How to spot CEO arrogance/overconfidence

Excellent crisis communication at Twilio: Recent letter from Twilio founder Jeff Lawson is a good example of crisis communication and behavior I would expect to see from a true leader.

Darcy Davenport, CEO of BellRing Brands (NYSE:BRBR): One of my ongoing research projects has been to identify outstanding business leaders BEFORE they are recognized as “outstanding” by mainstream investment community. While studying leaders who have delivered excellent business performance over extended periods of time is helps to improve pattern recognition, looking for high potential leaders is generally a more productive use of time and something I would like to increasingly focus going forw

$ALGT 2021 shareholder letter : This is probably the shortest post I will ever write here but I would like you to read this phenomenal shareholder letter from Maurice Gallagher, CEO of Allegiant Travel. It was published in May. https://ir.allegiantair.com/static-files/df11a0fd-eb4a-42a6-9bff-4f0fa573abf9

Shareholder letters from CEOs of founder-led companies : 2021 shareholder letters from 70 US founder-led companies across various industries and market caps. There are much more founder-led companies in the US, but not all of them publish shareholder letters. These did publish in 2021 so I’m sharing with you. The simple idea behind this filter is 1) founders typically have longer term horizon and higher ownership in the company thus they are more aligned with us, minority shareholders; 2) these

War: This post is not about outstanding business leaders. It’s about something completely different – the war, that started in Ukraine on 24th February 2022 at 4:00 AM after the Russian army invaded my country. I’ve stayed anonymous since starting this blog, but I don’t see a reason for that anymore. My name is Maksym (Max) Sirous and until recently I was based in Kyiv, Ukraine, working at a local family office as an analyst. Since the war started, I moved my family (my wife and my 4 y/o son) to

Satya Nadella - CEO of Microsoft : Nadella is arguably one of the best business leaders in technology industry. The main reason is a widely successful turnaround of Microsoft that he pulled off since becoming its CEO. While strategically the turnaround was driven by a successful bet on cloud business, which essentially put Microsoft back into the league of leading growth tech companies, a more subtle driver of the turnaround was cultural transformation.

Do not underestimate Twitter’s new CEO Parag Agrawal: I’ve been following Twitter for some time and while I’m a power user of the service, I’ve been less optimistic on the stock and the business. My biggest concern has always been Dorsey as a part-time CEO. I don’t believe truly outstanding results can be achieved by a part-time CEO with interests clearly beyond Twitter (e.g. Square and crypto) especially when your competition are outstanding founders like Zuckerberg, Spiegel etc. Yet, we have a

Lisa Su - CEO of AMD (Part 1): Lisa Su is one of my favourite professional top managers. Since she was appointed a CEO of AMD in late 2014, she rapidly turned around a struggling company and created almost $90B of value for shareholders. This happend not without luck: Intel, AMD’s archrival, has been mismanaged during the period; cryptocurrency market took off and demand for AMD products accelerated; risky product bets made by Lisa early on paid off handsomely. Still, given the extremely poor sh

Shareholder letters: Nvidia, Twilio, MarketAxess, Texas Roadhouse: Nvidia (NVDA) It will be hard to find more exciting letter this year than Nvidia’s. It’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang has put his company on top of AI revolution. The magnitude of innovations led by Nvidia is astounding. I would like to share a passage where Huang discusses four waves of AI:

Shareholder letters: Amazon, Tradeweb, Pulte Group: Amazon.com (AMZN) In his last shareholder letter as a CEO Jeff Bezos included a passage from Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker: “Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living bo

Shareholder letters: Pfizer: This week I’ll discuss only one letter – from Pfizer’s CEO Dr. Albert Bourla. The reason I decided to focus on Pfizer’s letter is because it’s head and shoulders above other letters I’ve read over the past week - a true Outlier. Here is Dr. Bourla: While I don’t have a strong view about whether Burla is an outstanding CEO (I have not done enough work yet), there are several signs pointing this might be the case:

Shareholder letters: Cognex, RH, Intuitive Surgical, Edwards Lifesciences: Cognex (CGNX) Cognex publishes entertaining and informative letters styled as a magazine. Here is the title page of the latest letter for example: Some excerpts from the letter to lick your interest in this machine vision business: https://s2.q4cdn.com/773500753/files/doc_financials/2020/interactive/2020CognexAnnReport/index.html

Shareholder letters: MSCI, Charter Communications, Church & Dwight, Stanley Black & Decker, BorgWarner: MSCI MSCI discusses corporate strategy which is based on three pillars. Future-Focused Business Strategy Our business strategy continues to be centered on delivering research- and technology-driven solutions for investors around the world and creating shareholder value.

Shareholder letters: Texas Instruments, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Adobe, Moody’s, Sherwin-Williams: TEXAS INSTRUMENTS While I’m not an expert on semiconductor companies, I’ve been fascinated by the concentration of extraordinary leaders in the industry: Jensen Huang at Nvidia, Lisa Su at AMD and recently Pat Gelsinger at Intel are on top of my mind. I also noticed Rich Templeton from Texas Instruments while reading 2019 shareholder letters for S&P 500 companies. His letters are generally short (1

Shareholder letters: Fastenal, Progressive: Fastenal (FAST) I should say I’m impressed with this letter and the work CEO Dan Florness is doing to communicate his company’s strengths. Florness literally mentions culture in the first paragraph; given my predisposition to companies with strong cultures, this part immediately caught my attention:

Shareholder letters: Lennar, Mettler Toledo: Lennar Corp (LEN) Lennar is the largest home building company in the US. The latest letter from Lennar is quite interesting given what’s going on in housing market at the moment: Operating results in 2020 look quite good: And here is long thesis from management:

Shareholder letters: McCormick: This week we have only one letter - a spice company McCormick with $22B market cap. I noticed this company while reading their 2019 shareholder letter and my first impression was quite positive as management went into a great detail describing the business and all the investments they were making.

Shareholder letters: CMCSA: This week we have only one shareholder letter: Comcast. Below is the most interesting part of the letter, discussing the future of the company: We have begun 2021 with renewed enthusiasm as America and the world strive to get the pandemic under control, and we are off to a good start. Our businesses will continue to deliver, building on the momentum generated in 2020 through

Shareholder letters: ADI, AMAT, QCOM, KEYS, SBUX: I’m starting a new series of posts focusing on shareholder letters of S&P 500 companies. My goal is to read all S&P 500 shareholder letters published over the next year and to share the most interesting excerpts with you. Specifically my focus will be on the following themes:

Mike Mussallem, CEO of Edwards Lifesciences (NYSE: EW): A share of Edwards Lifesciences, a medical technology company, delivered 7,670% return since the start of trading on the top of dotcom bubble in March 2000. S&P 500 returned 153% for the same period. Over the past 20 years CEO Mike Mussallem turned an obscure company, which was the worst performing business unit of Baxter at the time, into a global medtech leader focused on cardiovascular products and services. The magnitude of value create