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.

Explore how a predetermined game plan can revolutionize investment decision-making. Learn the importance of clarity and structure in prioritizing investment opportunities. Discover strategies for enhancing productivity through targeted dialogue in meetings. Hear insights on recognizing biases and evaluating risks to improve analysis. Analysts are encouraged to stay focused on relevant data to extract valuable insights. This approach leads to better outcomes and a more disciplined methodology in navigating the complexities of investments.

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:  Observation: What just happened?  Diagnosis: Why did it happen? Prediction: What’s going to happen next?  Prescription:  What should I do about it? 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.

Discover the art of crafting clear investment thesis statements that function like testable hypotheses. Learn how refining these statements can enhance team communication and improve decision-making. Delve into the complexities of investment analysis and the significance of simplifying arguments to highlight key points. Explore practical examples, including Netflix's evolution, which exemplify the importance of clarity in investment theses. This insightful discussion provides a roadmap for achieving focus and precision in the bustling world of investments.

Today we are discussing Profit and Purpose with Omar Shaikh, co-founder of the Global Ethical Finance Initiative. We asked David Kim, who many of you know, to join as well, because this topic can’t be torn apart from philosophical underpinnings of commerce, business, history, and law, and David has such a strong ability to put big concepts into context. This is such an interesting discussion that I hope will be absorbed into how you are currently crafting your ESG process, or even more clearly defining a few things that you learned in business school that are "just not so". I think this episode has the highest frequency of citing or referring to major philosophical theories or thinkers, from Adam Smith, Hume and  Hutchinson, to Narrow banking to the up-to-date work the Global Ethical Finance Roundtables are doing. I’ve included links to Omar’s Global Ethical Finance Initiative, as well as the Economics of Biodiversity paper David mentioned. That link will take you to a highlight report, but there is a 610-page version as well for reference. Thanks for listening.

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. Business Analysis Security Analysis Market Psychology Portfolio Analysis 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. 

We are bringing you a big topic today, so big that it matters to every corner of our lives and our economy: real estate. We’re interested in what is changing, at what pace, and why. To think through such a vast topic, we are bringing in three friends with three very different but complementary vantage points. We have Glenn Lowenstein, a real estate investor who has a very holistic approach to looking at the markets he invests in. We have Jennifer Salopek, who knows the business of retail at a large scale, and has served on Boards of large national retailers, and we have Matthias Hollwich, architect, founder of Architizer, and principal of the architecture firm HWKN. Today we start with commercial and industrial and end with some paradoxical thoughts on retail. All the while we will be working to go under surface level.  Next week we will continue with many more thoughts about retail and residential.