Book – Minh Quang Duong

Book

Three Good Books On Life

May 15, 2023by MQDuong1 Comment

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier

Kevin Kelly is the founding editor of Wired magazine. On his 68th birthday, Mr Kelly started to compile things he had learned about life for his adult children. Things that he wished he had known sooner himself. The final result is this short book filled with nuggets of wisdom and I really enjoyed this page-turner. Below is a glimpse of what you can expect:

“Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.”

“Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don’t know what you are passionate about. A better path for most youth is “master something.” Through mastery of one thing you’ll command a viewpoint to steadily find where your bliss is.”

“The consistency of your endeavors (exercise, companionship, work) is more important than the quantity. Nothing beats small things done every day which is way more important than what you do occasionally.”

“The real test of your character is not how you deal with adversity— although that will teach you much. The real test is how you deal with power.
The only cure for power is humility and the admission that your power comes from luck. The small person believes they are superior; the superior person knows they are lucky.”

Those Bastards: 69 essays on life, creativity, & meaning

A writer, blogger and investor, Jared Dillian is the author of Street Freak: Money and Madness at Lehman Brothers. As the title indicates, “Those Bastards” is a collection of 69 short essays, each of which draws heavily from the author’s personal experience and carries valuable insights on an aspect of life. Some chapters are lighter and funnier than others, but overall, I enjoyed the honest storytelling, brutally honest if I may add, and wittiness that Mr Dillian brought to the pages.

I say that worrying is praying for a bad outcome. And like I said, all fear is about the future—and why are we living in the future? We should be living in the present, in the moment, right now. And in the present, everything is fine. If there is something that will happen a month from now that you are worried about, are you going to make yourself miserable for an entire month until it happens? That doesn’t make any sense. I frequently tell myself: “I don’t have to decide this today.” I wait until the last possible minute to make decisions, which eliminates fear and anxiety.

Everything is going to be okay. And even if it’s not okay, it’s still going to be okay. I don’t stress about much. And the reason is that I only stress about things that are within my control, and when you think about it, there is very little that is within your control. It cracks me up that people stress about politics. I know some people who get consumed by politics, and pour out their rage on social media. They are profoundly unhappy about things that are completely out of their control.

You do the work, you put on the trade, and the result is not up to you. You have to get out of the results business. Instead, focus on the process. If the process is good, and repeatable, everything will work out in the long run. And if it doesn’t? That’s fine, too!

Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons

Born in 1940, Seymour Schulich is a successful businessman, investor, philanthropist and author. He co-founded and led Euro-Nevada and Franco-Nevada, two of the largest royalty resource companies in the world. In 2007, he published Get Smarter to educate aspiring young Canadians. The book contains conventional wisdom that’s often talked about in other self-help books. There is no ground-breaking insight, but the content is a valuable reminder for those well-versed with the genre and a great introduction for newcomers. The straightforwardness and brevity that Mr Schulich brings to the pages are refreshing. No long winded back stories. Just straight to the point that he wants to make.

Book, Business

Book Review: Quench Your Own Thirst

May 5, 2023by MQDuong1 Comment

Written by Jim Koch, the founder of the Boston Beer Company, “Quench Your Own Thirst” is a good book about beer brewing and business.

Charles James Koch, also known as Jim Koch, was born in Cincinnati in 1949 to German descendants and a family with a long history in beer brewing. Jim attended Harvard University and worked as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group. In 1984, using his great-great grandfather’s recipe, Jim sourced funding from friends and family to found the Boston Beer Company. Shortly after that, he created the famous Samuel Adams beer; which was the soul of the company in the early days. In 1995, he took the company public as Chairman of the Board and CEO. He retained the double duty till 2018, when he gave up the CEO seat to David Burwick. In 2022, The Boston Beer Company’s revenue crossed the $2 billion, making it one of the largest brewers in the US. That’s a long way from its humble beginning 40 years ago in Boston.

The book chronicled the journey of Jim Koch and the Boston Beer Company from the start. I don’t know much about the beer business, so I am happy to learn a bit more about it through Jim’s stories. I love that he broke the content into short chapters, each of which is dedicated to a certain topic. Jim discussed not only his successes, but also his failures candidly. In such reflection, he shared excellent nuggets of wisdom about life and business. No beating around the bush, no long winded stories, no bullshit. And I love that. The bonus point is that because I want to find “hidden gems”, books that don’t garner as much publicity as some others by celebrities, “Quench your own thirst” seems to fit the bill.

All in all, I like the book. If you want something refreshing and easy to read, this will be a good choice.

Excerpts

“To many, “decoction mash” might sound like an unpleasant form of surgery or maybe a dance you’d do at a heavy metal concert. Let me break it down for you: The first step of brewing is to take barley that has been germinated and dried (called “malt”), grind it up, and put it in a big vessel with warm water to create mash. We do this because the hot water in the mash triggers enzymes in the malt to break the grain’s complex starches down into simpler sugars. These sugars then become food for the yeast to work on during fermentation”

“To obtain a richer, sweeter, fuller-bodied beer like Americans drank in the nineteenth century, you want more sugars to stay in the beer to provide body rather than getting eaten up by the yeast. The sugar molecules have to be small and simple enough for our taste buds to perceive them as sweet, but large and complex enough that the yeast has trouble digesting them. Then you can add the hops and balance out the sweetness with bitterness.”

“I looked at this student and said, “I’ll tell you the difference. The difference between marketing and sales is the difference between masturbation and sex.” I think I heard a couple of gasps. Good! I wanted people’s attention. So I kept going: “One you can do all by yourself in a dark room and fool yourself into thinking you’re accomplishing something. The other requires real human skills and all the fury and muck and mire of real human-to-human contact.”

Entrepreneurs need to focus on what’s real. You shouldn’t worry so much about the image or hype that exists around the product or service. You should focus on the product, and on selling it. A great sales force can’t sell without a great product—it’s like a race car running off crappy gasoline. Great salespeople are only effective when they know they’re selling something worth buying.”

“He asked if I would give him seventy-five cents a case off that price if he ordered fifty cases.”

“I then asked him why the seventy-five cents a case was so important, especially since he was selling a case for an eight-dollar profit. He smiled, as if he had been waiting for that question. “You don’t understand my business. I have the best prices and expensive rent, but I still make more money than my competition. Young man, I don’t make my money when I sell the goods, I make my profit when I buy the goods. That seventy-five cents is my profit.”

“I decided to look at every place we spent money. I found money everywhere! It was like opening all the drawers in your house and finding a pile of cash in every one. Occasionally, it was as simple as asking for a lower price. Usually, it required that I be a better customer. For example, I had sixty-day terms with our contract brewery because I needed the extra time to pay, but once we were profitable, I asked for and got a 5 percent lower price by paying in five days. I found a way to use lighter-weight bottles of equal strength, and that saved 15 percent on bottles. We got our wholesalers to contribute twenty-five cents a case to help support the salespeople we put in their market.”

“If you want to run a successful business, you have to stay connected with people even as the business grows.”

“One day, I was talking to a guy who was a die-hard Heineken drinker. I was trying to get him to drink Samuel Adams and he wasn’t having it. “How can your beer be any good?” he asked. “It’s American. Everything in America is mass-produced by robots.”

“When he heard the words, “the beer is handcrafted in small batches,” he was persuaded. He now understood why Samuel Adams stood apart from the imports and the mass-produced American beers. An American beer that was handcrafted in small batches just felt good, evoking honest labor and a craftsperson who put his heart into the beer. “Sounds like it’s almost handmade,” he said. And he ordered a Sam Adams.”

“In 1986, two years after starting up, we changed our table tents to read “handcrafted in small batches,” putting that phrase both on our labels and on materials delivered at the point-of-sale. It was the first time the term “craft” had been applied to what was then called “microbrewing.” Eventually, we would become known as a leader of the “craft beer movement.” All from listening to a guy in a bar.”

“I tolerated the giant turds, the near disasters, and the unsteady sales because I had committed myself wholeheartedly to my new venture. I advise that you do the same. Don’t second-guess yourself. Don’t panic. Just stay the course.

In rock climbing, when you start out on a certain route, you say that you’re “committed.” You’re far enough off the ground that it’s easier to keep climbing up than to try to climb back down. All that matters is what’s ahead of you, so you don’t worry, and you don’t look down. Nothing good happens from looking down. Look up and find the next handhold and the next foothold and the one after that. You keep going. You trust yourself, even when you can’t see the whole path in front of you. If I could survive my own embarrassing screw-ups and keep going, then you can, too.”

“All of this might sound mundane, maybe even a little too high-minded, but every small thing that leaders do sets the tone and increases team members’ commitment to the common cause. People are always sensitive to hypocrisy or compromises from managers, and the behavior of senior leaders is scrutinized, magnified, and commented on by everyone. Leadership is a privilege, but in the immortal words of Spider-Man, “With great power comes great responsibility”—the responsibility to be a good role model and to practice what you preach.”

“When we sat down to negotiate the offering, I said to the investment banks, “I want my drinkers to be able to buy shares at a discount. Maybe it’s never been done before, but there has to be a way.”

“In the end, I prevailed. With the help of legendary venture capitalist Bill Hambrecht, who understood what we wanted to do and worked hard to help, we put a carefully worded press release (to comply with federal securities law) inside our six-packs announcing the offering of public stock. Consumers would mail in the press release to get a copy of our prospectus. They could then decide whether or not they wanted to participate in the initial offering. If they did, they had to mail in funds to purchase stock during a designated time period. Any investor could purchase a block of thirty-three of our shares for $495 dollars, or $15 a share—which turned out to be a 25 percent discount from the $20 a share that institutional investors got. The drinkers would do better than the big guys. Pretty cool.”

Book

Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs In His Own Words

April 18, 2023by MQDuong1 Comment

The new Steve Jobs book called “Make Something Wonderful – Steve Jobs In His Own Words” was dropped last week. The book is a wonderful collection of photos of the man as well as emails, quotes and speeches that he delivered over the years, all nicely assembled and delivered by the Steve Jobs Archive. Interested readers can order for free on iBooks or head to stevejobsarchive.com.

I am always a fan of Steve Jobs for what he achieved, his wisdom and the clarity of his thinking. As a businessman, he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and achieved incredible success together before Jobs got fired from his own company. Undeterred, he founded Next and Pixar. These companies’ own triumph fatefully led to Steve returning to the top job at Apple. At the time, Apple was on the brink of collapse. Steve not only saved the company, but also laid a foundation for the unprecedented success that Apple would have, even after his death. Some of the business lessons mentioned in the book are:

Hire people that are smarter than you. In fact, the higher up you are on a corporate ladder, the more important this task is.
Manage by values. In other words, surround yourself with people who want to achieve the same thing as you and get the hell out of their way. Otherwise, why would you hire smart people?
Be relentless about making products as good as they can be.
Even in the corporate setting, communicate from the inside out. Communicate your values

I know that some folks decried his decision to abandon one of his children earlier in her life. He deserved the criticism. But nobody is perfect and even if he made a horrible mistake, we can still take lessons from one of the best thinkers and businessmen in history. Here are a few excerpts that stood out to me:

“Just a bunch of little things: wine labels, paintings in galleries. Just simple things. Not anything real profound, just lots and lots of little things. I don’t think my taste in aesthetics is that much different than a lot of other people’s. The difference is that I just get to be really stubborn about making things as good as we all know they can be. That’s the only difference.”

“Well, things get more refined as you make mistakes. I’ve had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you’re going to make something, it doesn’t take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. Not that much more. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it’s really great.”

“So to be a creative person, you need to “feed” or “invest” in yourself by exploring uncharted paths that are outside the realm of your past experience. Seek out new dimensions of yourself—especially those that carry a romantic scent.

But one has no way of knowing which of these paths will lead anywhere in advance. That’s the wonderful thing about it, in a way. The only thing one can do is to believe that some of what you follow with your heart will indeed come back to make your life much richer. And it will. And you will gain an ever firmer trust in your instincts and intuition.”

“Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear.

The two endpoints of everyone’s rainbow are birth and death. We all experience both completely alone. And yet, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, much less even seen them in others. How many of you have seen the birth of another human? It is a miracle. And how many of you have witnessed the death of a human? It is a mystery beyond our comprehension. No human alive knows what happens to “us” upon or after our death. Some believe this, others that, but no one really knows at all.

Again, most people of your age have not thought about these events very much, and it’s as if we shelter you from them, afraid that the thought of mortality will somehow wound you. For me it’s the opposite: to know my arc will fall makes me want to blaze while I am in the sky. Not for others, but for myself, for the trail I know I am leaving.”

“I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow I did not breed or perfect the seeds.

I do not make any of my own clothing.

I speak a language I did not invent or refine.

I did not discover the mathematics I use.

I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate, and do not enforce or adjudicate.

I am moved by music I did not create myself.

When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive.

I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with.

I love and admire my species, living and dead, and am totally dependent on them for my life and well being.”

“He called it management by values. What that means is you find people that want the same things you want, and then just get the hell out of their way. The way I describe it is, let’s say we’re all going to take a trip together. The first thing is to figure out where we all want to go. The worst thing is if we all decide we want to go to different places. You can never manage it. [Pointing] You want to go to New Orleans. You want to go somewhere else. I want to go to San Francisco. You want to go to San Diego.”

“And so, what happened at Apple was that Apple’s goals used to be to make the best personal computers in the world. And then the second goal was to make a profit so we could keep on doing number one. Right?

What happened was that, for a time, those got reversed: “We want to make a bunch of money, and so, OK, to do that, we’re going to have to make some good personal computers.” But it didn’t work. It never works. And so things start to fall apart.

Those subtle changes in values can mean everything. The higher up in the organization they are, the more pervasive influence they have. So if you want to preserve something, what you want to do is have a good enough place to go, that’s got a long enough focal length that it will survive over time, that everybody agrees on—and not codify how you’re going to get there. So that each generation can argue anew about the best way to get to San Diego, and they’re not just taking your footsteps on how you got there. You see what I’m saying? But all the people want to go to the[…]”

“Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.”

“You never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few times.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle”

Book

Book Review: It’s How We Play The Game

March 13, 2023by MQDuong1 Comment

The story of how Dick’s Sporting Goods grew from a modest store in New York to one of the premier retail chains in the country is a fascinating page-turner.

Ed Stack is the son of Richard “Dick” Stack, who founded Dick’s Sporting Goods in Binghamton, New York in 1948. By the time Ed hit teenage years, Dick forced him to work part-time at the store because it was the family business and what put food on the table. Ed hated the work because it stripped him of valuable time to play baseball. Ed’s misery stopped when he went to college with the dream of becoming a lawyer. A few jobs here and there happened. One thing led to the next and suddenly Ed found himself back working at his father’s business. Ed applied what he learned while away from his father and improved the business. As Dick’s health declined, Ed gradually took over the company and ran the show. Father and son had vastly different opinions on how the company should operate. Eventually, Ed and his sister Kim bought out his father to gain total control.

The gripping account of Dick’s Sporting Goods’ transformation over the years includes valuable lessons to entrepreneurs, business leaders and students.

The business twice came close to bankruptcy, all because of the ambition to grow too big too fast. Through the near-death experience of Dick’s, readers can see that hyper growth is usually the rope that business leaders use to hang themselves. Grow too fast without supporting systems, especially cash flow management, and you may find yourself insolvent
To Ed, it’s very important 1/ walk the store and talk to the customer; 2/ pay attention to competitors and market trends; 3/ grow quietly under the radar as much as possible to avoid competition; and 4/ constantly change to stay competitive

I particularly like the chapters in which he walked the audience through the decision to stop selling guns at Dick’s. The ban on firearms sale hurt the company’s bottom line, but it was a brave decision. Not every CEO prioritizes doing the right thing over pleasing investors and their personal interests. Ed did that and as someone who advocates for gun control, I am thankful to him for doing that. I hope that the example that Dick’s Sporting Goods shows can inspire other leaders to take a stand and do the right thing.

If you look for a nice business read, I’ll recommend “It’s how we play the game“. And here are a few highlights:

On the danger of growing too fast

“We did. Our available cash dwindled. Store sales couldn’t come in big or fast enough to keep up with our needs. Another indication that our operations were out of whack: our shrink numbers rose to 2 percent of sales, double what’s usually regarded in the industry as acceptable. All of these issues were directly tied to our expanding too fast. This wasn’t measured growth. In 1996, all of these factors converged simultaneously: We had no money and no prospect of getting more—we were up against our credit limit. We had too much cash tied up in too much inventory and no way to relieve that situation besides slashing costs and taking losses on our merchandise. We were crushed by high operating and capital costs that we’d brought on ourselves. We used primitive systems incapable of helping us run so large a company. And we were spread across too wide an area, without the logistics in place to keep merchandise moving smoothly.”

“Not only did we open too many stores too quickly, we opened bigger stores—we introduced a new Dick’s prototype that measured a whopping sixty thousand square feet. The architecture we put into these cathedrals cost more to build—fancy floors, which were just plain stupid, because nobody noticed. Expensive fixtures. Design details that added up fast. The changes probably boosted our overhead with no return on our investment and did nothing to drive additional sales.

We located them in markets where we really didn’t know what we were doing; in one year we opened three stores in Cincinnati, three in Philadelphia, and three in Baltimore, all cities in which we had little on-the-ground history or insight. We didn’t take time to understand the hunting and fishing business there. What did we know about the catfish culture in Cincinnati, or fishing for rockfish and blue crab in the Chesapeake Bay? Not much. That showed in low sales volumes. At the same time, we made other mistakes. These stores were overinventoried and cost more to run, market, and supply.”

Business lessons for retailers

“He considered it a disservice to that shopper to have him leave the store without everything he needed to get the best possible results from his purchase. He roamed the floor through the day, visiting with customers, making sure that each one felt, every minute he was in the store, that he was looked after. The moment the front door opened, we were to be on hand to greet the guy walking in and be ready to answer his questions or show him around. Treat him as you would a guest at your house, I remember him telling me: “If you had a visitor there, you wouldn’t keep doing what you’re doing. You’d drop it to say hello and make him feel at home.”

That was a lesson that stayed with me. You can have the greatest merchandise in town, but if you don’t throw your energy into customer service, you won’t keep people coming back. To this day, nothing annoys me more than to walk into a store unacknowledged. I hate having to roam the aisles looking for help. At 345 Court Street, that never happened.”

“And it reinforced a truth that has been demonstrated to me time and again, which is that the moment a business stops evolving, the moment its leaders sit back and think, Everything’s good, that’s when it starts to fail. Maybe that’s especially true for retail. Change has to be a constant. Improvement can never end. You have to stay fresh to your customers, and to do that you have to be perpetually rethinking everything you do, questioning your every assumption. You have to be willing to sometimes blow up everything in the name of staying focused, and exciting, and better—and ahead of your competition.”

“One of the principles that guided Walton was to grow his business quietly, unobtrusively, to stay below the radar so that his competition didn’t notice him. He did it by expanding his geographic reach in concentric circles, radiating out from his launching point in tiny Bentonville. We replicated Sam Walton’s strategy. From Binghamton, our expansion had come in small, outward steps—to Syracuse, then Rochester, then Buffalo. From there we moved in the early nineties to Albany, New York, about 130 miles northeast of Binghamton; put a second store in Buffalo; then opened another ninety miles to the southwest in Erie, Pennsylvania. After that we slid eastward to Springfield, Massachusetts, eighty miles from Albany, and Hartford, Connecticut, twenty-five miles south of Springfield. These were small or medium-sized markets, which gave us a shot at customers without having to worry too much about a bigger, better-capitalized competitor moving in on us.”

“The key to everything I’ve talked about—the way the stores looked, the products we sold, the booming sales—was that our leadership team kept visiting our stores. I’d spend two days a week, three weeks a month, out in the field. I’d fly into a city such as Charlotte, where we had several stores, and all the store managers would meet me and our team from Pittsburgh at one store. We’d walk the aisles and talk to them. More important, we’d listen. I wasn’t there to critique their operations.

I wanted them to tell me what their customers were saying—about the store, about particular products they liked or didn’t like, about what they wanted but we didn’t have. I wanted these managers to tell me what we were doing right and, more urgently, what we were screwing up. The longer these visits went on, the more enthusiastic the managers and their staffs were about talking, because it became clear that we sincerely wanted to know what they thought. The insight they offered was the difference for Dick’s. It kept us relevant to our customers, and it kept us alert to shifting trends in popular taste.

“I’ll give you an example of how one of these visits changed our business. In 1997, a group of us went to Baltimore to walk through our stores there. Our manager in Columbia was a guy named John Jones. I asked him how things were going, and he told me that kids were coming into the store all the time, asking for this new product, a compression base layer that football players had started wearing under their pads. ”

Life lessons

“When you dig down into the roots of success, it has little to do with brilliance. I’ve known plenty of geniuses who didn’t amount to much, and quite a few numbskulls who’ve done well. We all have. Life teaches that success also has little to do with talent—we’ve all met really talented, creative people who can’t translate that talent into a successful career. No, success is all about what’s inside you, and the most important element of success is simple perseverance—often tedious, sometimes soul crushing, but the great differentiator in whether smarts, talent, and education add up to something bigger. Great musicians practice to perfection. Engineers refine and test, refine and test again. Athletes never stop training. And my dad, knocked on his ass, got up, dusted himself off, and got back in the fight”

“And a thought came to me, in my father’s voice—a memory decades old, from an exchange otherwise forgotten—delivered in his signature tough-guy style: “If you start something, you finish it. End of conversation.” I might have just as easily conjured another voice, my gramp’s: “If you tee off on number one, you putt out on eighteen.”

“Once seated at a table, he and I exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes before he reiterated that Callaway wanted to open us up. But before we do, he said, I have to ask you a question. Who were you bootlegging the product from?

“Bruce,” I said, “I can’t tell you that.” “Well, if you don’t tell me,” he shot back, “we won’t open you up.”

“Bruce, I’m not going to tell you,” I said. “I don’t think it’s our job to police your brand, and I’m not going to tell you.”

I could see he was getting angry. “If you don’t tell me,” he said again, “we won’t open you up.” It was pretty clear to me by now that getting the names of the people selling us product was the real reason I was there. I doubted he ever planned to bring us aboard.

I looked him in the eye. “Bruce, my mother taught me two things, growing up. Number one, you go to church on Sunday. And number two, you don’t rat on your friends. I’m not going to tell you.”
Bruce said it was a shame that we wouldn’t be doing business.

“I said that I guessed the meeting was over.”

Book

Book Review: Twelve Years of Turbulence

March 8, 2023by MQDuong1 Comment

Gary Kennedy worked at American Airlines for 30 years and served as the General Counsel during arguably the company’s most tumultuous period. He was the leading legal voice when American went through the bankruptcy more than a decade ago and the merger with US Airways. Gary reflected his experience in the book Twelve Years of Turbulence.

This book pulled back the curtain on the airline industry and the bankruptcy process. Chapter 11 is something that I read on the news once in a while, but it still remains a novelty. A foreign concept. Through the account of Gary and American’s own bankruptcy proceedings, I learned more about this unique process, including some key players and protections offered by the laws. Additionally, this book is a valuable resource on the airline industry. I became more familiar with how airline executives could struggle to deal with the unions. If I had been on the fence about investing in airlines, which I was not, I would have made up my mind after reading the book. I do have to call out the light touch that Gary applied to his book. A lawyer by trade, he could have made this book as boring as a legal brief. But I never felt that way going through all the pages.

I am pushing myself to read more and more books that can give me an edge in investing. That means reading what few others read. That also means the more a book is about a specific industry or offers insights into the inner workings of a company, the better. I think this book is a good start on that journey for me. Even if the book is not a mainstream work, it’s easy to read, yet it taught me a few unique things here and there. If what I have said so far and the snippets below interest you, give it a go.

“Carty reminded the union leaders that months earlier he had shared with them his concern that the continued deterioration of the company’s financial performance was driving officers to leave the company at alarming rates, and that he needed to take action to stem the tide. He had also told them that he had instituted a program to entice certain officers to remain with the company during the difficult times. Carty’s explanation fell on deaf ears.”

“As the details disclosed in the 10-K became widely known, matters grew more urgent as the unions cried foul and demanded that American reopen negotiations on the concessionary package. The unions wanted to rewrite the deal before the ink was dry on the first deal. The flight attendants went one step further. The Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA) announced a decision to rescind the earlier vote approving the concessionary agreements. They planned to have a revote on the concession package. It was total chaos. No one knew exactly what to expect or what could be done to get the concessions back on track and the company moving forward.”

“At another debate centered on the 2007 PUP payment, Arpey told the executive officers that he had decided to forgo 100 percent of the payment due him. He made this decision in spite of the fact that he didn’t receive a PUP payment in 2006 because he refused to accept the stock awards granted to him by the board in 2003. He reasoned that by refusing payment, he could provide “cover” for the rest of the management team and use his sacrifice to curry favor with labor. He desperately hoped to placate labor and build upon the trust he worked so hard to establish with employees.”

“I know. And the rest of the team should take the payment,” he said. “But as CEO I’m the one with my neck on the line and I just can’t do it. I made a promise to employees and I’ll lose all credibility if I accept the money.”

“In the end, we retained the program and it paid out as promised. Despite my admonition, Arpey waived his right to receive any payments. Labor’s reaction to the payments was awful even though Gerard’s sacrifice cost him millions of dollars”

“Over the last eight years, I have interviewed hundreds of senior executives for a major academic study on leadership, including six airline CEOs. Mr. Arpey stood out among the 550 people I talked with not because he believed that business had a moral dimension, but because of his firm conviction that the CEO must carefully attend to those considerations, even if doing so blunts financial success or negates organizational expediency. For him, it is an obligation that goes with the corner office.”

“Consequently, some labor leaders worked hard to discredit management and disrupt the airline. While the vast majority of employees were dedicated, hardworking individuals, the tactics used by certain union officials proved ruthless and unrelenting. At the 2007 Annual Meeting of Shareholders one employee referred to Arpey and other executives as “arrogant, greedy, selfish, and heartless individuals.” That statement was mild in comparison to what labor leaders, particularly the pilots, unleashed in the coming months and years.”

“Under the direction of new APA president Lloyd Hill, elected in 2007, the pilots initiated what is commonly referred to in labor union circles as a “corporate campaign.” The campaign was designed to embarrass and harass management at every turn. By the time the campaign was in full swing, we were in contract talks with all three company unions. The campaign lodged by union leadership against management was aggressive and mean-spirited. Even for veterans of previous corporate campaigns, the degree of vitriol and bullying was astonishing”

“The seat spacing is called “pitch,” and is measured in inches. At American, pitch ranges from a low of thirty-one inches in coach to sixty-four inches in the first-class cabin of large international aircraft. On some competitor airlines, like Spirit, pitch drops to a meager twenty-eight inches. For American, the pitch in first class of the Super 80 was only thirty-nine inches.

Pitch is something that receives a lot of attention from airline execs. It is consistently the subject of heated debate, particularly between the finance and marketing departments. Pitch greatly affects passenger comfort but also has a direct bearing on profitability. The near-impossible riddle to solve is the correct mix between comfort and revenue. On one hand, less pitch equals more seats, and more seats should equate to more revenue. But as pitch decreases, passengers complain and move business to competitors. The battle is even fiercer in the first-class cabin. A generous amount of pitch is essential to attract high-paying corporate customers. But as pitch increases, the total number of seats available for sale decreases. It is a constant tug of war.”

“The next important event in our bankruptcy case involved the appointment of the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors, informally called the UCC. The UCC is comprised of several of the largest unsecured creditors and is appointed by the United States Trustee. The trustee is an arm of the Justice Department and is charged with the responsibility to monitor and oversee bankruptcy cases. The UCC plays a pivotal role in a large bankruptcy case. The committee meets with the debtor on a regular basis, reviews the debtor’s business plan and its plan of reorganization, has standing to participate in court hearings, and has the right to hire professionals, like lawyers and financial analysts. The UCC’s job is to maximize the payout for unsecured creditors. Often, the interests of the UCC do not align with the interests of the debtor.”

“One of the most powerful and fundamental tools available to a debtor is found in Section 1113 of the bankruptcy code. This provision was, in many respects, at the epicenter of our bankruptcy case. It allows an employer, under certain circumstances, to reject collective bargaining agreements (“CBAs”). If our unions would not accept new labor contracts voluntarily, we intended to use this provision to force them to accept the drastic changes outlined in our business plan.”

Book

Book Review: Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves

January 24, 2023by MQDuong1 Comment

What do we know about the ocean?

That’s the question the book “Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What The Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves” tries to answer. As a journalist, James Nestor was assigned by Outside Magazine to cover the 2011 Individual Depth World Championship. It is arguably the biggest event for those that love freediving which was and still remains an unpopular sport. Fascinated and intrigued by what transpired at the event, the author started to learn more about freediving, the ocean and the fantastic world under the water that we, still to this day, know quite little about.

This book chronicles James’ journey from learning about the beauty as well as horror of freediving to how our body reacts to being hundreds of feet deep in the water, how dolphins & whales communicate and the theory that human life originated from water. James filled the pages with numerous scientific facts and theories, the results of hours of field research that did not lack of danger. Scientific books can be a bit dull, but I found myself glued to the author’s stories, from start to finish. James managed to find a sweet spot where he could be a teacher educating us on science and simultaneously a story teller with an exciting adventure to share.

James would be the first to admit that his book would cover “a sliver of the current research on the ocean”. Yet, I learned a lot from his work and writing. If you want to immerse yourself in the science of freediving and the ocean, have a read. I am sure you’ll learn a thing or two! Here are some of the things I took note

“The term Master Switch of Life was coined by physiologist Per Scholander in 1963. It refers to a variety of physiological reflexes in the brain, lungs, and heart, among other organs, that are triggered the second we put our faces in water. The deeper we dive, the more pronounced the reflexes become, eventually spurring a physical transformation that protects our organs from imploding under the immense underwater pressure and turns us into efficient deep-sea-diving animals. Freedivers can anticipate these switches and exploit them to dive deeper and longer.”

“As it turns out, the tradition of splashing cold water on your face to refresh yourself isn’t just an empty ritual; it provokes a physical change within us.”

“I discovered that we’re more closely connected to the ocean than most people would suspect. We’re born of the ocean. Each of us begins life floating in amniotic fluid that has almost the same makeup as ocean water. Our earliest characteristics are fishlike. The month-old embryo grows fins first, not feet; it is one misfiring gene away from developing fins instead of hands. At the fifth week of a fetus’s development, its heart has two chambers, a characteristic shared by fish. Human blood has a chemical composition startlingly similar to seawater. An infant will reflexively breaststroke when placed underwater and can comfortably hold his breath for about forty seconds, longer than many adults. We lose this ability only when we learn how to walk.”

“At sixty feet down, we are not quite ourselves. The heart beats at half its normal rate. Blood starts rushing from the extremities toward the more critical areas of the body’s core. The lungs shrink to a third of their usual size. The senses numb, and synapses slow. The brain enters a heavily meditative state. Most humans can make it to this depth and feel these changes within their bodies. Some choose to dive deeper.

At three hundred feet, we are profoundly changed. The pressure at these depths is ten times that of the surface. The organs collapse. The heart beats at a quarter of its normal rate, slower than the rate of a person in a coma. Senses disappear. The brain enters a dream state.

At six hundred feet down, the ocean’s pressure—some twenty times that of the surface—is too extreme for most human bodies to withstand. Few freedivers have ever attempted dives to this depth; fewer have survived.”

“If you could take your lungs out of your chest, they are completely flexible and you could blow them to whatever size,” she says, then she puffs up her chest and exhales. What stops the lungs from expanding is the musculature around the ribs, chest, and back. Through stretching and breathing exercises, freedivers develop up to 75 percent more lung capacity than the average person. Nobody actually needs this extra capacity to start freediving, but, like a larger tank of gas, it can help you go deeper and stay under longer.”

“In the water, the deeper we go, the more the pressure increases and the more the air contracts. Seawater is eight hundred times denser than air, so diving down just ten feet causes the same change in air pressure as descending from an altitude of ten thousand feet to sea level. Anything with a flexible surface and air inside it—a basketball, a plastic soda bottle, human lungs—will be at half its original volume 33 feet underwater, a third of its original volume at 66 feet, a quarter at 99 feet, and so on.”

“Three hundred feet is the halfway point to the photic zone. Even in the clearest oceans, with blazing sunlight overhead, visibility at this depth is about .5 percent of what it is at the surface, so the water is perpetually gray and hazy. Without artificial lighting, you can see maybe fifty feet in any direction. Because the light is so diffuse, all directions at –300 feet look the same”

“Getting down to this depth is arduous and often dangerous. Scuba divers can make it to three hundred feet breathing mixed gases, but it takes years of training and is a logistical nightmare. The danger isn’t going down—although that certainly is dangerous—it’s coming back up. For a scuba diver, a one-hour descent to two hundred feet breathing regular compressed air would require a ten-hour ascent to purge the deadly levels of nitrogen gas in the blood that accumulate on the way down. A three-hundred-foot ascent on compressed air would most likely kill you.”

“WHILE NOBODY KNOWS EXACTLY HOW hammerheads, feroxes, and other sharks can navigate in permanently black, deep waters, most marine researchers believe that tiny bumps on the sharks’ heads and the sixth sense of magnetoreception have something to do with it. Called ampullae of Lorenzini, after the Italian anatomist who described them in 1678, these little bumps, which look like tiny freckles along the shark’s nose, are actually pores filled with electrically conductive jelly. At the bottom of each of the roughly fifteen hundred pores is a hair cell that resembles one of the tiny hairs inside a human ear. These cells, called cilia, can pick up the slightest change in electrical fields in the water.”

“Sharks’ electroreceptive senses are remarkably acute. Tests on captive great white sharks have shown that they can sense electrical fields as small as 125 millionths of a volt. Smooth dogfish sharks can detect 2 billionths of a volt, while newborn bonnethead sharks can detect fields less than 1 billionth of a volt.

To put this in perspective, imagine dropping a 1.5-volt battery in the Hudson River in Manhattan and then running a wire from that battery to Portland, Maine, some three hundred and fifty miles away. The dogfish and bonnethead sharks could detect the faint electrical field coming off the wire. This sense is five million times stronger than anything humans can feel. It’s by far the most acute sense yet discovered on the planet.”

“Dolphins and other cetaceans use these clicking sounds as part of a sophisticated form of sonar called echolocation. They’re similar to the clicks sperm whales used to shake Schnöller’s body years ago, only weaker.”

“A simple sonar system, consisting of one speaker and one hydrophone (an underwater microphone), works by first sending out a pulse sound, or ping. That ping travels through water until it hits something, then echoes back. The hydrophone records the echo, and a processor calculates how long it took for the echo of the ping to return. This system can provide information on how far away an object is and the direction it is moving, but nothing more.”

“Dolphins and some whales have the equivalent of thousands, even tens of thousands, of echo-collecting hydrophones built into their heads. When a cetacean sends out a click (its version of a sonar ping), it receives the echo information with a fatty sac located beneath the lower jaw, called a melon. Unlike ears, which provide only two directional sources to gather information, the melon provides the cetacean with thousands of data points. The animal can process these to gauge the distance, shape, depth, interior, and exterior of the objects and creatures around it.”

“In 1958, during one of his first dolphin experiments, Lilly recorded a click-and-whistle conversation between dolphins and played it back at a slower rate. When he adjusted the frequency and speed of these dolphin sounds in water to match human speech in air, he found the ratio worked out to 4.5:1. This was a remarkable discovery. Sound travels 4.5 times faster in water than in air. The frequency of communication the dolphins were using, if modified to the density of water, Lilly wrote, matched the exact frequency of human speech in air. When he played the dolphin sounds at this slower speed, they sounded startlingly similar to human speech. Lilly concluded that dolphins were speaking a language similar to ours, but at a much faster speed, one far too rapid for us to comprehend”

“Sperm whale clicks, which are used for echolocation and communication, can be heard several hundred miles away, and possibly around the globe. Sperm whales are the loudest animals on Earth.

At their maximum level of 236 decibels, these clicks are louder than two thousand pounds of TNT exploding two hundred feet away from you, and much louder than the space shuttle taking off from two hundred and fifty feet away. They’re so loud that they cannot be heard in air, only in water, which is dense enough to propagate such powerful noises. The noise level in air maxes out at 194 decibels.

Any louder, and sound becomes distorted to the point that it turns from a sound wave into a pressure wave. The threshold of noise in water is 240 decibels; any louder, and the noise will almost literally boil the liquid into vapor in a process called cavitation. Sperm whale clicks could not only blow out human eardrums from hundreds of feet away, but, some scientists estimate, vibrate a human body to death.”

Book

Book Review: Soul In The Game: The Art Of A Meaningful Life

July 24, 2022by MQDuong2 Comments

This book came to me at the right time.

Soul In The Game was written by Vitaliy Katsenelson, who was born in a remote and cold city in Russia before migrating to the US in 1991. Tragedy came at a young age when his mother died from brain cancer. A few years after the death of his mother, he moved to the US with his father, settled down in Denver and despite knowing little English when he arrived, Vitaliy has gone on to become a successful businessman and investor. Currently the CEO of IMA, a Denver-based investment firm, he is also an author of multiple books and an award-winning writer.

Soul In The Game is a collection of essays and stories about life, Stoicism and a little bit of classical music. A big portion of this book is dedicated to the school of philosophy whose famous proponents include Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Readers will get to know these historical characters a little bit and many chapters end with a quote from them. I find it very cool. Vitaliy did a great job making the topic interesting through his own experiences and interaction with folks around him, especially his children. Some of the points and lessons from this book are profound enough that they require that you drop the book for a day or two so that they can marinate on you.

I was in a rough patch recently. I dropped a few good habits that I worked hard to build. I let frustration at work negatively impact my emotions and personal life. My pandemic cat, which adds so much joy to my life, became distant to me because I spent most time in the office and didn’t spend enough time with him. This book is a much needed reminder of what I can and should do, to feel happier and find what is truly valuable to my life. If you are looking for a book on Stoicism or life lessons, I highly recommend this book. Both the content and the writing are great. It gains some additional points from me as several stories speak to what I am going through. Here are a few excerpts that I took note of

“Artisans constantly strive for improvement. Jiro has been making sushi for over 70 years and is still learning. He says, “Even at my age, in my work… I haven’t reached perfection… There’s always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.”
“Artisans have a very narrow, single focus. Jiro said, “I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit.” Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “You become what you give your attention to.” Single focus combined with a drive for constant improvement, while being a student of life, adds up to an incredibly powerful force.”

“There are so many other things I could be doing. But a while back, I realized that there is a finality to everything in life and especially to kids being… well, kids. This changed my perspective on life. Instead of looking at driving my daughter to tournaments as an obligation and feeling victimized for being forced to do it, I choose to do it. And I really, honestly look forward to doing it. As we drive, Hannah and I listen to music and podcasts, and we talk. We go to lunch. We spend time together.”
Excerpt From: Vitaliy Katsenelson. “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.”

“I know that in two hours they’ll wake up. We’ll have breakfast and I’ll drive them to school. Jonah (my 16-year-old) will be bargaining with me about what music we’ll listen to – classical will not be his first choice. Hannah will be on Jonah’s side. Mia Sarah (my almost-four-year-old) will offer her preference, which is always the same: “Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round.” We’ll compromise. Jonah has a learner’s permit, and he’ll be driving us through a beautiful park. I’ll hug and kiss them, drop Jonah off at high school, Hannah at middle school, and Mia Sarah at preschool.
I am overwhelmed with emotions just writing this. This is all finite. One day they’ll all be grown up. The house will be empty and days like today will be distant happy memories. I never want days like this to end. I really don’t want my kids to grow up, and a bat mitzvah is another reminder that they are! Someday I will no longer be hugging and kissing them in the morning and driving them to school.
The stock market, economics, politics somehow seem so trivial next to this”
“Tim Urban estimated that by the time you finish high school, you have spent 93% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. Today I spend at least six hours a day with my kids and another 20 hours on weekends. When kids live in your house they are completely dependent on you, especially younger ones.”
Excerpt From: Vitaliy Katsenelson. “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.”

“When writing is a habit, I do not have to force myself to write. Writing is part of my identity. I am a person who gets up every morning and writes. After not writing for a month, I realize that without it my brain is complete chaos. Just like working out is exercise for my body (I feel mushy when I skip workouts), writing is exercise for my brain. It is not something I do in addition to investing. No, it’s a necessity for me; it’s how I keep my brain tuned and how I connect and organize my otherwise chaotic thoughts.”
“I write a few hours every single day. When I’m done writing I have a similar feeling to the one I have after I work out at the gym. When I’ve worked out hard, the micro-tears in my muscles leave me with a feeling of fullness and growth.”
Excerpt From: Vitaliy Katsenelson. “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.”

“The problem with a normal budget is that though it captures well ongoing daily expenses like a mortgage, the cable bill, groceries, etc., it ignores future expenses. Let’s take your car, for example. It’s paid for, which is great. But in five years this car will need to be replaced and “suddenly” you’ll discover that you have a one-time $20,000 expense, which should not be sudden and is actually anything but one-time unless you are planning to drive this car for the rest of your life.”
“Sit down together and identify all of your expenses, current and future. Once you have identified your future major expenses, create a sinking fund for each one of them. Once you’ve identified your future expenses, create your budget; and I guarantee that you’ll discover that your true income is much lower than you thought. Just because these expenses are going to happen in the future doesn’t make them less real.”
“By bringing all current and eventual expenses into our monthly spending budget, we got rid of unwelcome surprises. Also, when unexpected things happened – a car accident, a significant repair to the house – since money had been saved in the “emergencies” sinking fund and it came out of a different savings (and mental) account, writing a check was a lot less painful.
I realized over the years what Mark saw then: That our wants are unlimited and will always exceed our income. No matter how much money you make, without a system your insatiable wants (if not controlled) will always outpace your income.”
Excerpt From: Vitaliy Katsenelson. “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.”

“Stoicism seeks to minimize unnecessary negative emotions, which in turn amplifies positive emotions.”
“Nassim Nicholas Taleb put it so well: “A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
“Stoicism was started in ancient Greece around 300 BC by Zeno, a wealthy merchant who lost all his wealth in a shipwreck and barely made it out alive himself. Throughout this book I constantly make this point: Pain often unlocks creativity. It must have been a devastatingly painful experience for Zeno to lose everything overnight. Nevertheless, he later wrote: “My most profitable journey began on the day I was shipwrecked and lost my entire fortune.”
For a while Zeno’s philosophy was called Zenoism – but maybe because Zeno did not want it to become a cult of Zeno, he named it after a place in Athens where he and his students gathered, the Stoa Poikile (“painted porch”).”
Excerpt From: Vitaliy Katsenelson. “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.”

“Some things are up to us and some are not up to us.” This is how Epictetus introduced the dichotomy of control framework”
“He continues: “Within our power are opinion, aim, desire, aversion, and, in one word, whatever affairs are our own. Beyond our power are body, property, reputation, office, and, in one word, whatever are not properly our own affairs.”
“As Epictetus said, “Men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinion of the things that happen.” We just need to remember that opinion is completely up to us. We can reframe it in a way that minimizes our suffering.”
“Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate physicist, said, “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
Excerpt From: Vitaliy Katsenelson. “Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.”

Book

Book Review: After Steve: How Apple Became A Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul

May 13, 2022by MQDuong2 Comments

“After Steve” by Tripp Mickle is about Apple and how it transformed after the death of Steve Jobs. The book shed light on what went on behind the scenes at arguably the most valuable company in the world through two main characters: Tim Cook and Jony Ive. With Cook, we see a then-lieutenant become the ultimate force and voice at Apple. Early in his tenure, Cook had to face investor doubt on whether he could fill the giant void that Jobs’ death left behind. How could he avoid that when his former boss was larger than life? He also had to deal with the precarious political storms both at home in the US and in China. The contrast in how he handled delicate political engagements and how Steve did before showed the difference between two men. There is also a challenge of managing Ive and the growing workforce which meant that the previous culture was no longer a fit. The once-influential Design team which colleagues jokingly referred to as Gods had to see their influence wane and give way for the Finance and Ops teams. Such a transition could only happen under Tim Cook’s watch. The financial results and market valuation of Apple is testament to the excellent job that Cook and his teams have done in the past 12 years. His appointment to CEO was the right call for Apple.

Regarding Jony, the talented artist craves creativity. However, even though he wanted to retain control over all things creative at Apple while not fully mourning Steve’s death, he felt suffocated by the corporate responsibilities, a barrage of meetings and internal fights with other teams. After Apple Watch and Apple Campus, Jony felt burned out and needed to turn a new chapter. Hence, he left the company where he spent most of his adult life. The author reported that after the departure of Jony, the Design team became liberated by not relying on Jony, who wasn’t fully present and committed in the last months of his time there. I do think it worked out for both Apple and Jony that he left. Jony is immensely talented and has world-class taste, but his lack of focus and commitment was detrimental to his teams and colleagues.

If you don’t follow Apple closely but are interested in the company, I think “After Steve” will be a good read. In addition to the evolution of the two characters and Apple itself, there are business lessons that one can take away. First, attention to detail.

Tim Cook is maniacal on details. Becoming a CEO doesn’t mean that he cares only about strategy. At work, I often see executives talk high-level without drilling into details. For me, details matter. They require careful investigation which leads to deep understanding and better decision-making. Here are a few examples:

“The operations team, hollowed out by departures after Jobs’s return, detailed the headway they had made as Cook peppered them with questions: “Why is that? What do you mean?”
“I saw grown men cry,” said Joe O’Sullivan, who was the acting head of operations when Cook arrived. “He went into a level of detail that was phenomenal.”
“Joe, how many units did we produce today?” Cook would ask. “It was ten thousand,” O’Sullivan would answer.
“What was the yield?” he asked, referring to the percentage of units that passed quality assurance before shipment. “Ninety-eight percent.” Unimpressed by the efficiency, Cook would probe deeper. “So how did the two percent fail?”
Excerpt From: Tripp Mickle. “After Steve.”

“He continued waking up each morning before 4:00 A.M. and reviewing sales data. He drilled down into small details, discovering through questions that one model of iPhone was outselling another in a small city in Georgia because the AT&T stores there were running different promotions from those being run in the rest of the state. He held a Friday meeting with operations and finance staff, which team members called “date night with Tim” because it would stretch for hours into the evening, when Cook seemed to have nowhere else to be.”
Excerpt From: Tripp Mickle. “After Steve.”

Another lesson is that a different business life stage cultivates changes in culture and culture fit is important. Under Steve, secrecy and “need-to-know” basis were prevalent. Steve made decisions based on his instinct and was the final voice on many things. Tim Cook, on the other hand, encouraged collaboration and deferred to his reports in areas where he is not strong at, such as creativity. If you work for Cook, you are expected to be able to think strategically and be detail-oriented. Angela Ahrendts, the former CEO of Burberry, left Apple after 5 years because she was reportedly not a fit in Cook’s executive team. Others who are detail-oriented like Cook rose through the ranks like Deirdre O’Brien or Jeff Williams.

I was under impression that Apple’s leaders were excellent at thinking way ahead of time in terms of products or services. This book kinda changed my mind. There are several examples in which the company changed direction when they realized the initial strategy didn’t work. For example, Jony Ive insisted on positioning Apple Watch as a fashion accessory and making it exclusive to cultivate the luxury position. But it only took off when it was sold through normal sales channels and positioned as a fitness product. There was also the drama involving Apple Music and Taylor Swift. Taylor’s criticism forced Apple to change the compensation formula to artists. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened to the service? Last but definitely not least, nobody thought of Apple Watch or Airpods as significant sources of revenue for Apple. One look at the Wearables line item on Apple’s financial reports will tell you that they indeed are.

Overall, I enjoyed the book.

“Jobs had had a designer’s eye. He had once walked past a prototype of a forthcoming iPhone and barked, “What is this shit?” The curvature and polish of the prototype had been changed only slightly during manufacturing, but he had caught the differences with a glance and been repulsed. He had demanded that it be fixed. Without him, the team lost the feedback that fueled their work.”

“When the first prototype was finished, Ive exited his glass office and strolled to the table to review it. He twisted the shimmering silver camera in his hands and brushed his fingers across a toggle button on the rear of the unit that looked like a Nintendo controller. It was there to enable users to scroll through digital photographs on the camera’s display. But he didn’t like the buttons. They protruded too much. He told the team that he wanted the knobs to be as flush and smooth as the aluminum case itself.
It was a challenging ask. Keats spent days inserting 100-millimeter sheets of plastic film called Mylar on each side of the rear toggle, trying to raise the buttons the minimal amount necessary to make them discernible while keeping them practically flush with the exterior of the case.
The camera design took more than nine months and required 561 different models before Ive was satisfied. Apple estimated that fifty-five engineers had spent a combined 2,100 hours on it. The company reused some of the manufacturing techniques in future Apple products, including the laser-etching process for MacBook speakers. Keats did the final assembly by hand and traveled to Germany to have Leica’s engineers ensure that the camera worked”

“At various points over the years, the company’s leadership team had discussed the possibility of buying Disney, Netflix, or Time Warner, which owned HBO. But the rocky integration of Beats showed how difficult it could be to import companies into Apple’s rigid culture. Cook favored proceeding alone. His preference led to what became known inside Apple as Project North Star, a $1 billion bet that Apple could make its own Netflix.”

Book

Book Review: Just Keep Buying

May 3, 2022May 4, 2022by MQDuong3 Comments

If you are a normal Joe like me and want to learn about investing as well as personal finance, do yourself a favor and get “Just Keep Buying“. The lessons contained in the book are popular and well-covered by many other authors. So don’t expect any earth-shattering discoveries there. But great lessons remain great and it’s always delightful to regularly re-acquaint with them.

Just Keep Buying covers essential issues from rent vs buying a house, focusing on income instead of expense control to dollar-cost-averaging vs buying the dip, traditional IRA vs Roth IRA, individual stocks vs ETFs, REITS vs stocks vs bonds etc…The book doesn’t give a deep dive into each of these issues. Instead, it analyzes the pros and cons or when an investment option makes and when it doesn’t. The arguments are supported by recent data and written in a way that each a dummie like me could understand. If you are new to investing or personal finance, great. Take it as a great inspiring starting point. If you are relatively experienced in some investment areas, there may still be some valuable learnings to gain from the book.

What I also like about “Just Keep Buying” is that Nick offered some great personal perspectives with refreshing honesty. He talked about missing his saving goal by the time he was 30. He mentioned that he didn’t feel rich years ago because unlike his classmates, he never visited Europe. These admissions, if you will, make the book more relatable and credible. It’s a rare quality in books, I find.

All in all, I highly recommend this book, along with The Psychology of Money, to anyone who is interested in money, investing and personal finance. Below are a few highlights from the book

“The first tip is what I call The 2x Rule. The 2x Rule works like this: Anytime I want to splurge on something, I have to take the same amount of money and invest it as well.
So, if I wanted to buy a $400 pair of dress shoes, I would also have to buy $400 worth of stocks (or other income-producing assets).” This makes me re-evaluate how much I really want something because if I am not willing to save 2x for it, then I don’t buy it.

“When it comes to housing as an investment, unfortunately, the data isn’t that promising. Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, calculated the inflation-adjusted return on U.S. housing was “only 0.6% a year” from 1915–2015. More importantly, most of that return came after the year 2000. Anytime you look at U.S. housing as an investment, you have to compare it to what an investment in another asset would have done over the same time period. This is known as the opportunity cost of the investment.”
“For example, my grandparents bought their $28,000 home and paid a $280 monthly mortgage from 1972 to 2001. Around 2001, their home was valued at around $230,000. If they had put $280 a month into the S&P 500 from 1972 to 2001, they would have had over $950,000 by 2001, after reinvested dividends. And this doesn’t even include their down payment! Had they invested their down payment as well, they would have had over $1 million by 2001.”
“Given that the transaction costs of buying a home are 2%–11% of the home’s value, you will want to ensure that you stay in the home long enough to make up for these costs. For practical purposes let’s choose the middle of this range and assume that the transaction cost of buying a home is 6%. Using Shiller’s estimate for real U.S. housing returns of 0.6% per year, this means it would take ten years for the typical U.S. home to appreciate enough to offset this 6% transaction cost.”

“Just 4% of stocks from 1926–2016 created all the excess return for stocks above U.S. Treasury bills. In fact, “just five firms (ExxonMobil, Apple, Microsoft, General Electric, and IBM) account for 10% of the total wealth creation.”
“As Geoffrey West calculated, “Of the 28,853 companies that traded on U.S. markets since 1950, 22,469 (78 percent) died by 2009.” In fact, “half of all companies in any given cohort of U.S. publicly traded companies disappear within 10 years.”

“The main purpose of this chapter is to reiterate that saving up cash to buy the dip is futile. You would be far better off if you Just Keep Buying.”
“For example, if you had picked a random month since 1926 to start buying a broad basket of U.S. stocks and kept buying them for the rest of the following decade, there is a 98% chance that you would have beaten sitting in cash and an 83% chance that you would have beaten 5-Year Treasury notes as well. More importantly, you would have typically earned about 10.5% on your money while doing so.”

“And if your net worth exceeds $93,170, which is similar to the median net worth in the U.S., that puts you in the top 10% globally. I don’t know about you, but I would consider someone in the top 10% to be rich”
“There is no right answer, because being rich is a relative concept. Always has been and always will be. And that relativity will be present throughout your life.”

“I would be willing to bet that not one of you, if you were offered every dollar of Warren Buffett’s fortune, would trade places with him right now… And I would also bet, by the way, that Buffett would be willing to be 20 years old again if he was broke.” Consider Attia’s trade for a moment. Imagine having Buffett’s wealth, fame, and status as the greatest investor on earth. You can go anywhere you please, meet anyone you want, and buy anything that can be sold. However, you’re now 87 years old (Buffett’s age at the time). Would you make the trade?”

Book

Book Review: A Shot To Save The World

January 24, 2022by MQDuong2 Comments

A Shot To Save The World is a riveting book on how different biotechnology companies raced against one another and time to produce the world-saving Covid-19 vaccines. The author did a good job telling the stories of not only what happened in the past two years, but also what transpired leading to the astonishing achievements that our modern scientists unlocked. The stories are broken into 19 chapters, each of which covers a period ranging from 1979 to 2021 and a character whose professional and personal struggles would eventually contribute to the birth of Covid-19 vaccines. Audience will get to know Katalin Kariko, Drew Weissman, Luigi Warren, Stephane Bancel (current CEO of Moderna), Ugur Sahin or Ozlem Tureci, just to name a few. Some of them are more famous than others, but each had a role in to play in the invention of the current vaccines we have today. It’s interesting to learn about their professional as well as personal journeys.

I usually review a book by sharing some of the content that I deem noteworthy, but for this book, I am going to share below some of the things I took away and leave the interesting read to you.

A career in biotechnology is not for everyone

Throughout the book, readers will come to see how difficult it is to work as a scientist in biotechnology. Long hours, countless experiments, constant pressure to deliver results and perennial lack of funding. For example, Kariko and Weissman started working together in 1998 on mRNA and were determined to find a way to sneak it past our immune system. Their breakthrough only came several years later, culminating in a published paper in 2005. In the meantime, Kariko had to take an undeserved demotion to keep her dream alive while battling health issues. Even after the paper was published, they still didn’t gain the recognition of their work at the time and still struggled to further their discovery because of the resource constraints.

In 2001, Uguer Sahin and Ozlem Tureci together started a company called Ganymed. Seven years later, with financial support from a couple of German billionaires, the couple founded BioNTech. As of 2011, neither Ganymed nor BioNTech had anything in even the early stage trial. By 2017, nine years and a lot of investor money after its founding, BioNTech only had one drug in the medium stage trial with no sight on any revenue stream.

If you are used to the corporate world where results are much quicker to come by, imagine how difficult it is to work relentlessly for years without any concrete results. You basically have to run on blind faith that the breakthrough will come some day. There is no guarantee. There is little short-term reward. Just faith and conviction. If that’s not challenging, I really don’t know what is.

Investing in biotech firms is extremely risky

Because it usually takes a long time for scientists to make a breakthrough, if they even make one in the first place, it’s risky to be an investor in biotechnology. The Struengmann brothers are German billionaires and early backers of BioNTech. A decade after pouring millions of euros into the startup and the Turkish couple, the brothers had nothing to show for their money. One of them even questioned why they believed in Sahin and Tureci in the first place.

Moderna was founded in 2010 with early backing from Noubar Afeyan and other investors. The company had the biggest IPO in biotech industry’s history in 2018 at $23 share. The stock traded at $18-19 in 2019 and early 2020, lower than its IPO price. One of its early investors, Viking Global Investors, dumped almost all of its stocks, about 5% of the company, at the end of 2019, signaling a lack of trust in the company’s outlook. The fate of Moderna took a major turn when the pandemic hit and the company bet everything on its ability to produce a vaccine. Had the pandemic not come or had Moderna failed at its effort, there is no telling where the company would be today.

“As 2020 began, Novavax was conducting late-stage trials for yet another vaccine from Smith and his research team, which was now down to fewer than twenty people. This time, they were tackling the flu. Early data was impressive, but existing flu shots were largely effective, and no one was willing to fund Novavax’s program.”
“We were down to not a lot of people, no facilities, no money, no confidence,” Glenn says
“The flu vaccine was the company’s last chance. Erck had managed to keep Novavax going for over a decade, pulling his team off the mat after each failure and frustration. Even he was getting gloomy, though.”
Novavax was trading at $3 – $4 a share in 2019 and early 2020 before skyrocketing during the pandemic

If you are an investor, ask yourself whether you have the stomach to go through what those investors went through. To me, difficult as a word is not enough and I, unfortunately, don’t have the vocabulary to do it justice.

Fate is a magical thing

Many scientists working on mRNA benefitted from the work that Kariko, a Hungarian immigrant, and Drew Weissman did. They, in turn, likely couldn’t have had their breakthrough in 2005, had it not been for the work that others did before them. For Kariko, she wouldn’t have been able to stay in the U.S, had a scientist at the Bethesda Naval Hospital not given her a job when she was on the verge of deportation and nobody else took a chance on her.

The Struengmann brothers, rich as they were, gambled on a young Turkish couple, even when there was scant evidence of what they could achieve. Without their backing, who’s to say whether BioNTech would even exist and whether we would even have a vaccine from them to save millions around the world?

During its early years, Moderna struggled to create a drug using mRNA. Everything they tried at the time failed and the company was on the brink of collapses. Then, a staff named Eric Huang came with the idea that instead of a drug, Moderna should start making a vaccine. The technical challenges that Moderna faced at the time were features of a vaccine. Why not pivoting? Fortunately for us, Stephan Bancel and the Board of Directors of Moderna agreed with Eric. Otherwise, who knows where Moderna or we would be today?

These are just a few examples of countless events that had to happen and in the right sequence so that we and the world could be saved from a deadly pandemic. The course of history would change dramatically if one of these events hadn’t happened. None of us could write this script. Only the magical fate could. And thankfully it did.

I hope by now I made you a tad more interested in the book. I think it’s great. The stories are persona, appealing and inspiring. I finished the book feeling inspired and grateful for all the work and sacrifices that so many scientists had to make for the good of science and our society. It’s easy now to just walk into a Walmart or Hy-vee to get a vaccine. But only by reading this book did I understand the work leading to the birth of that vaccine is full of blood, sweat, tears and sheer luck.