Relevance of 'The Outsiders' for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Managers

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Explore how focusing on shareholder-focused management and capital allocation decisions can impact the growth and success of small businesses, using a hypothetical scenario of a local bakery facing expansion choices to illustrate the trade-offs involved.

In today’s episode, Patrick Donley (@JPatrickDonley) sits down with Shawn O’Malley, Chief Editor of our newsletter, We Study Markets, to discuss what his main takeaways were from doing a deep dive into The Outsiders by William Thorndike.

Learn how CEOs operate like stock investors, why capital allocation is unintuitive for most company leaders, what factors lead to poor capital allocation, how to identify leaders that will be extraordinary capital allocators, which Outsider CEO most stood out to Shawn, how you can apply the lessons in The Outsiders to your own investing, plus so much more!

William N. Thorndike is founder and a managing director of Housatonic Partners, a private equity firm. He is a graduate of Harvard College and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

00:00 - Intro

02:36 - How CEOs operate like stock investors

05:01 - Why is capital allocation is unintuitive to most CEOs

09:37 - What factors lead to poor capital allocation by CEOs

11:36 - What is in a CEOs toolkit to allocate capital effectively and how can they be evaluated

16:28 - How to identify extraordinary CEOs that will be great capital allocators

20:18 - How the Outsider’s CEOs were able to resist the institutional imperative

24:29 - Which of the Outsider’s CEOS most stood out to Shawn

29:30 - How Henry Singleton masterfully allocated capital at Teledyne

34:05 - What lessons can be learned from The Outsiders for today’s investor

*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.

BOOKS AND RESOURCES

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Lawrence Cunningham's book, The Essays of Warren Buffett.
Benjamin Graham's book, The Intelligent Investor.
William Thorndike's book, The Outsiders.
Check out the books mentioned in the podcast here.
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