Last week might have been the week of maximum uncertainty in the world of food supply chains. It might not be the week of maximum pain of course but risk, pain and uncertainty are all different. Last week the largest buyers in the country (Costco, Kroger, Amazon) we’re placing unplanned purchase order to food manufacturers at a scale I’ve never seen before. These are the largest POs you can imagine. In normal times, filling massive POs involves basic financial risk.

About a week ago I purchased @allandib’s book The 1-Page Marketing Plan.

Truth be told, I expected this book to be overrated if not terrible, but felt compelled to read it because I’ve seen it on various top ten lists. If you consider yourself a pro in a given field and you haven’t read the obviously available and popular literature on the subject you’re a dolt and a fraud.

And that especially includes reading things you assume you won’t agree with at the outset. That’s where the new ideas are

I just finished reading Curtis Faith’s book “Way of the Turtle.” A couple thoughts:

I was a runner on the Chicago Merc Exchange & CBOE in 2007

Back then, everyone told me to read a dense options pricing book that THEY THEMSELVES admitted they didn’t fully understand Many of the traders I knew that summer got wiped out or switched jobs in the following few years.

Obviously the book they had recommended to me (and by proxy their own methods) had failed them, and this led me to heavily discount the wisdom of all trading disciplines

I just finished reading Reality in Advertising by Rosser Reeves.

This one wasn’t on my radar until @JVMeredith pointed it out - and I’m glad he did.

Quick refresher on how I went from deep Munger cuts to deep marketing cuts, then I’ll do my top takeaways from Reeves (thread) I work in the consumer packaged goods industry as an owner operator.

This industry IS marketing, and until a few years ago, yours truly had never read an advertising book or taken a marketing class.

That made me a one legged man in an ass kicking contest

So I started reading

I just finished up “Hello My Name is Awesome”, by Alexandra Watkins which is a great short book on naming your company that I’ve seen @TaylorPearsonMe recommend a few times

I was interested because a few years back I hired the firm that named Starbucks to help me name a company. Long story short, I didn’t use any of their suggested names. They had an interesting and very thoughtful process that I think hangs together intellectually, but creatively, the results just didn’t work, at least for me.

I just finished ‘Secrets of Professional Turf Betting’ By Robert Bacon (H/T @maxolson, who brought it to my attention at Berkshire this year).

I picked the book up because horse betting is central to one of my all-time favorite Munger quotes: That quote goes like this (h/t @farnamstreet):

“The model I like to sort of simplify the notion of what goes o­n in a market for common stocks is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack”

I just finished reading “Tested Advertising Methods,” by John Caples.

I found this book after seeing that David Ogilvy called it “without a doubt, the most useful book on advertising [he] had ever read.”

Good enough for me!

Here are my key takeaways: The book is premised on two simple ideas.

First, there is a GIGANTIC difference btwn a good ad & a bad ad

Caples says “I have seen one ad sell 19 1/2x as much goods an another.”

Second, a good ad is discovered by applying the scientific method to the testing of ad variables

Buffett's 2018 annual letter to Berkshire shareholders is out.

berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2018lt…

My takeaways: WEB has always been precise when comparing book & intrinsic values, BUT for decades he's opened by reporting the % change in per share BV, calling it a flawed but useful proxy for IV.

Thats over.

WEB no longer thinks BV has enough relevance for the top spot, even w/ caveating

I just finished reading ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’.

After personally overseeing many frustrating marketing campaigns in 2018, this book hit me like a bolt of lightning and was easily a top five read in the last 12 months.

Here’s a thread of my favorite takeaways: Ogilvy viewed advertising not as an art form, but as a medium of information designed to SELL.

“When Aeschines spoke they said, ‘How well he speaks.’

But when Demosthenes spoke, they said “Let us march against Philip.’”

We advertise to elicit action, not the praise of peers.

I just finished High Output Management, by Andrew Grove. To be honest, I had never heard of this book until it was cited more often than any other mgmt book by @bhorowitz in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I thought both books were excellent, but Grove's book struck me as having a few incredibly refined ideas about the practice of management that I'd like to remember. Those ideas are...