“Stan, they could pay me a whole lot less if they treated me better”, Jacob said as he sipped his standard morning black coffee at what we call Starbucks North. Jacob and I have been meeting at one or the other of two Starbucks about once a month for the last three years. The subject of our regular meetings has been an ongoing project to create a life that combines the best of what he loves about his work with a feeling of being appreciated and respected for his significant contributions.
Many of my life lessons come from overhearing conversations. And if they occur in the sauna, well, the pithiness is directly proportional to the sogginess of the speaker.
“I’ve tried Epsom salts for that. It works pretty well,” said the woman to her sweating companion. The temperature gauge showed 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I thought it was called Ibsen salts..?” pondered her companion.
“No, you’re thinking of Buddy Ibsen, the guy who played the patriarch of the Beverly Hillbillies”, she corrected him. “You know, the guy who missed his dinner but shot a hole in his land that gushed oil.”
In 2001, the bestselling book on business was “Good to Great”, by Jim Collins. That book was a field study of 11 companies who fit certain criteria for being “great” that Collins proposed. One can quibble with his definition, but I think the criteria represented a fairly reasonable business definition of greatness. One of the common elements he identified was that each of the eleven subject organizations employed a rather ambitious, measurable objective towards which the entire organization could focus its collective efforts. Collins and his team coined the defining acronym for this goal: BHAG, a “big, hairy, audacious goal”.
It used to be that “institutional” investors were the paragons of long-term investing. The entities included in that title ranged from pension funds (defined benefit), to custodians and money managers of 401(k) plans (defined contribution), to insurance companies and others. In past decades, the actuarial requirements for payouts from these entities for beneficiaries were such that the institutions took a longer-term view of their investment returns, and “long-term” meant the decades to come.
