chowyonghan Author

Why investors are impatient

(Excerpt from Useful Laws of the Land by Morgan Housel) Vierordt’s law: We underestimate long periods of time and overestimate short periods of time. Nineteenth-century physiologist Karl von Vierordt spent most...

February 23, 2020| Investing Read More

Share generously to be discoverable

(Extracted from Show Your Work by Austin Kleon) You don’t really find an audience for your work; they find you. But it’s not enough to be good. In order to be found, you have to be findable. I think there’s an...

February 21, 2020| Marketing Read More

Raise the average with the next hire

(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch) Hire to raise the average. Ideally, each new recruit should be in the top 10 per cent of existing employees. That way the firm will constantly get better and better....

February 21, 2020| People Read More

Three Golden Rules of Innovation

(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch) 1. Innovation is best based on what you already do best and most distinctively. Innovation is powerful when it suits the new category you have invented rather than the...

February 21, 2020| Strategy Read More

You have to be reactive and not proactive in the markets

(Extracted from The Business of Options by Martin O’Connell) When I left the corporate life to become an independent CBOE marketmaker in 1977, I considered myself to be a real adventurer. I wasn’t going to spend...

February 20, 2020| Investing Read More

Subtracting benefits as a market position

(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch) Subtracting benefits is important because it usually enables the new category to lower costs, and/or to substitute the new benefits without charging more, because of...

February 20, 2020| Strategy, Via Negativa Read More

Wisdom via negativa

To attain knowledge, add things every day. To attain wisdom, remove things every day. Lao Tzu...

February 19, 2020| Via Negativa Read More

Which business idea should you pursue – is it a star venture.

(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch) you can forget about more than 95 per cent of the ideas you may have. For every 20 ideas you have, you can junk 19 of them, confidently and securely, without doing any...

February 18, 2020| Focus, Strategy, Via Negativa Read More

We don’t explain success, we rationalise success

(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch) As Professor Phil Rosenzweig of the IMD business school in Switzerland demonstrates, nearly all the usual explanations of business success are useless and exaggerate...

February 18, 2020| Confirmation Bias Read More

Hard work is not a panacea

(Excerpt from The Star Principle by Richard Koch) … nearly all successful entrepreneurs stress the importance of hard work. But so do 95 per cent or more of all executives, successful or unsuccessful,...

February 18, 2020| Life Read More

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