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Now, if I’d told you in a vacuum about the Starbucks CEO and a former McKinsey partner, McKinsey being one of the most legendary consulting firms in the world, you’d probably think these were two brilliant guys who had everything figured out.
Wrong again.
At least one of them must be completely wrong, because they’re now apparently going head to head with opposite policies. In reality, the answer probably lies somewhere in between.
Or look at Boeing’s (BA) earnings today. They got hammered, and the company is in the midst of a very serious identity crisis, barreling towards a strike, and hemorrhaging money left and right.
This one hits a little closer to home because, as a St. Louis company, Boeing has been a fixture in my world for a long time, and some of my good friends are facing the threats of furloughs and potential layoffs because of their mismanagement.
So if you thought the people who run one of the biggest airplane manufacturers and defense companies in the world must have it all figured out… well, nope… wrong again…
And their new CEO is admitting as much: “This is a big ship that will take some time to turn, but when it does, it has the capacity to be great again.”
(By the way, with airplanes, maybe it’s a little less light-hearted that these folks don’t have it figured out. I can’t be the only one that prefers to see an AirBus when I have to fly)...
Now, my point isn’t to beat up on the CEO of SBUX, or BA, or really any other bigwig or powerful person out there.
My point is to challenge the idea that big wigs and powerful people should be thought leaders, role models, or people we trust absolutely to make good decisions.
And it’s not because there’s some vast, conspiratorial cabal of the ultra-elite who want to hold us down and make life harder on us — I don’t think that’s true.
I always trust the law called Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
In other words, don’t assume the world is out to get you. Just assume that the other people around you, much like you, don’t have it all figured out.
And, to put a bow on this long rant, I want to remind you that this plays a BIG role in investing.
We need to remember that companies are more than an individual. People look at leaders like Nvidia’s Jensen Huang or the late Steve Jobs at Apple and think that these men are geniuses guiding their company through a golden age. And there’s some truth to that.
But the companies will survive when these men move on. The stocks will still trade. And people will still make mistakes.
We as traders need to remember that it’s an irrational world, and do our best to make some sense of it.
But if you struggle at times, be kind to yourself.
Because, and I’ll just speak for myself here, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing a lot of the time, either. :)
To your prosperity,
Stephen Ground
Editor-in-Chief, ProsperityPub
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