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Munger on mental models

You've got to have models in your head. And you've got to array your experience—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models. You may have noticed students who just try to remember and pound back what is remembered. Well, they fail in school and in life. You've got to hang experience on a latticework of models in your head. What are the models? Well, the first rule is that you've got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you're using, the nature of human psychology is such that you'll torture reality so that it fits your models, or at least you'll think it does. You become the equivalent of a chiropractor who, of course, is the great boob in medicine. It's like the old saying, "To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." And of course, that's the way the chiropractor goes about practicing medicine. But that's a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world. So you've got to have multiple models. And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department. That's why poetry professors, by and large, are so unwise in a worldly sense. They don't have enough models in their heads. So you've got to have models across a fair array of disciplines.

Charlie Munger: learn multiple models to avoid rigid analyses

Rule #1: Learn Multiple Models “The first rule is that you’ve got to have multiple models—because if you just have one or two that you’re using, the nature of human psychology is such that you’ll torture reality so that it fits your models.” “It’s like the old saying, ‘To the man with only a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.’ But that’s a perfectly disastrous way to think and a perfectly disastrous way to operate in the world.” Rule #2: Learn Multiple Models From Multiple Disciplines “And the models have to come from multiple disciplines—because all the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department.” Rule #3: Focus On Big Ideas From The Big Disciplines (20% Of Models Create 80% Of The Results) “You may say, ‘My God, this is already getting way too tough.’ But, fortunately, it isn’t that tough—because 80 or 90 important models will carry about 90% of the freight in making you a worldly-wise person. And, of those, only a mere handful really carry very heavy freight.” Rule #4: Use A Checklist To Ensure You’re Factoring in the Right Models “Use a checklist to be sure you get all of the main models.” “How can smart people be wrong? Well, the answer is that they don’t…take all the main models from psychology and use them as a checklist in reviewing outcomes in complex systems.” Rule #5: Create Multiple Checklists And Use The Right One For The Situation “You need a different checklist and different mental models for different companies. I can never make it easy by saying, ‘Here are three things.’ You have to drive it yourself to ingrain it in your head for the rest of your life.”
Cynk Technology Corp. plans to be a social network that is also based on showing the types of people you are connected with and are associated. However, it's also based on the idea that people should, and will pay to get in touch with people you know. Furthermore, money or donations act as a convenient reason to get in touch with people who can benefit your career or enhance one's life. We believe that people will pay for introductions that are meaningful since it can save or create significant value to someone's life such as to find the right executive, nanny, software developer - or even the right squash player. Instead of paying for a lunch that neither party wants to eat, parties can get down to business knowing that their time has been valued.
In 2013, BI made more than $19 million, most of it selling this traffic to advertisers. It said it was profitable in the fourth quarter (usually a good quarter) and that it won't be profitable in 2014.It has to produce lots of content — quantity tending to trump quality — to realize these traffic goals. But Business Insider is seeking to be not just a content mill (a site that uses bulk amounts of low-level content to attract mass traffic) but also a significant new brand, which adds costs. It has hired, if not quite a seasoned staff, young journalists with at least a bit of experience: about 70 of them now, costing upwards of $15 million a year. Overhead and other traffic-acquisition costs push expenditures well past $19 million. In other words, it costs more to get traffic than what you can sell it for.In this, Business Insider finds itself in the CPM vice. The cost per thousand page views (CPMs) — a measurement beginning to be as common in conversations about digital media as movie grosses were in the 1980s — slides ever downward. This is a result of expanded inventory, general unhappiness with the results of digital advertising, lower-valued mobile space and the increasing prevalence of what's called programmatic buying (wherein a targeted audience can be assembled more cheaply outside of brands). In addition, as a site grows and its inventory expands, its CPMs decline. MailOnline, one of the most trafficked news sites, averages 160 million unique visitors a month — more than six times what Business Insider receives — but produces only $60 million in revenue, just three times more than Business Insider.
Among Tinder’s most intoxicating assets is the illusion it creates of a never-ending supply of eligible dates. Sorting dates has become my go-to tool for cell-phone procrastination and entertaining myself while in line at Duane Reade. Before dating apps, I used those moments to browse Twitter, text my mom, and learn languages on DuoLingo. Now I just rate men.
Using data culled from their most recent 10-K reports, we looked at how efficiently some of the biggest media, entertainment and technologies companies are run as a measure of profitability per employee. To get the figure, we simply divided the fiscal year 2013 net income a company reported in its 10-K (companies end their financial years at different times, some in June, some in September, some in December) by the number of employees it reported. The results were surprising even to us.
One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works. Before the journalistic purists burst a fountain pen, consider that there are intermediate points between “holier than holy” and “hopelessly corrupt” when it comes to editorial content.
The opportunity for leadership in the journalism business, just happens to be same leadership opportunity as in all businesses. Leaders just need to start leading. One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. No other non-monopoly industry lets product creators off the hook on how the business works. Before the journalistic purists burst a fountain pen, consider that there are intermediate points between “holier than holy” and “hopelessly corrupt” when it comes to editorial content. Paying attention to the business doesn’t equal warped coverage. It does equal a growing business. There are many businesses that balance incentives and conflicts all day long. Those businesses are able to hold the line on quality, and make great products. The point is, there isn’t just one way, but ought to be many ways to skin the cat in news.
Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and still the Queen kept crying `Faster! Faster!' but Alice felt she could not go faster, thought she had not breath left to say so. The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. `I wonder if all the things move along with us?' thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried, `Faster! Don't try to talk!' Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so much out of breath: and still the Queen cried `Faster! Faster!' and dragged her along. `Are we nearly there?' Alice managed to pant out at last. `Nearly there!' the Queen repeated. `Why, we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster! And they ran on for a time in silence, with the wind whistling in Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, she fancied. `Now! Now!' cried the Queen. `Faster! Faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy. The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, `You may rest a little now.' Alice looked round her in great surprise. `Why, I do believe we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as it was!' `Of course it is,' said the Queen, `what would you have it?' `Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, `you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.' `A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. `Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'
What can Jeff Bezos do that the Grahams couldn’t? I personally believe there’s no magic bullet. If there were, someone would’ve found it, how to transform for the digital era. But we are in a great position. We have a credible brand, deeply engaged readers, [and we] cover Washington. And now we are owned by someone with deep pockets who cares what we do and is willing to invest for the long term.
But The Huffington Post has yet to turn a profit for AOL, falling far short of Armstrong's projection at the time of the acquisition that the unit would post $66 million in operating profit in 2013 on $165 million in revenue.
Brown went on to say that the digital revolution is ruining pretty much everything. “The digital explosion has been so explosive, there isn’t a single place where the digital thing is a profit thing,” noted Brown. “The disruption hasn’t brought a business model.” While we agree that explosions are often explosive, we don’t agree that there’s no positives to digital journalism.
Multi-layer hierarchy is the plague of legacy media. The org chart should be minimalist. A management team of five dedicated, experienced editors is sufficient to lead a 24/365 news structure. Add another layer for production tasks and that’s pretty much it. As for the headcount, it depends on the scope of the news coverage: My guess is a newsroom of 100-150, including a production staff (I’ll come back to that in a moment) can do a terrific  job.
The Globe and Mail made a couple of key hires from ailing Canadian firm BlackBerry, and the new recruits have "made a tremendous difference" as they have discovered new ways of using data and pulling it all into one database. The news outlet is targeting "a high-end market", Crawley said. "We are really only interested in readers who earn more than $100,000." There is a great deal of "wasted money", he explained, as 40 per cent of content produced by Globe and Mail is read by fewer than 1,000 people. "Predictive analytics helps," he said, but compelling content is the key to the success.
In addition, our advertising revenue per timeline view in the United States is substantially higher than our advertising revenue per timeline view in the rest of the world. For example, during the three months ended June 30, 2013, our advertising revenue per timeline view in the United States was $2.17 and our advertising revenue per timeline view in the rest of the world was $0.30. We expect this disparity to continue for the foreseeable future.
It is not hard to see the appeal of recurring revenue, but some of the benefits may be less obvious. “This is the best business model you can ever have because we can place inventory purchases against future sales,” Mr. Zhardanovsky said. “I will be shipping out 24,000 products next month whether I land a new customer or not. I already know how many bags of Blue Buffalo brand chicken-flavored dog food I have sold in the next 60 days.” That predictability allows PetFlow to maintain lower inventory levels and to negotiate better deals with suppliers, who appreciate that PetFlow does not discount its sales and that its customers are much less likely than others to switch to a different brand. “We have 60 percent of our customers telling us that they used to shop at Petco or PetSmart,” Mr. Zhardanovsky said. “Which means we’re taking a lot of people out of the traditional retail channel.”