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How to be Visionary: First Principles & Learning from History
Today I write a more personal note, which we don’t often do in these newsletters. My lifelong study of businesses, working in them and starting them, has led me to think about how one sees the future clearly. The many great business leaders we profile on...
The US Consumer Panel Industry, 1940-2020: Lessons for the Age of Big Data¹
It is easy for manufacturers and retailers to know how much product moves out their doors. It is harder, but very necessary, for businesses to know what kinds of people buy what kinds of goods, with what frequency, the degree of brand loyalty, and whether it’s in...
The Bookstop Story by co-founder Gary Hoover
I started collecting books by the time I was 8 years old, starting with a Rand McNally world atlas. I think it cost $1, and I still have it. My addiction has led me to live with my 57,000 books in an odd old commercial building in a small historic Texas...
History of Ibbotson Associates
Ibbotson Associates, an investment research and data firm that is now part of the financial data giant Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ: MORN; mid-2019 market cap $6 billion), was founded in 1977 by Roger Ibbotson, then a young University of Chicago professor. I was its...
The Indiana Glass Company in the 1960s and 1970s: The W.C. Hoover story
I really appreciate the history of the Indiana Glass Company provided by The Museum of Glass in West Virginia (and Tom Felt, Monograph #69) and Craig Schenning in his great book about Indiana Glass from Schiffer Publishing. As well as the folks at...
Covering Retailing on Wall Street at Citibank 1973-1975
I fell in love with retailing by the time I was 13. After studying economics in college at the University of Chicago, I wanted to become a securities analyst covering the retail industry on Wall Street (which of course means the industry, not necessarily on that...
Payless Shoe Source: History with the May Department Stores Company
With the final collapse of Payless Shoes in February 2019, I figured I better record a bit of their history as I know it. In my 5 years at May Department Stores’ corporate headquarters in St. Louis from 1977 to 1981, I evolved to become the "strategic planning" guy,...
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