Coburn Ventures Podcast

Today we have Zak Dychtwald, Founder of Young China Group, joining us to help us understand the global young consumer and specifically, all the ways we may be misunderstanding the global consumer with regard to "Young China". 

Zak wanted to know what the future held, he found himself living in China. With that experience and his lens on demographics, he has become a bridge for decision-makers, many in the western world, to understand the rapid pace of change in China. Zak will walk us through a framework to reveal more of what we may not be fully understanding, and he offers a multitude of important observations along the way. I hope you enjoy it.

Joseph Tainter said, “Complexity is the cumulative effect of reactionary decision making”. Well, we can do better than that, can't we? The investment process is the specific domain we use to reduce complexity and improve decision-making, and through our deep work over the years, we created the pre-determined game plan as our tool to get centered and focused on what we believe are the most relevant needs of the investment case.

Like all of our tools, it's meant to be customized, so if you listen for the high-level abstract points, you’re likely to find a few elements that might help your team's work to sharpen up too. I hope you enjoy it.

In this conversation, JP Rangaswami is going to help us slow down our thinking, breaking apart our tendency to literally jump to conclusions. He’s going to talk about the four stages of data development. So that you have a bit of background before we start, here they are: 

JP has some great examples to illustrate these four stages in real-world decision-making. Just listening to this conversation helped me heighten my awareness of when I conflate these steps, I think you're likely to find some new insights too. Enjoy.

The thesis statement, in the context of investing, is our best effort to create a testable hypothesis. Of course, it is not a scientific process, but we can surely borrow from the discipline of science to create a richer process!

If you find sometimes that your work is voluminous but unfocused, or the communication on your team or with outside parties is muddy and you can’t figure out why, then the process of forming and re-working a thesis statement can be a good place to start. 

In this episode we will go into the process we used to sharpen our thesis statements, (they were a little unwieldy at first). This process let us get clearer on what really mattered, strengthened the signal and quieted the noise, and provided a roadmap for analysts that let us use our time far more precisely. We also include some examples so you can see how it works. I hope you enjoy it. 

Today we are examining business strategy, and especially, strategies that are weak, becoming "Tactics Masquerading as Strategy".  And then, we tie that to a key philosophical underpinning of many business strategies that we may be adapting away from: Porter's Five Forces. This is a philosophy that fits very well with the last four decades. It would be a largely successful framework to start strategic thinking…  but just as we want to be able to identify when a strategy is really just a reduction into tactics, we want to be able to understand the underlying building blocks philosophy a strategy rests on. So it's important to consider that this framework is now being reevaluated, even by Michael Porter himself and his colleagues, who starting in about 2011 now write mostly on Creating Shared Value. So, some kind of change is afoot. Let’s get into it. 

Polly Labarre is an author, thinker, collaborator, and journalist. I first met her through Pip as she was working on her book Mavericks at Work, which is a fascinating look into the most original minds in business. You may know her as a co-Founder of Fast Company. Any of you who enjoyed our very first Sundance Gathering know her as the first to utter "you are the program", an ethos of creativity and contribution that is inherent in almost all of our work at Coburn Ventures. 

Polly's special ability lies in examining what’s happening at the edges of organizations and culture to see what might be an indication of future change in business and management. We dive into what it means to have a company that understands how to bring out the best in their employees, how institutions frame our work experience, in sometimes limited and very outdated ways. Polly has this great phrase about building organizations where systems and structure "go with the grain of humanity". Imagine that. 

We will get into edge cases that take us to real-life examples from China to Sweden and back again. I hope you enjoy it.

We are often asked to help teams in some way refine their communications, especially so that they can get better idea flow between the analysts and the portfolio manager.

So Pip stepped back to see if he could better define each role required in investing. You could probably break this down further, or differently, but here are the four jobs of stock picking.

So who does what? We’ll walk you through, in hopes that communicating around these four “jobs” might help analysts and PMs get clearer on how to work more powerfully together. I hope you enjoy it.

We promised to pick up where we left off from last week's Episode #1 on the Reinvention of Real Estate. If you remember we have three guests for this conversation, from different but highly related disciplines in real estate: we have real estate investor Glenn Lowenstein, Matthias Hollwich, co-founder and principal of architecture firm HWKN, and Jennifer Salopek, advisor to major retailers on navigating change. 

In this episode, we go deeper into the transformation happening with mixed-use real estate. If you remember the great perspective from Matthias in Part 1, that after this year of massive pressure and change we are already really living in "2035", we apply that idea to specific changes that blur the lines between retail, commercial, residential, and office space.