Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are: Business (Management lessons from Honeywell's former CEO; Niche consumer firms grab investor eyeballs), Productivity (All highly intelligent people share this trait; A psychologist explains why these 5 habits will help you stay focused all day), and History (East India Company: The original corporate raiders)
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At Ambit, we spend a lot of time reading articles that cover a wide gamut of topics, ranging from zeitgeist to futuristic, and encapsulate them in our weekly ‘Ten Interesting Things’ product. Some of the most fascinating topics covered this week are: Business (Management lessons from Honeywell’s former CEO; Niche consumer firms grab investor eyeballs), Productivity (All highly intelligent people share this trait; A psychologist explains why these 5 habits will help you stay focused all day), and History (East India Company: The original corporate raiders).
Here are the ten most interesting pieces that we read this week, ended September 18, 2020:
1) Management lessons from Honeywell’s former CEO [Source: The Economist]
David Cote, the former CEO of Honeywell, an industrial conglomerate, has produced an excellent effort with “Winning Now, Winning Later”. When a team failed to come up with suggestions to cut costs, he ordered them to cancel all other meetings and keep talking until they produced the results. “The idea that as a leader you can focus on strategy and delegate its implementation to great people is a fallacy,” he writes. But his approach paid off and the book is a detailed guide to the tricky task of managing a big business. He thinks the idea that corporate leaders have no choice but to embrace short-termism in the face of pressure from investors is “one of the most pernicious beliefs circulating in business today”.
When Mr. Cote took over at Honeywell in February 2002, he says the company was “a train wreck and on the verge of failure”. Remarkably, the board and outgoing boss refused him any access to the company’s financials until July 2002, when he also became chairman. What he eventually found was that the group had pursued short-term profits through aggressive accounting practices. During the previous decade, for every dollar in earnings Honeywell generated only 69 cents in cash. He changed the accounting approach, put a greater focus on investment and aimed to expand the business while keeping fixed costs constant.