YouSaid · the spoken record

Thomas S. Gayner

lines on the record: 128
first: 2021-11-05
most recent: 2021-11-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And we did so. And I am so amazed and so grateful for the ways in which the leaders of those companies. And by that I mean not just the CEOs, but the people who work for them and the frontline supervisors and all of the associates who they went to work, among other reasons because they needed to work.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I heard in last year's annual report there's been an unprecedented use of the word unprecedented. And that's an accurate statement to make. None of us had a playbook for how to do this and how to proceed. And of those 20,000 people, 15,000 of them are within ventures. And a lot of them are in the category of frontline workers. As one of our businesses called HAFCO, and it makes the flooring for trailers of tractor trailers. And it's Wood. And as the president of that business, a guy named Bruce Bader said, you can't make wood floors from home. We had to keep a factory running and we had to figure out how to operate cleaning procedures, sanitation procedures, not wildly unlike the procedures that existed to get into this building this morning. You got to figure all of that out on the fly.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“really works in your favor and again i use that language very precisely the weighted average because the things that worked mathematically become larger and larger as a percentage of the total whereas the things that didn't work become less and less a percentage of the the total so the the mistakes get diluted into the the overall solution which which in aggregate worked out just fine it's my grandmother's lesson i really don't know the names of those other 10 stocks she owned but it doesn't”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I started out life as an accountant in the accounting profession, but we could do hours and hours on the path of the accounting profession. But a good accountant, a true accountant, an accountant who is honoring his craft is giving you a feedback loop that this worked or didn't work. So when we make mistakes in the fullness of time, they show up. So what we do is we stop doing that and we do more of the things that work and we do less of the things that didn't work. And over time, the weighted average of that.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because it didn't feel good, you wouldn't do it exactly right. So we make mistakes. We do that. But we do have financial reporting.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Mike Heaton, who is my partner in Markel Ventures, and he's the president of Markel Ventures, a day-to-day execution of the Markel Ventures business. He has a great saying. He says, you know what it feels like when you're making a mistake? It feels great.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And That was one of the things we thought about. And even if you have a car that can drive itself, you don't want to send it. Exactly.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To do so. So that's just another small example, and it's been cars. I was about to make the mistake of saying cars can't drive themselves. But we'll get to that.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now that makes that business a little hard to finance. If you're using a lot of debt to buy it. So by virtue of the fact that we're not using debt to do that, our underrated decisions gets to be a lot easier. And you don't need to have an MBA to sort of figure this out. My math was if I buy that today, I'm pretty sure that within the course of the next five years, I'm going to get out all my money and then still own the business, which is probably better and bigger in five years, especially with the culture they have and the people that are running it. And I really have some indifference about whether I make zero in year one and 40% of it in year two and 10% of it in year three and zero again in year four and whatever the residual is in year five. That pattern doesn't matter to me because I'm not trying to hit quarterly goals. And as such, we're able to be competitive to buy businesses like that because we're not competing with people who are using leverage finance.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Roll off. It's one of those. That's exactly right. So they've just done a spectacular job over many, many years. Of taking care of their customers and incrementally sort of getting more and more of the flow. And the wonderful thing about that particular business and a variety of reasons that we were able to buy it, it's cyclical. So for instance, when car sales are going up and there is incremental demand for the trailers to move the cars around, it's a nicely profitable business and that they're going to earn good returns if they run their internal operations reasonably well. If car sales are flat or going down, they're going to struggle. To break even. And there's nothing they can do about that. You can't reduce your prices by 10% to induce demand. People either need it right now or they don't need it at all.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of the other examples. We have a company called Cottrell, and if you're driving up and down the highway and you see a trailer hauling seven or eight or nine cars We're the dominant company that makes those trailers. Oh, really? And we've owned that. Again, I lose track of times five, eight years, something like that. Spectacular business. And the gentleman who runs it, Danny Zinc, just a first-rate individual.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tend to be able to buy things and hold them for a long period of time, which means we're not incurring the tax costs of realizing gains and paying the tax at that point. So the growth in the deferred tax liability, which is just compounding over time. That isn't an easily quantifiable cost, and it's not captured in that basis point of management figure talking about. But in terms of dollars, that's bigger than all the others by multiples.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't have a lot of people, so it's myself. I've had a gentleman named Dan Gertner who works on the equity side that's been there 10 or 12 years. For the first 17 years that I was at Markel after Steve hired me, we managed the portfolio in-house, and I did that solar. After 17 years of doing that, I decided to add one person, and that was Dan. And then a couple years ago, I added one more person. So we have that group of people thinking about the equity investment portfolio. We have three people working on the fixed income side, which is also a treasury function of managing just the cash balances of the company. So we have an extraordinarily small number of people doing it. By Wall Street standards, our compensation is very modest, so that keeps the costs down. And here's the implicit cost savings that cannot even be measured.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pleasant but modest lifestyle. It did that. And I observe that basically when you're right about something, don't get off the train if that train is going to keep rolling. We're both searching for who we should attribute these quotes to, but I think it might have been Peter Lynch talked about that human tendency to want to sell your winner. Ring the bell. Exactly. Well, that's pulling the flowers and watering the weeds. That's right. That is the Peter Lincoln book. Exactly. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I try not to be the dumbest. If I got a flower that's blooming, let it grow.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those 12, 13, 14 stocks that my grandfather had when he died, my grandmother held those until she died. Now, within that little portfolio, there was Lockheed Martin and Pepsi. Now the fact of the matter is the other ten holdings could have gone to zero. And it wouldn't matter. I'll bet my grandmother was the 95th percentile in investment returns, basically because she caught two mega winners that she was able to hold for 30 years. In terms of the growing dividends and funding her.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At that on Friday nights, unfortunately, instead of being able to get a date, sometimes I would sit with my grandmother and we would watch Wall Street Week with Lewis Ru And my grandmother, she was widowed at my grandfather had died. And she was one of the types of widows that basically never made any substantive decisions after that. So she remained in the same house. His suits hung from the rack in the closet. His shoes were on the floor. And being just a small town local businessman in the 1960s, they would have been the type that they drank coffee at the diner together and they would talk about their stock portfolio and that sort of thing. That's what small town business people did. And he had a 1215 stock little portfolio.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think there are a couple things that come together, and one of my great investment teachers was my grandmother. So let me get to her in just a minute. Now, obviously, those 10 have worked and those have been circumstances where we're basically right. And I had a high degree of confidence in order to make some substantial bets to put them in the portfolio at that size. But then time and being right about your fundamental underwriting of the business kind of is your friend. Is Charlie Munger says, you know, time is the friend of a wonderful business and the enemy of a mediocre business. So here's my grandmother's story. So when I was a kid in a...”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct. Cosfight. And Costa Farms is the name of that company. And even within Costa, there will be sub brands within that. So you don't exactly know when you're looking at the label who the ultimate folks are, but that would be us.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. These stories could just go on and on and on. We're the largest grower of indoor houseplants in the world through our Costa Farms business. So if you go into”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Home and home and came to terms, and it came on board. So that's how some things like this happen. And at that 300 ton to 1,000 ton crane, I mean, thousand ton lifts, you can't do that over the internet. You can't do that from a foreign country. There are certain underwriting criteria that if you really go through the traps of what you're looking at, that speaks to the likely durability and need for that. If you need to lift something that's a thousand tons, there are not many people in the world who know how to do that. And again, I don't think that's the kind of thing that kids in business school are trying to figure out how to disrupt that. You can't. It's heavy. You got to lift it.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So it's a real value add kind of business with a good physical base there. But the family and the family values really mattered to the family as they were looking to sell their business and create liquidity for the third generation, but set the fourth generation up for success to run the business going forward. They called. We went down to visit them. Immediately we struck a warm and friendly relationship and did a”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in addition to the crane itself, and it's a German manufacturer that supplies Buckner with its cranes, and Buckner in turn leases them out to the companies that are erecting wind turbines or very large structures or new football stadiums, things of that nature. And you can't just show up like at the Hertz Renault lot and rent one of these things. You have to know what you're doing. And if you don't know what you're doing, oftentimes Buckner will provide the crew or the technical expertise to operate.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They know what they're doing, and there's something that's just fundamentally right about a circumstance like this. This was an inbound call. Somebody called us and said, laid out the snippet thumbnail case of what this company was and what they do. And they had started out in a steel erection business and they'd rented cranes. And the crane size kept growing and it kept becoming more and more sophisticated over time. So their kind of cranes lift things from 300 to 1,000 tons.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, I mean, the most recent company that we bought is a company called Buckner Cranes. And this is an interesting case study as well and why we get these things. Fourth generation family. So if a family business has made it to the fourth generation,”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I don't think the young geniuses at the Stanford Business School are trying to figure out breakthrough disruptive ways to break bread. So these are not the sort of things that people are talking about or are interested, but we can build a fine business by collecting these wonderful things and growing.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if you look at a market leader in a small industry, what you have is a situation where you are the go-to vendor, you are the go-to supplier, you have some advantages of incumbency. And unless you mistreat your customer or do something wrong or don't keep up, you are highly likely to get the next order. So if you look at all our businesses, it is often the case that these companies are actually pretty well known and very good and very dominant at the little niche they're in. And because it's a small industry, that is not as attractive to bigger, bigger companies that are going to come after it. And because it is so well established and so dependent upon by their customers, it's harder to start up a competitor in the garage.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's exactly right. And those four things are indeed the selection criteria. Now, if I wanted to speak in an academic setting and I wanted to convince the consultants and the academics that I did indeed have some sort of rational strategy, I could frame it in such a way where I said what we are looking for is large companies within small industries.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of an interest bill and adding the dimension of that time horizon where, look, I'm not going to worry about this quarter because I know this is the right thing to do. So we're just going to do it. And then the accounts will tally up with the results of that, but I'm just willing to bet that'll be good. And that is a business that in a no-growth industry, they've done a couple of... Size that they were the day we showed up. And they're every bit as profitable, if not more so. And I think the mentality with which the business is run has helped by the Marquell Capital umbrella, we really give somebody the room to do what they want to do anyway.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These days, and forever going forward, I'm not rooting for machines to break, but I know in the real world they do. And on that day, instead of that being a bad day, I now want that to be a good day. I want you to show up. I want you to fix it. I want you to make it right. I want you to make your customer happy. And if you do that and you do that repeatedly, dependably, and never waver from that, what will happen over the course of the next three, five, seven years is your reputation for being that person will grow and grow and grow. And you'll get paid fairly for doing that. So by removing the financial constraint.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many private equity circumstances would be, but it had some leverage attached to it. And the CEO of the business, when I showed up and Markell bought things, I said, you know, in the old days, Ken, when a machine broke, that was a really bad day for you because you had an unhappy customer and you had an interest bill to pay at the same time. And that creates tension. I said.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct of the 20 or so businesses that we have bought over the last 16, 17 years, probably 15 or 16 of them are still run by the CEO who's there the day we showed up. So we are very much hopeful that the management team, the leadership team that is in place will stay with us and become part of the Markell family and grow and flourish because we'll take the worry about capital off the table for them. And I'll tell this story about AMF, for example Know it was owned by a local set of business people in Richmond, and it was what I would call a club private equity deal. So it was not levered to the extent that...”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is correct. And for instance, one of the ways to validate that and look at what people do, not what they say. The CEO of AMF Bakery, who we bought that business with in 2005, is still the CEO of that business today.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which, if you eat a McDonald's hamburger or hot dog, very good odds that those buns and rolls were baked on AMF bakery equipment. Leading company at what they do in that world. So happen to be headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, happened to know the CEO, happened to know it was for sale, I knew the seller, and we were able to do a deal. And doing that one deal raises a flag. And then all of a sudden, my phone starts to ring. And oh, I didn't know you guys would do that. And how about this business? How about that business? And it really has cascaded from that.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shares of something, or the entire company. The thought process is exactly the same. So we'd seen the example from Berkshire and Teledyne of what it meant to go from passive minority shareholders to actually controlling shareholders in diverse businesses. And that's really the way it happened. Really from the first minute that I went to Marcella in 1990, I always had it in the back of my mind that this would be a future leg of growth and sustainability for the company. It wasn't until 2005 that the stars aligned in a particular deal because it happened to be in Richmond, Virginia because it happened to personally know the CEO. We were not in the traditional investment banking channels, deal channels. It just happened through serendipitous circumstances some of that time and space that we talked about found a company called AMF Bakery Equipment.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Well, again, the way it came about was being aware of the Berkshire example where you saw Buffett and Buffett would give a lot of credit to Henry Singleton and Teledyne and seeing that model and how that worked. We'd always bought equity securities. And there's a construct and a way we think about what we buy. And really, it's the same thing we hope Marquell's shareholders think about us when they buy Markel stock. So we look for profitable businesses with good returns on capital that don't use too much debt to do it. We look for management teams with equal measures of talent and integrity. We look for businesses that have reinvestment opportunities or great capital discipline. And we look for that at a reasonable price. That's the quick and dirty way of describing what we look for when we're buying a public security. Well, from my point of view, whether that's buying 100 shares of something, 1,000.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's in charge of the insurance operations of the business. I'm in charge of the investments and the ventures operations. And our normal working relationship is if something meaningful or substantive comes up in one of our areas. The first person that I will talk to about an upcoming deal or a big capital allocation decision, I'll talk to Richie and make sure he and I get on the same page. We don't see the world eye to eye on everything, but we function and work it out. And similarly, on an insurance thing, he would come to me first and we work that out. So on major capital allocation decisions, it's very important that he and I manage to find agreement. And we have on day-to-day matters, the tactical execution of the business itself, we both operate as sole CEOs in the realm of the business we run.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And anything, the lost reserve setting, the MA activity, strategic stuff like that, Steve was the ultimate authority on that sort of stuff. And Alan joked he was the world's highest paid referee because he would adjudicate disputes between the two of them to make sure that's how it worked. So with Richie and I, it's a slightly different gearing”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what branches did we have? How many salespeople? What were the locations, all the sort of things that managing the real estate, all that would, Tony would be the ultimate authority and really the ultimate CEO of that. And I was in the room sometimes when Alan and Steve would disagree with him, but they would always say at the end of that meeting, that is your decision, that is your area, so we support you, and they walk out of the room, the door is closed, and the team speaks with one voice. That's right. Similarly, Steve was in charge of the balance sheet of the organization.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every insurance company has an investment operation, so that wasn't weird. As Markell Ventures has grown to become a substantial part of the company, you have two very distinct pieces of the company. So in reality, the way it works between Richie and myself is that And this is really the way it worked with Alan Tony and Steve as well. In the era of the triumvirate, everything on the income statement.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As time goes by. So there's that element of how the transition is taking place. So the four went down to three and really a triumvirate of Steve Markell, 20 Mark Ellen, Alan Kirschner, who was a cousin-in-law, ran the business for decades. And as they started to move on, Alan retired from the board year and a half, two years or so ago. Steve and Tony are still on the board, but not active in day-to-day management. That went to three to two. So Richie and myself. And it's also connected to the evolution of the business itself in that historically, the insurance business was the largest single piece of the company. Investments are there, but it's just the investment operation that's embedded in an insurance company. So while we emphasize investments more than most.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not a Markell family member. I'm not married to Markell. I have no Markell blood in me. But I've been there 30-some years. I've been there since I was a kid. So I feel like I remembered the Markell family. And I own some equity in the company from the IPO from day one and had always sort of been accumulating more stock”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the twelve cousins said were in. And in effect, they did a leverage buyout of the second generation where they gave them a note with a coupon to provide income and sale process to the second generation, but gave them the stub equity underneath of it so that as they built the value of the business it attributed to the equity as opposed to the debt that was there for the second generation. The IPO did two things. It paid off that debt. It gave the company a little bit of a capital base. And culturally, it said, you know, you don't need to be a member of the Markell family to own equity interest. And I'm a perfect example of that.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At this point, there are 12 cousins that are in existence, some of whom work for Marquel, some of whom did not. And the generational succession issue started to become paramount and become important. A lot of sifting and sorting about that The public offering offering in 1986 was one of the tools used to bring about some finality of that. Sure. But at the end of all that sifting and sorting, three.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and the company did not grow that much during their era that they ran it. But then what happened? So he went from one CEO to effectively four, despite what the titles might have been. So then the second generation started to The way of all flesh and the third generation comes along.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think you're correct to point out that that's not the odds way to bet. And I think it gets back to some of the history and culture of Markel that makes it work in the sense that, all right, you had Sam Markel, who was the original founder of the company. He ran it from its inception up until I think the mid-50s, late 50s, something like that. Sam had four sons who were two sets of twins. And when he unfortunately died, the business then was taken over by the four sons. And they ran it essentially by unanimous consent. I believe they had lunch every day. If not almost every day. And for any kind of strategic or more than just little decision, there had to be unanimity among the four. And I think you can sort of picture how this unspools.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They start to occupy a greater and greater share of your mind share. And the people who are wrong kind of drift away into a smaller and smaller thing. So the math of compounding really accentuates the positive and it makes the... It makes the mistakes drift away into irrelevance over time.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think markets are quantum systems. They defy understanding. And you can do a lot of work and you can keep trying to get to the next decimal point of understanding. But there's a certain irreducible quantity to human psyche and greed and fear and all those sort of things that really do matter in markets. And I just think it's helpful to be humble to acknowledge that don't pretend you can know it. And by virtue of not pretending that you can know it, I think you're more open to ideas, people, different ways of thinking that you can start out with the premise that this person I'm talking to is probably smarter than I am. They're demonstrably smarter than I am. So I think I should listen and learn something. And if you just go about your daily life that way, you do learn things and you do get exposed to things and the people that were right.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. So you're forced, bullied by the system to make hyperbolic statements and claim precision and claim efforts that are superhuman just to get people to give you the job and give you the money to manage.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Couldn't have thought of beforehand. And that happened somewhat through serendipity. So I think humility, and it's an epic challenge. I'm 59 years old now. And fortunately, things have worked out well. And I have credibility because my record is pretty good. I have a lot of empathy and understanding of the challenge that would face a 26-year-old or a 25-year-old or me at 22 trying to get on. Typically, if you just say the kinds of things that I do, long term and we're going to be patient and we're going to look at this and sifting. So you don't really stand out enough to get people to write you a check.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll defer to the fact checking experts on that. But the point is there's an element of intuition, of the intangible sense of spirit and culture that I find extraordinarily different to matter, that sometimes you've got to let people have some room to make some mistakes and look at outcomes that are not optimized. And what you get in design thinking and in systems approach, if you're dealing with the right kind of systems, there's a bit of an evolutionary process where mistakes that you make start drifting away and things that you did right start compounding and magnifying themselves. And as such, if you just leave a little slack in the system and you don't try to press it to the last red line of what's there, you allow time and space and muscle and rest and energy to create things that you can.”
2021-11-05 · Masters in Business · Thomas S. Gayner on Things That Matter in Markets (Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source