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Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

The tldr version of this post is that Alice Waters started Chez Panisse with obliquity. She knew what to do thanks to a DIY education, lots of (failed) experiments, talking with others (including customers), and keeping her cost low. Her differentiated product focused on a few key things and she hired independent employees.

Also, Alice owned her building, Tren Griffin addresses this in his post on wholesale transfer pricing and restaurants.

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Alice Waters is the force behind Chez Panisse and her story is told in Coming to My Senses and Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. I’d have never read these books if not for Rory Sutherland recommending the book Obliquity. This quirky little book by John Kay is about working toward big ideas, it’s about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. It may be about starting any company.

Kay writes that the biggest brands in the world all started as small companies with big ideas. It was about design or culture or feelings. When I think about Apple, Coca-Cola, Nike, Subaru, WordPress, or NYC I sense an essence. That’s what founders, like Waters,  aim for.

“How the slapdash, make-it-up-as-we-go-along little hangout and its harried mistress became such icons is a story of adventure, misadventure, unintended consequences, steel will, pure chance, and utterly unrealistic visions.”

“Alice decided to cook her way straight through Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking. The book was about more than just good recipes. It portrayed a way of life — honest, elemental, caring — from which a tactile, sense-engaging way of making food emerged as naturally as a plant form the earth.”

“Alice knew, at last, what she wanted. The Montessori way – direct sensory experience, experimentation, optimism, confidence – would be the way of her restaurant. As for the practicalities, she had no specific ideas. She had never heard of a business plan. She had only faith that things would fall into place.”

The restaurant’s goal was “to evoke the sunny good feelings of another world that contained so much that was incomplete or missing in our own.”

Waters had a grand vision for what she wanted her little place in Berkley to be. She got there by bypassing the traditional education system. In high school:

“I cried at my desk…I felt I was just not smart enough.”

“My grades were good generally but I was distractible.”

She graduated high school and enrolled at Santa Barbara. It was too much of a party school. A friend and the culture pulled Alice to Berkley. From there she traveled to Europe. She kept learning, just not in the classroom.

“The dreary classrooms of the Sorbonne versus a joyous immersion in French cuisine in the sparkling, spotless dining rooms of Paris’s restaurants – for Alice it was an easy choice.”

“But I got the whole French aesthetic, from beginning to end. What those thick curtains looked like, what the fruit bowl looked like, how the cheese was presented, how it was put on the shelves, how the baguettes twisted. The shapes, the colored, the styles. Everything in Paris was magical to me.”

Waters traveled with friends and learned about food, culture, restaurants, hosts, and gardens. Back in California, the people came to her; she met filmmakers, foreign students, and academics. The DIY education paired well with Alice’s temperament.

Back in the states she started cooking for friends. Dinner parties and films, dinner parties and themes, dinner parties and experiments. Alice got the idea to start a restaurant. She had seen women running places throughout Europe. She had seen places in California doing things she might like to do. These were here see it to believe it moments.

She found a house in Berkley, but with no money had to beg and borrow from everyone she knew. But she kept a low overhead and spent 1971 looking for supplies in flea markets.

Alice knew – unlike some starups – that she had to talk to her customers.

“Alice had good reason to believe there would be a public for her cooking. Nearly everyone who had come to dine at the little house on Dada Street said that hers was some of the best food they’d ever tasted.”

“I was in the dining room, and I knew what things people were really likening, or how they were reacting to special little things that we’d try for just a few people, and I would feed that back to him.”

She knew what people wanted thanks to a lot of experimentation.

“We were willing to fail, which is absolutely essential to any kind of learning. Truly momentous disasters occurred on a regular basis, both in my artwork, which I destroyed and in her cooking, which she destroyed.”

“Jeremiah would try anything…Fuckups? We had a few. More than a few.”

The testing was what allowed Chez Panisse to be different.

“Much of the food that Alice loved most was la cuisine du marche – market cooking.”

The Chez Panisse hunter-gatherer culture “was was something that no American restaurant had ever done.”

In the first year of the restaurant Waters drew her line in the sand. She found what the most important things were.

“It was simple: ‘No corners cut,’ she told everyone. ‘Ever’.”

“That’s what distinguishes a great salad from a good one — a great one is alive.”

Good ingredients and good cooking of French recipes with small twists was the menu for the early years of Chez Panisse. This wasn’t an easy thing to prioritize. Great ingredients meant new logistics, new inventions, and new processes. Guided by obliquity, Waters didn’t care how long it took or how much it costs. This took a lot of non-glamorous hard work.

About the first year, “It was a train out of control, a wreck about to happen.”

“Nearly always, Chez Panisse managed to present a calm, contented face to the world. Nearly always, there was something going haywire behind the scenes.”

Said a friend, “That’s how I think of Alice…always moving so quickly…She has never wanted to stop. She’s is not a contemplative person.”

Through hard work and word of mouth the restaurant grew it’s top line revenue, bottom line revenue, and bottoms in the seats. With this Waters hired more people. She found that serving great food didn’t necessarily mean food service skills. Instead, Alice looked to hire someone with esprit. Once hired, you operated under the Chez Panisse decentralized command.

About flowers “With Alice’s devil-may-care carte blanche, Carrie’s artistry was also stunningly expensive.”

“If a waiter, or even a buster, wanted to try cooking something, that was fine – though it would never appear in the dining room unless it passed Alice’s unsparing review.”

Alice went through extensive training with new employees so that once they started they could function on their own.

“When somebody would start, I’d take them into every little nook and cranny. They’d have to go into the narrow closet to see how narrow it was. They needed to go outside and see how we took care of the garbage…How hot it was in front of the ovens. How it all felt.”

“After just a couple of weeks, Alice trusted me to do it on my own — that’s one of her characteristics, to trust people. She’s less worried if you don’t’ have the competence if your heart is in the right place and you’re shooting for the right aesthetic. I got in over my head, as did Chez Panisse constantly.”

Waters wasn’t absent. She understood that she didn’t have all the answers and only in brainstorming with the staff would they settle on the right dish.

“The kitchen staff met early every afternoon. The first order of business was to compare what was on the published menu with what was actually in the house. If salmon was scheduled for Friday night and the salmon that had come in that morning was, in Alice’s opinion, anything less than pristine – well, did anyone have a suggestion?”

Early feedback from one patron pointed out that some female servers weren’t wearing underwear. Waters didn’t care. She wanted chic. It was all in service of the spirit of Chez Panisse.

Over time Alice got better at; exploring, cooking, listening, and managing. But this excellence came at a cost. To get 10,000 hours you need support.

“Finally, Alice had to choose between Tom Luddy and Chez Panisse. No one was surprised when she and Tom parted ways — she was married to the restaurant, and both she and Tom recognized that she could never give him the time and attention that he required.”

“She had yet to meet a man with whom she could imagine having a child. Her most recent lover was a cook at Chez Panisse, handsome and sexy and smart and focused — and fifteen years young. She had hardly ever found a boyfriend outside the restaurant, so total was her inhabitants of it.”

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Thanks for reading. I’m mikedariano.

 

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

In his book on market crashes, Scott Nations does an excellent job explaining what happened. While reading I returned to Sanjay Bakshi‘s idea of part of the reason thinking. When cause and effect are hard to untangle, understanding comes from a full picture. Nations does a great job of untangling, separating stories from reasons, politics from populations.

There are patterns to the highlighted crashes. They begin with a catalyst. Nations believes in the Uniquity thesis. In that book, Mark Buchanan looks at how forest fires, earthquakes, and extinctions might relate to economic instances. “In the critical state, the forces of order and chaos battle to an uneasy balance, neither ever fully winning or losing,” Buchanan writes.

Buchanan asks questions like; If a match is dropped on a random square what are the chances of a fire? If one, how severe? The answers depend on the build-up to the critical state, that balance between order and chaos. In Scott Nations’s book, it’s the same thing, down to the catalyst.

“Every modern stock market crash has an external catalyst at its heart. These external catalysts—some are acts of nature, such as 1906’s earthquake; some are geopolitical, as in 1987 and 2010; some are political, as in 2008; and some are criminal, as in 1929—are not sufficient themselves to start a crash, though they are necessary.”

It’s like a bumped domino. Sometimes there’s not enough trees (above) or dominos (here) for things to spiral out of control. Sometimes there are, and that’s usually because, Nations writes, “each collapse has been fueled by a new, poorly understood financial contraption that introduces leverage into a system that is already unstable.”

In the early 1900’s it was the investment trust, in the 1980’s it was the leveraged buy out, in 1929 the Jone’s were jonesing to trade. Leverage made each instance worse.

“In 1907 it was the trust company, a hedge fund dressed as a savings and loan. In 1929 it was the levered investment trust, a massive stock market wager with little room for error. Portfolio insurance was another of these contraptions, though it would take more than a decade to metastasize”

People back then were so dumb. Right? Wrong. Each idea; trusts, LBOs, insurance, hedges, credit default swaps began as a sound idea.

It’s when those sound ideas are taken to extremes that problems arise. Each innovation makes an assumption about the world. On a small scale, those assumptions are fine. On a large scale, they are not. Often those assumptions were about liquidity. Again and again, in the book, a model worked so long as there were buyers and sellers. But when the shit hits the fan the buyers stood on the tables while the sellers hid under them.

A few leveraged participants don’t make a crash. It’s when everybody gets in that things get messy. That happens too. The Liberty Bonds normalized investing and was part of the reason people became interested in the stock market. The LBO corporate raiders were part of the reason stocks ran up, as people hoped they held an acquisition target. Each additional participant was like another breath into a balloon. The system stretches then snaps.

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If this were a recipe what would it look like?

1. The government creates a condition, making things too easy or hard.
2. Investors seek new returns.
3. Innovative products which behave one way in the ‘lab’ another way on the ‘street.’
4. Initial and then mass adoption, often with leverage at each stage.
5. A catalyst.

There was one idea I kept thinking of while reading this book: Bitcoin.

Nations’s writes, “Despite their differences, Pickens and Icahn seemed to be reading from a book that no one else understood.” This is what I thought listening to Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Hashpower Documentary. Not only that, but so many of these factors line up with cryptocurrencies. They’re financial products most people don’t understand. They work in one instance but are untested in the wider world. The masses aren’t in but will they be and will there be leverage? What kind of worldwide catalyst could destroy or inflate them?

The book doesn’t have the answers and each new crisis is different from the last. This book isn’t predictive and doesn’t try to be. But it descriptive, and for that, it’s a worthwhile read.

 

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Sloan Conference week continues! Monday it was how General Managers make decisions, today is all about the NFL.

It’s easy to say “coaches should stop punting!” yet they keep doing it because punting is a conventional failure. “No one got fired for buying IBM,” said Rory Sutherland. Along with career risk/career capital, there’s bias, inertia, and other factors. Here’s what these football guys said about analytics in sports.

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Analytics isn’t a panacea. Nothing is. Numbers are merely tools that can lead to black and blue thumbs too. Mike Lombardi (more on him here and here) said that coaches need to figure out the figures and structure practices around them. It’s not about convincing players so much as, in Jocko Willink’s words, showing “commanders intent.”

This is when the buy-in happens. John Urschel played for the Baltimore Ravens and echoed what Lombardi said. If a coach found helpful statistics the players would readily adopt the strategy. However, said Tedy Bruschi, it had to work. He said there were times when Bill Belichick (more on him here) would stop following a model early in the season and never revisit it. Wrong priors were gone priors.

Actions in practice should reinforce the analytic indicators said, Lombardi. Should they punt? isn’t decided on Sunday. That decision is made on Tuesday. Teams will (should?) practice and prepare. The fourth down bot was fun but by then it’s too late.

There is in-game data that the players use. Former players Bruschi and Urshcel both said that it has to be simple. These aren’t statisticians, Urshel said, these are football players. Sometimes he and the other coaches had to help players figure out what this or that meant. Bruschi said that one or two best guesses are what the players need, especially during key moments of the game; third-downs, red zone, high confidence plays, etc.

There’s so much going on the players need to focus on the most important things. We saw this too with Eliud Kipchoge, the fastest marathoner in the world. It’s also something professional investors remind the amateurs; save enough, limit fees, diversify holdings, and be patient. Do the Most Important Things first.

Executives can roll around in the numbers a bit more. Lombardi said that individual player numbers can tell you when someone’s physical skills are declining or when a player needs more rest. Bruschi said that each team approaches numbers differently and that figures are all relative. Yards per game, for example, is a baloney number said, Bruschi.

The panel also discussed how difficult it was looking in from the outside. This is a common theme in sports from Andre Agassi in tennis to Ben Falk in basketball to Neal Huntington in baseball. People on the inside need thick skin for the criticism bombardment from people on the outside who don’t have the same information. It’s so nuanced, said Lombardi, that the same scheme like ‘Tampa Two’ is played differently in Pittsburgh than New England.

This internal/external dynamic also applies to trading players. Like used car sales, there’s an information asymmetry. How, asked moderator Bill Barnwell, do you evaluate Jimmy Garappolo? (This panel occurred before his trade).

Well, said Chase Stuart, look at your prior. What was his score when your team graded him for the draft? Then look at the evidence; completion percentage, time with the Patriots, etc, and update that view. The sample size is small enough that Stuart says to not update your prior. Bruschi said that the sample size is small but the comparables are good. Throwing forty passes in the NFL is a much lot better sample than throwing forty passes in college. But is it better than four years of passes?

There’s also the performance per dollar to consider said, Sandy Weil. Rookie deals are cheap, especially if a player is excellent like Russel Wilson during his rookie contract. Garappolo only has one year left on that type of deal so he’ll be more expensive.

This stuff is complicated – and that’s before the biases the other GM’s talked about. Weil said he was shocked to see that just a few years ago many NFL teams used the fastest forty-yard dash time in their player evaluations. That’s like an executive who picked his best quarter from the past three years.

You get this kind of thinking, said Lombardi, when you begin with the end in mind. If you know you need to solve for X – lineman, linebacker, kicker, etc – you’re more likely to justify why a player does that. Instead, outsource your scouting at the combine. Distance can create impartiality.

 

Thanks for reading.

Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

At the 2017 Sloan Conference Billy Beane, Sam Hinkie, Cade Massey, Daryl Morey, and Farhan Zaidi spent an hour discussing decision making.

Good decision making is hard. “You realize that you’re in the fishbowl not knowing there’s water,” said Morey, “Half the time with your decisions you don’t know if its cognitive bias, anchoring, or loss aversion. Even if you know its happening it still affects you in a big way.”

These biases can be as puny as presentation. Medical patients tend to prefer surgeries with 90% survival rates to 10% mortality rates. While pernicious, our evolutionary biases can be circumvented.

• Hinkie suggested to write down your reasoning, let it rest, and then revisit. If a key point fails to hold water, the whole plan is sunk.
• Morey said to flip the script. Instead of asking if you would trade A for B, consider that instead you had B and were trading for A. “It’s shocking how often you’d go, ‘We’d never think of doing that.'”
• Zaidi offered a more morbid life hack. Instead of trading a player, imagine you shot him instead. Would you still do the deal?
• Beane added that most of the decisions we make our independent but we treat them dependently. Just because a player from one school succeeded doesn’t mean the next one will. Related, have no sunk costs.
• Zaidi conducted blind voting but warned against a false sense of independence. After all, you’re all employees with the same data set.

Good decision making requires humility. Sometimes bad reasons have good outcomes. Fortuna is blind so don’t look to her, but your model needs attention. The best models, said Hinkie, are interesting ones. Free throw shooting is boring. However, those better models are more subject to your views (and biases).

Beane said that he wouldn’t recommend a “scorched earth” policy of only data. Instead, incorporate the non-numerical data. How?

If it’s subjective, rank it.

Hinkie said he learned from Morey to strip things down. “I’m asking ‘Why?’ a hundred times,” Hinkie explained.

Beaned added, “The idea that anyone can watch a seventeen-year-old for an hour and predict what’s going to happen in ten years is asking too much.” But, he added, you need on the ground intel. Sometimes a scout in Oklahoma can tell you things only a scout in Oklahoma knows.

Remember though, you aren’t doing this on your own. As Eliud Kipchoge said, “one-hundred percent of me is nothing compared to one-percent of my team.” Morey said much the same thing, “That’s why in hiring it’s very important. Passionate, well-informed, well-prepared people will advocate and you will only learn from the strong advocation of someone.” These GMs want people who argue well.

You also need to communicate with the people above and below you. Some ownerships are better said, Beane and Morey. All organizations have stakeholders and in sports, that group includes; players, owners, fans, journalists, and sponsors. Investors know that filtering in aligned limited partners helps them do more. GM of the Astros Jeff Luhnow said:

“I think it’s important in our position we spend the requisite amount of time managing the stakeholders; the fans, the media, the influencers in the organization, the ownership – all of those stakeholders. I spend a large part of my job managing those stakeholders. It all comes down to communication.”

The Sloan Conference GMs are also a group who chose different tacks and tactics. Morey clarified that it’s not so much different as extreme. For example, if you want to score more points, shoot more three-point shots than two-point ones. If you want a great player you need a high draft pick, and the more high draft picks the better.

These leagues are good, said Hinkie, and you need to have an edge that you push. This could be scouting, player development, training, analytics, trades or whatever. The type of edge doesn’t matter so much as having one. Don’t be different for the sake of being different said, Zadia. Be different because you think you’re right.

But don’t get comfortable with your difference. In the early days of analytics, said Beane, it was like picking up a dollar off the sidewalk. Then it was like finding fifty cents. Now it’s spotting a quarter. Edges erode. “The game is so much smarter now,” said Beane, “There is no low hanging fruit at the executive level now.”

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If you liked this post you may also like posts on Sam Hinkie, Daryl Morey 1, Daryl Morey 2, or Michael Lombardi.

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Supported by Greenhaven Road Capital, finding value off the beaten path.

Holy guacamole this was inspiring, but I’m a runner, fan of documentaries, and lover of musically backed sweeping drone footage. It’s about Nike’s attempt to break the two-hour marathon barrier. If you don’t know, they got damn close, 2:00:25.

Beyond the story, the documentary shows how to get peak performance in the marathon. The 2:00:25 time isn’t an official world record because of the nature of the event. But it was those conditions that led Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya to run faster than anyone in history.

As I watched, I wondered, what does it take for my peak performance?

An interview with Caroline Webb and Khe Hy planted this seed. In that episode, Webb said she asked CEO’s how often they performed their best. Their answers were disappointing. Webb helps people be better. That’s what Nike tried to do too. That’s what anyone can do. Here’s how.

1/ Do the most important things.  To run that far that fast requires you to run far and run fast. Oh, and drink water. When the Nike team showed up at Eliud’s camp they found that he had mostly done this. There was very little the scientists – there were more PhDs than expected – could add to what he was doing.

For Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia and Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea, it was a different story. The former wasn’t running fast enough, the latter wasn’t running far enough. Zersenay also wasn’t drinking water – ever! Even though he’s an Olympic medalist and holds the world record for the half marathon he’d never taken water during a race.

These big things are often the low hanging fruit. Because Eliud had gotten these things right there was less to do. After Lelisa and Zersenay made changes they had big improvements in their times.

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2/ Conditions matter. The Breaking2 attempt was made at a Formula 1 track in Monza Italy. A low elevation, cool temperatures, and minimal incline made this difficult challenge slightly easier.

Environmental conditions and designs can have large effects. Coca-Cola began in Atlanta when it was ground zero for patent medicines. The Black Soxs threw the 1919 World Series when they were poorly compensated. Milton Hershey cut his teeth making caramel and then had the unique opportunity to make milk chocolate in Pennsylvania dairy country and use the reconstruction railroads to ship his sweets. Conditions matter.

As Pete Carroll said about the right environment:

“People will function at a higher level. They’ll come in earlier. They’ll stay later. They’ll be more on it. They’ll inspire those around them. That’s the subtle way of improving an organization.”

Or in how Jason Licht said Bill Belichick evaluates his staff:

“If I said a guy was a first-round draft pick and the Colts picked him, and he turned out to be a bust, they (Belichick and Pioli) wouldn’t have looked down on me. They wouldn’t have said I was a bad grader. Because that player in the Patriots system might have been successful.”

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3/ Use data. The Nike scientists measured the runner’s gait, VO2 max, and lactic acid levels. Each measurement gave the team insights into how an athlete could and should perform.

Sports are a natural place for gathering data, but the data changes over time. Baseball has gone from batting average to on-base percentage to pitch framing to visual acuity to camaraderie. And, said Jeff Luhnow those things are always changing. Ben Falk adds that some data is better. Knowing how tall a basketball player is easy to measure but difficult to change. Other data points are difficult to measure but easier to change. Data isn’t a panacea but it does help solve problems.

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4/ Remember heart. Part of the reason Eliud performed so well was his heart.

There are things we can’t measure that still matter. Spreadsheet cells don’t have the elbow room that life requires. His interviews in the doc are inspiring.

 

Thanks for reading.