Negative rates? You rub your eyes. You can recall no precedent. There has never been one in 5,000 years of banking.Sanjay Bakshi's opening remarks to his new class (LINK)
Farnam Street Mental Model: Bias from Liking/Loving (LINK)
Albany International: a work program for a fund manager - by John Hempton (LINK)
This is going to be a stock note with a difference - because it is not a stock note. But it is about a stock/business - Albany International is a company that makes machine cloth based in upstate New York. The interesting part of Albany though is that it has a high-growth but unprofitable aerospace business.
Amazon is doubling down on retail stores with plans to have up to 100 pop-up stores in US shopping malls (LINK)...If you wonder what a good fund manager really does this is a decent illustration. (I wish our work were always of this standard. It is a hard standard to maintain but I will try.)
The CEO of Popeyes on Treating Franchisees as the Most Important Customers [H/T @jeff_gramm] (LINK)
The Convenience-Store Innovator of Bend, Oregon [H/T @HurriCap] (LINK) [While I haven't read them yet, there are two convenience-store related business biographies on my list to get to one day, and both companies were mentioned in the article above: 1) The Wawa Way: How a Funny Name and Six Core Values Revolutionized Convenience; 2) Made To Order: The Sheetz Story.]
How to insure something that blows up once every twenty times you use it [H/T @maxolson] (LINK)
Lucy Kalanithi: "When Breath Becomes Air" | Talks at Google (LINK)
Related book (maybe my favorite read of 2016): When Breath Becomes AirBook of the day [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi]: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It
"The truly curious will be increasingly in demand. Employers are looking for people who can do more than follow procedures competently or respond to requests, who have a strong, intrinsic desire to learn, solve problems, and ask penetrating questions. They may be difficult to manage at times, these individuals, for their interests and enthusiasms can take them along unpredictable paths, and they don’t respond well to being told what to think. But for the most part, they will be worth the difficulty. Curious learners go deep, and they go wide. They are the people best equipped for the kind of knowledge-rich, cognitively challenging work required in industries such as finance or software engineering. They are also the ones most likely to make creative connections between different fields, of the kind that lead to new ideas and the ones best suited to working in multidisciplinary teams. Consequently, they are the ones whose jobs are least likely to be taken by intelligent machines; in a world where technology is rapidly replacing humans even in white-collar jobs, it’s no longer enough to be merely smart. Computers are smart. But no computer, however sophisticated, can yet be said to be curious."