My Turkey Day reads:

• 101 Simple Joys of Life We Must Not Forget: No matter what is happening in our lives, we can always find something to appreciate and be grateful for. (The Plain Simple Life)

• Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’ Who Investigates Centuries-Old Paintings for Clues About Produce That Has Disappeared: From the Kitchen Table Renaissance paintings, medieval archives, cloistered orchards—how one Italian scientist is uncovering secrets that could help combat a growing agricultural crisis. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Buffett’s Life Advice May Be More Valuable Than His Portfolio: The Oracle of Omaha’s latest letter shares his insight on how to leave behind a strong family and a lasting legacy. (Bloomberg)

• Fast food is too expensive for its core customer and not expensive enough for the customer it wants: How a communication crisis around value risks making the entire sector a limited-time offering. (Sherwood)

• Restaurants Aren’t Really Charging People For Skipping Reservations Anymore: Diners are treating restaurant reservations like dating apps, ghosting when something better comes along. (Eater)

• 18 Thanksgiving dishes Post readers make every year: Stuffed ham. New Mexico red chile sauce. A miraculous broccoli casserole. Can we come to dinner? (Washington Post)

• The Best Inventions of 2024 200 innovations changing how we live: 200 Best Inventions of 2024 (Time) see also Cutting in line? American Airlines’ new boarding tech might stop you at now over 100 airports: In an apparent effort to reduce the headaches caused by airport line cutting, American has rolled out boarding technology that alerts gate agents with an audible sound if a passenger tries to scan a ticket ahead of their assigned group. (AP)

• What is Michael Saylor Doing? How Bitcoin’s Biggest Champion is Winning. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Behind Many Powerful Women on Wall Street: A Doting ‘Househusband’  More men are staying home to facilitate the complex juggle of family life and their wives’ high-powered careers. (Wall Street Journal)

• The Fields Medal Winner Who Thought He Was a Slow Learner: Plus, paper guillotines and corner rounders, mystery dinners, and contronyms in different languages. (The Critical Thinker)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Michael Morris, cultural psychologist at Columbia Grad School of Business and Psychology Department. His research focuses on cultural influences on styles of cognition, communication & collaboration. He advises corporations, government agencies, NGOs, and political campaigns about culture-related issues. His new book is “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.”

 

What it takes to be “financially successful” by generation

Source: Axios

 

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The post 10 Thanksgiving Day Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

 

 

This week, we speak with Michael Morris, cultural psychologist and Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership at the Columbia Business School. Prior to joining Columbia, he was a tenured professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and Psychology Department.

Morris has published over 200 articles in leading behavioral science journals and has received countless international awards from scholarly societies across several fields. Michael serves as a consulting editor at the Journal of International Business and at Management and Organization Review. On this episode, Barry and Michael discuss the connection between psychology and leadership, the basic tribal instincts that drive us, and his new book Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.

He explains how malleable tribes are — they are not written in our DNA as so many like to say, but rather, can be altered to help a company or country progress.

A list of his favorite books is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Tuesday.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Tony Kim, Head of Technology Investing, Fundamental Active Equity at Blackrock. Kim’s funds have beaten their benchmark over the past decade; his new AI-focused fund, the iShares A.I. Innovation and Tech Active ETF, just began trading.

 

 

Published Book

 

 

Current Reading

 

 

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Next time you encounter a calm pond or lake with a nice, smooth surface, pick up a rock and toss it into the water. The result will be very predictable: concentric rings will expand out from where the mass disrupts the calm surface.

This is how models depict the economy.

Once the surface settles down, repeat the exercise. Only this time, have 10 of your friends grab big scoops of rocks of various sizes, from pebbles to boulders, and randomly throw them into the water over minutes, hours, and days.

This is how the economy actually behaves.

Each stone’s effect creates waves, which then interact with other waves and ripples until the complexity reaches a point where you cannot tell where each wave came from or where it is going. Boulders can disrupt the system, and smaller rocks get subsumed by what appears to be random motion.

I think about that calm pond this time of year when the annual Wall Street forecasts for markets and the economy get released. These reports are aggressive acts of arrogance.

Look no further than the track records they have amassed: Some people are occasionally correct, few consistently, none in the fullness of time. Hey, someone’s dart will come closest to the target, but I defy you to identify in advance whose dart it will be.

We rarely understand fully how each new event will impact all of the others that came before it and how the next events in time will affect what preceded it. And, we never know when that Boulder, which disrupts everything, will come along.

Investors should consider this when they create a portfolio. It should contain enough risk assets—primarily stocks—to benefit from the expansion of the economy and gains in corporate earnings. However, it should not be so risky as to be problematic. It should be both robust and boulder-proof.

I think about this when I see the torrent of forecasts this time of year: Price targets for the S&P, inflation forecasts, and most LOL of all, NRF Black Friday retail predictions.

Never confuse opinion marketing with actual, useful information.

~~~

Give thanks this weekend! Celebrate with family and friends. Count your blessings. And have a safe and happy holiday.

 

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