YouSaid · the spoken record

Vaughn Tan

lines on the record: 101
first: 2019-12-03
most recent: 2019-12-03
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

“Into the food. If they're not doing that, there will be crap in the food Got to think about all of these different steps. The cost of cheap food is paid in the food itself and also in the people who work on it. So the people who work in these like industrial farms, they get exposed to agri chemicals all the time and they often have chronic health problems. As the end consumer in a regulated system, you're probably not going to experience that. But you are still eating every day if you choose not to buy food that's properly grown. You're still eating a tiny amount all the time and over many days and many years. Some of those things we think build up inside you. So we're not quite the slug, but we could be”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just pour the water onto some plants in the garden. And there were some slugs there, which we didn't really know about, but they died. Very, very fast. They just like went. Which is interesting. We are not slugs, so what's on the strawberry will not kill you? But do you really want to be eating maybe with every meal food that has some kind of systemic poison for living things on it? Probably not. And that's just what you put on the fruit before harvest and in the process of preparing it to be shipped around because when you ship fruit around all the systems and the channels by which you transport it also have pests of their own. So you need to protect them from those pests. But think about the entire growing season, right? Like when a plant is very small, like when a strawberry plant is tiny, you need to protect it from especially slugs because they eat the small leaves. That's not good. So you have to spray it once unless you've got someone who's going through farming without chemicals and picking slugs off by hand or doing some other thing which is more laborious, more time consuming, more expensive on their time that allows them to put less crap.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So I won't mention the brand because I actually can't remember what it was, but it was a box of strawberries that I got from a supermarket in Cambridge, Massachusetts about eight years ago. And it was out of season strawberries from like South America or something. And what we did, we soaked them for a while in water, which you should do with all soft berries, because if you don't buy them from a nose spray or organic farming system, chances are that there will be some residual pesticide on it. Because the time when you want to eat the berry is also coincidentally when it's most delicious to all the things that also want to eat it. So you got to like wash it. And the best way to do it is to soak so that things dissolve. Most things are applied in water or oil soluble stuff. If you soak in water, you'll get the water-soluble pesticides and herbicides and fungicides. You won't necessarily get the oil soluble stuff. But we soak the berries, the strawberries in water for about an hour, and then...”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And who they bought the wine from and who they bought the wine from and how that person made the wine? Chances are you'll get some crap. And that's exactly what happens whenever you go into a restaurant. Because most of the time, restaurants don't pay their staff enough. They don't have enough time. And customers don't pay enough for the food for them to take the time to do all of this work. It's a ton of research that you have to do.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff has a lot of shit in it. I love drinking natural wine. I hate that phrase, but it basically means wine that has as little put into it in the vineyard or in the cellar as possible. And the interesting thing about most wine that is not intentionally made in a low intervention way is that if it was regulated like we regulate the purity of bottled water, most wine would not be saleable. It's so filled with agricultural chemicals that you really don't want to drink it. People love wine. Nowadays people think it's healthy. And I actually think in moderation, almost anything is like not necessarily bad for you. And wine is joyful, right? It's great. But you don't want to drink the other stuff, I think. And you barely know that it's even there. You barely know that all this other stuff you don't want to drink is in the bottle so that you're out having a great night or you're at home with family and you open a bottle of wine. And if you haven't done a lot of thinking to figure out who you should be buying the wine from,”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With complete honesty on the bag, this is wheat. But how was this wheat processed? Was it a stone mill or a roller mill? We don't know. How was the wheat grown? You don't have to say anything about how you grow it as long as you use permitted herbicides fungicides, pesticides, permitted additives in the entire process. And so because we don't have to say anything about it, we don't generally know that”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are probably spraying a whole bunch of stuff on you that doesn't get rid of. So it's not truly a deodorant. What it is is it's an odor mascar. In order to get it out of a spray can onto you, there's like all these propellants which used to be horrible chlorofluorocarbons. And the things themselves, you're basically spraying volatile organic compounds on yourself. Some of them are okay. Some of them we don't really know about. But when you choose to do that, you don't really think about what you're putting on yourself. And that actually applies completely to what we put into ourselves as well. So most people look at bread and if it's not in a plastic bag at a supermarket, if it's been made by someone, they're thinking, oh, this must be carefully made bread. And in many cases, it actually is carefully made bread. But if you go one step beyond the person who's making it out of ingredients to look at what the ingredients are, it's often really, really very difficult to figure out what's in the ingredients themselves. You can say,”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's young in the history of the world, and it makes a bunch of trade-offs implicitly. I won't say most chefs, even though I think this is true. We'll give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Most people generally don't get a chance to be exposed to a context or information that makes them think really deeply about what things they put into their bodies. If you use, for example, deodorant.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me, what this says in combination with where we were for lunch, it makes me think okay, it's probably a very, very high gluten variety that's designed to have lots of gluten so that you can bake bread that's really aerated. And because it's probably commodity flour, it's probably milled in a commodity way, which is like with a roller mill, very high pressure steel rollers that crush the wheat into a powder, basically, right? In the process subjecting them to lots of heat that changes their structure in ways that we don't fully understand. By looking at the bread, like how it looks, its structure, its color, and also, very importantly, where we are, you can sort of guess. I'm not sure, pretty sure, that it's a kind of wheat that I normally wouldn't want to eat.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of replay what was happening. Part of it is not just looking at the bread, it's also like thinking about the context. If I were at your friend's restaurant, Hugh Kitchen, then I would look at this bread and I would think, oh, maybe they found a way to make it look like they were using. Okay, so let's just replay it a little bit. You open up the bread, you look at the bread, and you think, okay. The crumb, even though it's a Foccaci, which is soaked in olive oil, is surprisingly pale, and it's got lots and lots of aeration, like huge bubbles inside it, which means that the gluten is really strong.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's really interesting, actually. So you're thinking about this, maybe we can call it style or something. Like style is an asset that compounds for a company. Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely say that. That is very cool.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not just like a straddle. I think it's literally a tension between the two things. Like, you cannot go all the way to innovation, like just do it new. You cannot go all the way to familiarity. Just do it old. You have to somehow do something which is not just a balance between the two. It's simultaneously both things. And that's really, really hard.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. I think it may not necessarily be about thinking we need to do it the way we used to do it. If you talk to those people, I think it's about this is how we do it and everything that we do has to feel like how we do it. So it's a very small difference from saying, let's do it the way we used to do it. Because then you don't necessarily get to do really brand new things. Whereas if you think, okay, we need to do something totally different, but we need to do it the same way that we normally do it. So Pixar is a great example. Every single successful Pixar movie always feels like a Pixar movie, but it can be about totally random things like wall E had barely any dialogue and every single Pixar movie before that that was successful that felt like a Pixar movie was like super dialogue heavy. So I think the ability to think this is how we are and this is how it manifests in our products lets you come up with really new things discontinuous innovation if you want to call it that while still preserving this idea that there is familiarity along the way and it's really hard it's like”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Apple makes technology better, but people buy it because it's an apple, right? Nobody goes out and says, I really want a new Samsung. It's something which I think is really important, which is very hard to think about, but we don't really think about it from a sort of a management training perspective. But people clearly know how to do it and are doing it really well. It's worth thinking about that.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instinctively, what your organization would make. And those are the ones I mean, you were talking about how innovation is now like a really big thing in the equity markets, the innovative companies are the ones that are rewarded the most. In fact, actually, if you look at it, I think it's partly that they're innovative. In some consumer markets, it's a large part of it is going to be that they're innovative in a way that allows a consumer's previous Help them choose to buy the next product. It's like movies from the Marvel universe are like that. iPhones are like that in a way that Samsung doesn't have hardware loyalty the way Apple does and therefore cannot charge the same price premiums. They have to constantly keep making the technology better.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feels like something which they've had before, which is also new. And I think this idiosyncratic idea of quality that you can have, not everyone has it, that's part of what allows you to make new things that always feel like yours. A more familiar example might be you go to a museum and you look at, I don't know, like Ango painting. And every single one of them, even from early on, will feel the same even though they're brand new paintings. And every time Vango paints a new painting, it'll feel like a Vango because it's him. Even if it's a brand new painting about something he's never painted before. And I think that's something which we, I know that in management research, we never think about this. And yet, if we are thinking about innovation and how people make new things, it's not just about how new they are in some industries. It also is important that they feel a part of what came before. It has to feel like something which is.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without it, idea of what quality means for them in this thing. And that's part of what makes an organization's products super distinctive. If you think about why people buy Apple hardware, it's because Apple hardware historically has always felt apply, even if it was brand new. So you can pick up literally off the production line the very first new thing, like back when there was no iPhone, you pick up an iPhone and the design language and all the sort of trade-offs that you're willing to make and not willing to make, the problems you're trying to solve, the problems you're not trying to solve in making an Apple product manifest in that Apple product and it feels like an Apple product. That's what makes it distinctive. The reason why they can charge this massive premium on the hardware is not just because they make it really well, is because people want the apply feeling. Like most people don't care about the engineering tolerances on the iPhone or on the MacBook Pro, even though they're extreme. They just want something which...”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With talking through the process of designing this chair, like what material they're going to use, how they're going to build it, what the design is going to look like. They all had completely different ideas of what a chair is supposed to be good for. So there's this one guy who, to his credit, he's a great technician. So his chairs, I'm not going to say who he is, but I don't like the way his chairs look nor how they feel, but it would be hard to find someone to make a more technically challenging chair than that. And for that reason, they're quite cool. There's another person who doesn't care what the chair looks like but cares a lot about the ergonomics of the chair. So I love his chairs, but I don't like how they look. There's another person who cares a lot about construction. So those chairs are like meticulously constructed, but they're very simple. I actually quite like them, but they're not comfortable. But the thing is, for each one of them, they all have a very clearly understood, even if they cannot necessarily clearly talk.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top down and also deterministic versus if it's bottom up, it sometimes is also deterministic. But in this case, bottom up means everyone who bubbles into this group potentially brings in something new, a different perspective, some new knowledge. And it's the fact that all of these different perspectives that you couldn't really have pre-programmed are talking to each other and having to negotiate with each other. That's what allows that group of people that you couldn't have anticipated the composition of. That's what allows that group of people to come up with interesting stuff. So that's the Google thing. And I don't regret that time at all. I probably wish I had the courage to leave earlier, but I don't regret it. And then the furniture thing, I mean, that's the place where I met all these people who had completely different ideas of what quality was, but they were all supposedly making furniture, right? So that was the first time I not really consciously saw people who were making a chair as they were.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It bubbles up is properly structured to do innovative things, that basically became the entire subject of how I thought about my PhD research. So it was from looking at all the things that were happening at Google unintentionally that I started thinking about what was going on in these restaurants as something which was systematic just not systematic in a way that conventional management research thinks makes sense.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They basically drive everything that I do. Both of them drive everything which I'm interested in doing now and for the foreseeable future. So at Google, the thing which I realized was you've got this supposedly very creative organization that's supposed to be run in an organizational way like creative organizations should be run, right? Given lots of resources to innovate, carving off time so that people can do innovative stuff, not worried about operational requirements. To be fair, this actually is true at Google. But the most interesting thing I worked on at Google were things that bubbled up from below. Like you're in the Google cafeteria and someone says, hey, you're interested in working on like genomics. So you should meet Rebecca and you should meet Joel. And then all of a sudden, after a few months, you've got like a small team of people that are all kind of interested in doing something which is super weird for what their real day jobs are. But collectively, we start a project. So this idea that you can have a bubbling up of a team that be”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do it while you're still full time employed in a job and try and become uncomfortable with a bit of a safety net.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the Google thing, which if you ask anyone at Google, chances are they'll tell you that most people don't actually use that percentage time. So even if you're in an organization that says you've got 20% of your time, if you're in a particular part of the organization to try something which you don't normally work on, most people don't use it. If you already have that facility, definitely use it, right? And even if you don't have that facility, there's so much informal ability to sort of negotiate around what your job is like most people are not literally fully deployed in the work that they do. So if you're not fully deployed, turn some of the bits that are not fully deployed into time that you spend learning what else you could be doing that maybe is more fulfilling for who you are, but also can be demonstrated to benefit the organization that you're working for. So that's kind of an intermediate step.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that you want to do that you think make sense for your organization on your role. Most people get hired into a job scope that's like quite carefully programmed. That's what your job requisition looked like. You have to do it. I think one of the things that you can do, especially if you're already like a quite high performing employee, is you can simply say, okay, I already do all this stuff. Here's something else that I think the company needs that I can do. Let me try it. And there are some organizational contexts which make it easier to do that. So all this like percentage time.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could Implement the idea of productive discomfort in your own life is skip the NBA, maybe, and simply go take a slightly lower position in this other industry and spend those two years working up to where you would get to after you got your MBA and join directly. I don't know many people who talk a lot about doing that. And it would be really interesting to hear from people who have done it that way to compare their experiences with the people who went to business school and then went into what almost invariably is a quite carefully programmed management position that comes out of business school. That could be an interesting way to think about how you do it as an individual. But I think even if you're inside an organization already,”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me go find a job in this other thing I'm not yet good at and take a much lower position, maybe take a pay cut, and be very profoundly uncomfortable for possibly quite a long time. So I used to be a marketer at Google. And one possibility after I left was to go become a furniture maker full-time. Massive pay cut, totally different hours, social contact completely different. The nature of the work was fundamentally different, super uncomfortable, probably one of the best experiences I've ever had working three months doing that. Enough time to realize not quite the right thing, but super useful. So I think you don't have to be quite as extremist that. Right now, one thing that people use MBA programs to do is to transition from one thing to another thing as comfortably as they can. Use the two years of the MBA as a way to say, okay, I used to be X, now I can be Y as well. One way that”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that is quite interesting potentially is simply thinking about how you choose what kinds of work you want to do. So there is one school of thought about how to find a career or a job which says find a job where you are really, really well qualified because that will make you easy to hire. And go get that job. And to be fair, that probably is quite a good idea because if you are very qualified for it already, then you'll get hired and life will be great. The other way of thinking about it might be to say, okay, I'm really good at this. I want to get good at that, which is a different thing which you're not yet good at.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and also not give yourself the opportunity, the time to rest and learn from it. If you simply just like keep overloading an organization or a person with discomfort, over time, they may be able to deal with it for a little bit, but tendons will snap. Sometimes people will just leave because it's too much stress. I think it needs to be a carefully programmed thing, and we just don't really understand how to program these things yet because we don't really think about it like this.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And possibly if you're a person, you have to do this as well. So you have to constantly be putting yourself into a position which is extremely uncomfortable as long as you design that position so that it's helpful and also you give yourself opportunities to learn from it. So those two things need to be true. You cannot just say, I'm going to make myself really uncomfortable, but not create a context where that discomfort helps you do something that you want.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they reincorporate it into the next time. So over time, what you see is the project start very small, they get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger until they get to the point where they can, at this point, they can do all sorts of what the outside observer would look like, impossible things to do. But for them, it's just, it's still hard, but it's exactly like weight training. You don't start immediately going to a weight that you cannot lift. You start with something which you can lift, and then you gradually go over and you build up. You tear out some muscle. then you build it up again and you have to rest a little bit and then you do it again and again and again and over time you build up capacity so i think i don't know if it's true i think it's possible to build capacity like this and i think as an organization if you're trying to be an innovation organization you actually have to do this”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what they do is they don't tear it down. What they do is they do this very stressful, highly uncertain project that makes them very uncomfortable. And along the way, what it forces them to do is learn a bunch of new stuff. They bring in new people into the team that they may not have had in the team before because they didn't need them, or people who are already in the team may have had to go out and learn how to do something new because they had to do that and they didn't know how to do it before. They may have had to completely restructure how the team works simply to do something new. So they don't tear it down. What they do is they take the product of the productive discomfort.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a very interdisciplinary conference with people in public policy, people in biology, farming. They all brought them together. They'd never done anything like that before. So this really was like going from doing something which they knew how to do, which was run a restaurant, which they did very well, to saying we're going to externally commit, we're going to tell everyone out there that we're going to run this thing. It'll be on this date. And people are going to buy tickets that are very expensive. And along the way, we're going to realize that we had no idea how to do that. And we're going to figure out along the way and get super stressed out about it. So they basically kept doing this year after year. They would spend maybe about nine months doing something and then take three months just to catch a breath, but also they would incorporate what I saw. They did this for so far. I've seen them do it for like about 10 years.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tear out your entire kitchen and completely redesign it over the course of like three months. To me, this is an exercise in intentionally putting yourself as an organization into a situation where you literally don't know how you will reopen. You know that you will reopen because you've got bookings and people may have made travel arrangements to come from a long way away to come eat with you. But you also know that until maybe two weeks before that opening date, the kitchen will actually physically not be ready. You'll have two weeks in that time to learn how to redesign some of the dishes that you used to cook in the old kitchen to work in the new one. And you may have to design some new dishes in the first place. So that was the first stressful but small example. The year after that, they decided to run a conference in the middle of a busy season for them, invite all of their most respected industry mentors and peers to come and not just make it a conference for chefs, but also they brought in a bunch of other people.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first example actually was when they decided they cook in this very specific way. And I'm not sure how much you know about the way a restaurant kitchen works, but usually what happens is you design dishes so that they can be cooked by a particular configuration of different stations working together. And in the pressure of a restaurant where you've got lots of orders coming in, it's really meant to be a highly optimized machine, especially at this very high level of fine dining where things really should never go wrong. So you're really talking about making this machine that works perfectly. So you design the dishes that have to be produced to work very well with the people who are cooking them, the physical layout of the room, the way the restaurant is laid out. All of these things need to work together for it to be a seamless flawless experience. So if you decide after you've spent five or six years making this experience totally seamless, then”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the best example is probably one of the restaurant teams that I've studied, which I don't think I should name because we're not really sure if we get to name them yet. One of the things that they've done is about every nine months, they will commit themselves to a project which is in some cases quite a bit beyond what they know they can do at that time.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of that as discomfort that's productive, right? It does something for you and is a good thing, except we sort of instinctively avoid all sorts of discomfort, regardless of whether it's good or bad.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Part about uncertainty is that you also don't know what the future will be like, but in some cases you don't even know what the possible outcomes will be. And that actually reflects the situation that we most of the time find ourselves in today. We were talking over lunch about how when you're faced with a situation where you don't know what the future will be like and you don't know how it will get to that point, it's extremely uncomfortable. That's the kind of discomfort which I'm thinking about. Sometimes that discomfort is paralyzing, but sometimes it can really make you look in new places for new information. It can change your mind about things, especially things that aren't working. It can lead you to interact with people in ways that help you do something rather than prevent you from doing it.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The top level difference between risk and uncertainty is that, in a sense, risk is not truly uncertainty. Best way to think about it that I've come to is not necessarily the right way, it's just the best way that I can think of it is that we actually have to think about uncertainty in the context of certainty. When something is certain, you know almost exactly what is going to happen in the future. And then most of the time in the real world, we don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future. But this not knowing takes two forms. One form is the type of not knowing where you know all the possible outcomes. If you're throwing a die and you are trying to predict what the outcome will be, you don't know for sure whether it will show one or six or three or whatever, but you know that there is an equal chance that the die face that shows up will be one of those six die phases, right? That's a risk situation. So you don't know what the future will be like, but that's a risky situation where you know all the possible outcomes and you know the likelihood of each one of those outcomes. The hard”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means ends causality. It's quite explicit in how we frame some of these programs that you have to go through to get a particular type of degree. But I think there's also a lot of implicit shaping going on. So if you are an undergraduate at UCL, which is supposedly a good university, you have a career service that helps you find internships. And if you get an internship at a place, chances are you will just get a job at that place. The career service when they design career fairs, they only get people like a JPMorgan or a Bain or a BCG to come. So simply by a process of implicit selection of what kinds of opportunities undergraduates get exposed to, they only get exposed to a certain category of things. And it's like a self-perpetuating cycle. So I don't think this is a very good thing for sure.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think superficially looks prestigious. It pays a lot. And actually, it's, I think the best way to describe why they want to go into jobs like consultancy or investment banking is that it's cognitively very clear what goes on in that job. It's like if you do that job, you get paid enough money, your peers think you are successful. There's no uncertainty about what your career path will be apparently. So it's like it's very cognitively comfortable to do it. And to a large extent, I think the way we structure undergraduate education both explicitly and implicitly pushes people in this direction. Explicitly, it's because we teach people that school is about learning skills so that you learn a lot of skills and then use those skills in your job so that you can choose the skills that you want to learn based on what jobs need what skills, right? Like that kind of”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I teach at UCL now. I teach an undergraduate program that teaches management science. And I also teach in a PhD program that teaches PhD students. So one of the things I've noticed over the last five years is nearly every student that I've taught Wants to go into a job”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think the overall frame is if we stop to think about what our goals or our definition of quality is in any particular sphere of life happens to be, then you're forced to begin to rethink whether or not the actions that you take to achieve that goal make sense as you start to change those actions, you start to realize that you know more about these different goals that you're trying to pursue so that they keep on evolving in a way that moves you further and further away from how the generic idea of what you're supposed to be pursuing has been presented to you.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cannot go out to To cook That Or for And instantly, this sort of obsession Really complex, very detailed Where it's just a lot of preparation that gradually falls away, and what you're trying to do instead is you're trying to source as well as you can, prepare it in ways that are as simple as possible. And over time, I think what happens is you also start to realize that your definition of what's delicious changes. If you're used to just going out and eating all the time, maybe what you love is you love very highly seasoned things. You love things that are kind of whiz-bang. But the more you cook for yourself, the more you realize what you really want is you want cooking that is highly precise so that you cook it to exactly the right amount to reveal what it's supposed to show. You want to source from people that you trust, that grow food that doesn't make you feel ill after you've eaten it. And your priorities start to change a bit. So it's this ongoing process of figuring out what quality means for you in food or in all sorts of other kinds of things like your career or the business that you run.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Promote personal To enhance your Simply May want it to be produced Sustain And the moment Start to have these things that are optimization principles. You start to realize that the way Is kind of slightly fucked. Very, very fucked up.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Come to realize that the way we Go about those things If you start with food Which we talked about. The idea is Delicious Something Gives you instantaneous That fits the criteria. But if you really start to think about it a little bit, maybe. Think one of my With”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Qualify that. It's not to say that the way we think about the way the world works is. We stop to think about what we. Really wanted out of food or Or a we really did some About what the sort of The goal was Of We might come to As”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, the same idea, I think, will keep showing up in all sorts of areas where really great people do really great work. A lot of scientists will. That the big challenge is not answering the question. The big challenge is figuring out what question you're trying to answer in the first place. Not to say that answering it is easy or trivial, but it's not conceptually difficult. It's the part where you figure out a way to reframe the way the world works so that a new question Shows up. That part's difficult. That part's what actually is really interesting and produces really interesting outcomes when you try and solve that problem.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking is that everyone's pursuing the same outcome. That's how you can Compare all these different strategies for achieving the same outcome and see which strategy gets you that outcome the most. And that's actually not true. Lots of companies choose to pursue different outcomes and that's what makes them Innovative and successful. So I think this idea that there is lots and lots of heterogeneity in terms of what thing you are pursuing, that's actually where interesting strategy begins. And I think it'll be the same nobody ever makes a really, really great product by wanting to make a product like everybody else does. They always make a really great thing by figuring out why all the other stuff that exists in the market is not quite right for them. And then they go and they fix this problem.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My favorite wine bar in the world is a bar in And the guy who started it was, I mean, we ended up spending two and a half hours talking about it His idea of quality in Wine bar or any kind of hospitality establishment is these are his words actually. It's a place where. You come, you are forced to, but also enjoy meeting people that you would not normally meet. So the moment he said that, I completely understood why I love this place so much because that's exactly what happens, right? You go there, you always meet someone that... You weren't expecting to meet. They become people that you sometimes know for a long time. It's a really wonderful place. I think actually this is something it'll sound a bit like a tangent, but it's not a tangent. In the strategy world as well, one of the default assumptions of strategy”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me what's important to you when you're. Making it. Tell me what's not important to you when you're making it. Tell me why. Me, how you got to this point because everyone always goes through these evolutions and how they think about quality. And that's really what I'm trying to get to, right? Like how their idea of quality is different from everyone else's idea of quality and how that makes a difference in what they're doing.”
2019-12-03 · Invest Like the Best · Vaughn Tan – Quality and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.150] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source