you might like to use too.
ESG, or Environment, Social and Governance regarding sustainability, was thought of as an add-on to an investment thesis 5 or 10 years ago. But the world is arriving at the doorstep of ESG investors. Its more than an add on, it is a base layer, a foundational component of investment philosophy. And its rare that we get to take part in forming such a crucial component of investment philosophy. For teams that take on what ESG means to their particular process and philosophy, they may find themselves with a more rounded out look at a company, a more enhanced view of risk, and likely, stronger conviction in real long term competitive advantage. So how do you implement ESG into your process? In this podcast, Pip and I talk about just a few of the 10 greatest hits we published in 2020 on ESG. We’re happy to send you the piece, this is just a starting point. *Just one thing to listen for before we begin: I hope the tactic of pulling away from moral arguments and into exploring the gray zones is particularly helpful. Using this tool, you might be able to lay the groundwork for productive discussions right from the beginning.
Today we’re talking about community and business, and we have with us two business leaders who know loads about this topic: Peter Espersen and Darren Herman. Their experience on the topic runs deep, and both have extensive entrepreneurial experience, but they each have past roles that will help you connect to them - perhaps putting together that you have met them previously at one of our gatherings - and see why we immediately thought of these two for our conversation: Peter Espersen was Global Head of Crowd Sourcing and Online Innovation at Lego, and Darren for his role as VP of Product at Mozilla/Firefox. So I hope you enjoy this conversation between the four of us, now for you, on community in business.
Today, we present just a few of the ideas related to process that we know have helped our team find leverage in what we thought were unmovable parts of the investment process. Some of these changes will sound rudimentary at the onset. I challenge you to listen to these ideas with a "students mind", reviewing your process, how your team works and maybe, just maybe you will find one or two ideas in here that you’ll venture out and explore to increase conviction while saving time. Who knows what will happen?
Elliot Noss, CEO of internet company Tucows for just about 25 years, starts us off with a simple but reverberating statement: “the fundamental compact between employer and employee has changed”. There are so many related mutations of work, as he calls them, to consider. A few up shots that don’t do this conversation justice: Changes that will stick have cultural principles that were already underlying, and people, culture and mission are still the critical focus. Let’s hear more.
Picture a pie chart of your work week: what percent is your job, your vocation, or total waste? Let’s use this model to uncover possible changes in process and decision making.
As more of our work life is digitized, we do know now, or we will know the how, when, why and where of work... where we work best, with whom and for what purpose. But there is so much to understand and experience before we can know what that means for industries across many sectors. Let’s dig in with Greg Parsons.
Growth and value are simply boxes we put around two giant categories. It’s helpful for marketing purposes, and for investment process. So what gives? Well, we have been in a period of disequilibrium for over 25 years, and that disequilibrium has skewed massively to growth. Let’s dig in on what this means for process.
The “study of the mind” is now mainstream, but why is this important, and how far ahead are corporations and advertisers?
This student mindedness conversation will help us take a step back, exploring an attitude or approach that can be highly personalized. But what is it? What does it look like in active practice? Pip and Brynne discuss what it is snd why it comes up so often so that you can identify what elements might be helpful to your process.
We continue with biologist Maria Souza on complex systems. In Part 1 we discussed resilience as a key property of complex systems. Now we examine the role of internal feedback loops in resilience and how to identify the lynchpins that could help change your system.
Biologist Maria Souza introduces us to the core properties of complex systems: how to identify a resilient system, and how understanding the property of resiliency — which is neither good nor bad in and of itself — can help us identify effective cultures.
An introduction into Stewart Brand’s pace layering model, from his work The Clock of the Long Now. Movement in this model leads to vast destruction or creation of market cap. We talk through how we identify where companies sit in the model, and when and why there might be movement.
Social psychologist Matt Wallaert offers his thinking on why identity is the most powerful force for behavior change, and how to be aware of it and use it to make better decisions.
Continuing on the topic of decision making, we walk through the data chain and how to use it to identify where you are in the process and to then make the conversion from one node to the next.
JC Herz guides us through risk avoidance vs. risk acceptance, resilience and fragility, and why your first step must be to identify and write down the answer to this question: what is your source of maximal regret?
We know investors are particularly prone to some common decision making biases. We start the discussion today on some of the tactics and tools to bring awareness of these biases to the forefront in order to ameliorate the problems they can stir up.
Data scientist and business leader JP Rangaswami expands on the impact of starting from a point of view of stewardship vs. monetization; how he expects the quality of investment metrics associated with ESG to improve, and the conditions required to act with real stewardship in business governance.
Continuing our series of tools to assess change, we apply Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief to managements ability to assess reality and lead through periods of massive change.
Part 3 in a series intended to help you study possibilities for the future with fewer investment biases, more context, and easy to use tools.
“Omni” means all, but we have used the term omnichannel to describe retailers who compliment brick and mortar with e-commerce and mobile. In this mini-cast, we start an examination of how omnichannel is accelerating and what forms it is taking on with regard to how we work.
Adversity comes every day. What can we do to mentally prepare for it and handle it in the moment it arrives? Dr. Morris Pickens is back to explain his “locker room” process that he uses with his clients, some of the best professional golfers on the tour.
Part 2 of a series intended to help you study possibilities for the future with fewer investment biases, more context, and easy to use tools.
Part 1 of a series intended to help you study possibilities for the future with fewer investment biases, more context, and easy to use tools.
What does it mean to “trust your gut”?We explore this question with investor and former CEO Rudy Karsan. Rudy gives examples of how he has learned to identify the many facets of gut decision-making, but also expands on the practices he uses to continue to refine his ability to trust it.
What is considered a healthy building or community in a world that was already increasingly remote? Glenn Lowenstein discusses a changing calculus in how buildings are valued, which long-held customs and rules may be fractured , and whether defining communities and buildings by productivity is missing the whole picture.
Giving ourselves clean time to think is a surprisingly counter-cultural activity. In this conversation, Mo describes why it’s so important, and Mo, Pip and I discuss a variety of modalities to support this practice.
In this mini-cast, we discuss one quick insight with cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken.
Pip and I are in conversation with Lenley Hensarling on accelerating changes in sales and development strategy.
This is the first in our series of 5 to 7 minute mini casts designed to give you a quick process insight and get you on your way.
Right now we are in the midst of the COVID-19 virus arriving in Europe and the United States, and as leaders we are called to quickly reorient to managing and leading with confidence during this time. To help navigate this, we called up Morris Pickens, or “Dr. Mo” as his golfers call him, and to us, “Mo”, for his take. Mo is a sports psychologist and Performance Enhancement Specialist at Sea Island Golf, and personal sports psychologist to many PGA golfers. Mo’s job is to help golfers understand their emotions, refine their practice, and design a preparation routine for the best performance possible. As you might expect, he has a few thoughts on leadership in this particular time that applies to all of us: investors, business owners, entrepreneurs and family members.... In this conversation, I hope you’ll listen for a few gems from Mo, like “talk like a grand-dad would”, and “attitude is contagious, its just a matter of whether yours is worth catching”. At the end, there’s a special bonus on one of the ways Mo is adapting for his golfers as they now find themselves in the midst of an unwelcome off-season.
From Coburn Ventures, a conversation with Brynne Thompson and Pip Coburn on what Type II Error Avoidance Behavior is, what to do to identify it in your work and how to use investment process and to mitigate it.