This week’s highlights: Meetings in Person, Michael Dell, and Crawfish Farming
Photo by Ayden Sutton on Unsplash
Issue 436
Happy Friday!
Hope you have a great weekend
Original Content:
- How to Keep a Vacation Home From Becoming an Albatross. 80% of wealthy families own at least 2 homes – the average owning 2.7. Yet with this being such a common phenomena, I found comparatively little analysis about the pros and cons of owning additional property. And as you might imagine, there are a lot of factors at play, and hint, investment return is not really the most significant.
Best,
David
In the FoF Community
One of the pleasures of editing and publishing FoF each week is getting to keep up with a dynamic and creative community of readers. I wanted to highlight briefly one thing that might be of interest. Not surprising to some of you, I have had a long-term interest in business strategy, since probably the age of five when I started grabbing brochures and catalogs from companies to keep in my briefcase (long-story). This interest in strategy was greatly enhanced during my time at Wake Forest and specifically through a professor there, Dr. Page West.
I had the privilege of studying for a semester in London with Dr. West, and took several of his courses on entrepreneurial strategy. Dr. West has long been a mentor and friend. For years, he has written and published one of the top strategy textbooks, which he has now adapted into a more digestible bite size called Strategy Foundations*. If you have never taken a business school class, or it has been awhile, these short volumes present cutting-edge ideas about designing, executing and assessing business strategy. Definitely worth a look.
Food for Thought
- HBR – When Do We Actually Need to Meet in Person?
- WSJ – Law School Loses Luster as Debts Mount and Salaries Stagnate. With high-paying jobs out of reach for most, graduates of the University of Miami and other well-regarded programs routinely carry six-figure student loans for years
- Smithsonian – How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad. A schoolgirl and a former traveling Bible salesman helped turn deodorants and antiperspirants from niche toiletries into a multi-billion industry.
- TheAtlantic – Plan Ahead. Don’t Post. And seven other rules for a happy vacation “Research published in 2018 in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that taking pictures with the intent to share them on social media leads people to enjoy their experiences less because it increases “self-presentational concern.”
Business
- Forbes – The Case Of Ernie Ryder And When Tax Shelter Promoters Drink Their Own Koolaid. If it seems to good to be true…
- II – With Goldman Sachs in the Rear-View Mirror, Morgan Stanley Chases Down Schwab. Begun the custodial wars have.
- Forbes – Deal Of The Century: How Michael Dell Turned His Declining PC Business Into A $40 Billion Windfall
- FA-Mag – AOC’s Bill Seeks To Require Wealthy Family Practices To Register With SEC. Not super surprising given the chatter post Archegos.
- WSJ – Succession Drama Grips Scholastic: CEO’s Sudden Death, an Office Romance and a Surprise Will. Richard Robinson stunned his family by bequeathing his controlling stake in the ‘Harry Potter’ publisher to senior executive Iole Lucchese
Culture / Arts/ Tech / Science
- Eater – How Louisiana’s Biggest Crawfish Farm Sells Three Million Pounds of Crawfish Every Year Rice farmers like Mike Frugé of Cajun Crawfish in Louisiana figured out that the two year growing cycle of crawfish synced perfectly with the two year cycle of the rice crop. He shows us how his rice fields are seeded with baby crawfish every other year, creating a new source of food and income for farmers in the area.
- Jalopnik – Track Modified Tesla Plaid Sets Laguna Seca Electric Record With Surreal Near-Silent Lap
- Spotify – Hardcore fans listen like crazy. Amazing what Spotify’s data set is able to compile on user engagement. And good to remember Terry Benedict’s maxim, “there’s always someone watching”
- Revisionist History – Little Mermaid Part 1: The Golden Contract. These three episodes of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast on the Little Mermaid are just fantastic.
- Domino – This Is What Happens to Your Body When You Drink Enough Water. 75 percent of Americans are described as “chronically dehydrated.”
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
I wrote the book because of a problem I saw and experienced personally. As we pursue our dreams and achieve success, financial wealth is often a natural result.
Yet, the first steps we take to manage this wealth are focused on avoiding negative outcomes (unnecessary taxes, estate issues, losses in the stock market), rather than articulating what we actually want to do with our wealth.
The book is about how we shift from focusing on the things we want to avoid, to the things we want to accomplish with our wealth. Doing so requires a person to articulate 3 key items – Wealth Structure, Wealth Identity and ultimately a Wealth Strategy. The book walks through each of these items in great depth, and guides the reader through a process to develop each.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.