Just short of a month ago, I was invited to Milan by my good friend Paolo. Paolo was my roommate back when I lived in New York (almost four years ago now). Paolo now works as the personal assistant to Angelo Moratti, who is a friend of Warren Buffet. Moratti had followed Buffett around his recent European tour to introduce him to new people, and the trip ended in Milan.

Paolo had invited me to the Buffett press conference to ask a question. See the full press conference on here: Part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4. I asked Buffet what he thought of the significance of true equal opportunities for men and women in the workplace, and a couple of innovative ideas for how to achieve it. The part with my question is part 2 — you have to scroll about 10 minutes 15 seconds in.

After the press conference, Paolo had also arranged a small get-together in a hotel suite, where Paolo, me and 10 other people got to speak to Buffet for about three quarters of an hour. He is completely down to earth and extremely fun.

When we asked him what his metric of success is, he responded with a beautiful metaphor: “How many people will hide you”, which is a reference to who would hide the Jews during WWII. If you have people who will hide you, you have achieved something — true friends. He is a great guy, enormous aura and has great empathy. It was a magnificent experience.

Of course, the weekend after the event was as much fun. Paolo, Stefan (my good friend, who joined for the Buffet event), Simon (my cocktail buddy and entrepreneurship thought partner), and I hit the town in Milan. We ended Sunday morning for a Mozzarella bar brunch. Below, all of us in a slightly misty Milan right after Sunday brunch on the way to the airport.

Yesterday was a beautifully sunny day, and I sat on the balcony of my friends Jesper and Mia’s apartment, reading The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel Pink. What a great read.

Written, or rather drawn in manga, Japanese-style print cartoons (very much like the Kita Koga series in the back of my favourite magazine Monocle), Pink conveys six career/life lessons. It is short and sweet, and the book is fun and enlightening.

While I do not agree fully with all of the points made in the book, I think that they make for a very good perspective. Here is a short bite of what I took note of:
Lesson number one that Johnny Bunko is taught is that there is no plan. I could not agree more. I have a strong preference for not planning (so I keep telling myself), both concerning small things (not packing in due time for vacation), but also in the grander scheme of life (not knowing where I want to end up). “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” (John Lennon).

What I also feel important about not planning too much for life, is that it is difficult to actually know what will be useful for you later in life. How can you possibly? And we need not go further than to our own house-philosopher here in Denmark, Søren Kierkegaard: “Life is understood backwards, but must be lived forwards (Livet forstås baglæns – men må leves forlæns).”

Building on that, Johnny learns that you can make choices for basically two reasons — instrumental and fundamental. Doing something for instrumental reasons is to do something for another desired and expected outcome, whereas doing something for fundamental reasons is to do it because you are inherently interested in it and not necessarily know what it will lead to.

There are many more goodies to go for in the book. Regardless of how you feel with what you are currently up to (doing your dream job — or — thinking seriously about doing something else) this is a fun and insightful read.

One or two of you may have heard “Fly or die” fly out of my mouth. I stole it — along with the headline — from Paul Arden, the author of these two books:

   

I read them a couple of years ago after which they ended up as shelf material in my apartment. On a lucky strike, I rediscovered them after a friend of mine returned them after having lent them for a while. I picked them up and read them again. And they are even better the second time around.

They are both easy and quick reads with Paul Arden’s input for how you can approach life. When reading, you may find that many of his ideas are self-evident, but give me, him, and yourself a break. Many of us need a push once in a while, and these books do it, so it’s fun to read. (Paul is a former advertising executive, so he has flair for good copy writing.)

Let me bring up just a few great passages, which are not only well-written, but also touches on important topics. Firstly, about our tendency to neglect to assume responsibility when things go wrong:

If you are involved in something that goes wrong, never blame others. Blame no one but yourself. If you have touched something, accept total responsibility for that piece of work. If you accept responsibility, you are in a position to do something about it. There are no excuses.

Secondly, about sharing ideas and how we tend to “sit on” ideas and knowledge instead of sharing. Remember, sharing is caring :-):

Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know, and more will come back to you. If you give away everything you have, you are left with nothing. This forces you to look, to be aware, to replenish.

And lastly, about problem solving leadership and taking chances:

If you can’t solve a problem, it’s because you’re playing by the rules.

(…)

But you must show no fear. It must be what you think, not what the client may think or your boss will think. This is your job. Don’t refer back to those in authority, they will play for safety. You’re on your own. Fly or die.

[All bolds in quotes my formatting]

If you have to choose the one over the other, I think the first one (It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be) is by far the best. But I’d pick up both any day.

Paul Arden has also written a new book (new and new — end of last year) — God explained in a taxi ride. Has any of you read it? If so, let me know if it is worth picking up.

Below is the stock price development of Bombardier, the company behind the infamous DHC-8 Q400, the past 3 months. The first serious SAS incident with this aircraft type, was on September 9 this year. Can you spot the trend?

I wonder what this will look like tomorrow morning when the stock exchange in Toronto opens. And I also wonder how other airlines will behave following SAS’s complete abandonment of the Dash 8. A move, which–by the way–in my mind was the only plausible course of action to maintain/restore long-term customer confidence and thus SAS itself.

Some of you may already have seen this Coke commercial, which recently started to air on Danish TV. It is actually a 2007 SuperBowl commercial. I love it and I wanted to share it with you; see it below.

More Coke commercials on the Coca-Cola website, and more SuperBowl commercials on SuperBowl Ads.

Yesterday, Apple announced the iPhone — something we have all been waiting for, for a very long time. And it’s beautiful!

And the effect of the announcement was directly traceable on the markets. Below is a picture of the share price development of Apple, Palm and the makers of BlackBerry for the past days. Ouch!

Chart from Google Finance

I bought a MacBook Pro (the fastest laptop on the planet) some time ago. So, naturally, I’ve been surfing the Internet for a lot of Mac stuff lately. This ad (one year old, when Apple launched their new lines containing Intel processors) is a perfect example of the ingenious marketing that they do. I love that company.

Marie and I are deep into our thesis, which I have promised to tell you about on several occasions. I am working on it right now, actually, but I just needed a break from it (which I then use to write about the thesis on this blog — what a break!).

We write about business strategy and how this can be coupled with the firm’s capital structure. Capital structure (also called financial structure) refers to the way the firm finances itself — very simplified you can either use your own money (equity) or the bank’s money (debt). Coupling strategy and capital structure theory is rather new, and hasn’t been done much before the very end of the 80’s — and there is still a lot of ground to be covered.

Within strategy, we look at innovation and to which degree the firm focuses its strategy on innovation and how it affects its financing decision. Our main hypothesis is that the more the firm focuses on innovation, the more it will use equity financing, other things equal. The immediate rationale for this is that equity capital is more risk-willing than debt capital — and when you have an innovation strategy, you take more risk than firms that do not have an innovation strategy. That is the basic notion, although there are plenty more arguments and details — but then I could go on forever :-).

Marie and I have been able to prove such a relationship between the degree to which the firm’s strategy is focused on innovation and its capital structure. We have looked at more than 2,000 companies, and our findings are quite significant. Below, I have quickly made a graph, that illustrates our findings (albeit simplified). Another interesting feature of our findings, which you can see from the graph, is the polynomial relationship (the famous s-curve).

That was the short story. I don’t think I’ll write much more about it on the blog, because it is somewhat different from the topics I normally write about. Still, if you want to know more about this and our findings, let me know.

As I have mentioned before, I’m currently writing my Master’s thesis — which I hope I’ll get the time to tell you about. The thing is, when I work on it all day, I really don’t feel like spending my evenings trying to write a post for my blog. At the latest, I’ll write up the ideas of the thesis when it’s done and over with. :-)

Anyway, because I’m writing my thesis I am re-reading a book I bought in the NYU book store in the fall of 2004 when I lived in New York City. The book is called The Elements of Style (by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White) and is about usage and style of well-written English. It is my absolute favourite book on the topic, it is short and it is to the point.

However, the point I want to make in this post is actually far from the subject matter of the book. But in the introduction to the book is an important point:

If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it out loud!

This sentence, one that William Strunk repeated over and over in his classes, is a metaphor or something bigger. Please don’t hide what you can’t do, because if you do, you’ll never learn.

There is a lot of talk about Google (GOOG) these days because they broke the 500 dollar/share roof. The valuation seems crazy, but I haven’t looked into whether it is sustainable or not, so let’s not discuss that :-)
However, I had a little look into the money Google spends on innovation (or research and development) versus Yahoo (YHOO) — and Yahoo has outspent Google every year for the past five years (I didn’t look further back). Still, if we look at the stock price since Google went public, Yahoo’s share price is flat compared to Google, whose share has quadrupled.

Here is a slide illustrating that point exactly from a presentation my good friend Thomas Joachim Hansen and I held yesterday.