1. Lyrics from a song that features in C.I.D., directed by Raj Khosla (1956). Loose translation: ‘My heart, it is tough to live here, so be careful and watch your back; this is Bombay, my love.’
2. Soutik Biswas, ‘What divorce and separation tell us about modern India’, BBC, 29 September 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-37481054
3. Times News Network, ‘40% marriages in Mumbai, Delhi end in divorce’, Times of India, 26 March 2018, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/nagpur/40-marriages-in-mum-delhi-end-in-divorce/articleshow/63453211.cms
4. ‘The world’s biggest disease is what will people say if you go against societal norms.’
5. Times News Network, ‘India is the 6th most depressed country: WHO report’, Times of India, 12 October 2018, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/health-fitness/de-stress/india-is-the-6th-most-depressed-country-who-report/articleshow/66179026.cms
6. From a discussion the authors had with T.V. Mohandas Pai in Bengaluru on 11 May 2019.
7. Ibid.
1. Parts of this chapter first appeared in The Ken as part of a series of articles written by the authors (see Appendix 2 for a list of these). The text contained in these parts has been edited before being included in this chapter.
2. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London: Alma Classics, 2019).
3. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (Cambridge: Hackett, 1982).
4. Nick Chater, The Mind is Flat: The Illusion of Mental Depth and the Improvised Mind (London: Penguin Books, 2019).
5. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, ‘Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases’, Science 185, no. 4157 (1974), http://www.its.caltech.edu/~camerer/Ec101/JudgementUncertainty.pdf
6. Comment by Daniel Kahneman: https://replicationindex.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction-of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment-page-1/#comment-1454
7. Source: Redrawn from available material for the Johari window on the Communication Theory website, https://www.communicationtheory.org/the-johari-window-model/
8. Michael Shermer, ‘Rumsfeld’s Wisdom’, Scientific American, 1 September 2005, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rumsfelds-wisdom/
9. Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone (London: Macmillan, 2017); Chater, The Mind is Flat.
10. See Tod Perry, ‘Astrophysicist Shoots Down Climate Change Denier’, Good, 30 October 2017, https://www.good.is/articles/deny-global-warming-you-get-burned/
11. David Eagleman, The Brain: The Story of You (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2015).
12. Fiona MacRae, ‘It’s not just men who can’t multi-task: New research says women are just as bad at juggling tasks’, Daily Mail, 7 March 2013, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2289664/Smug-women-beware--new-research-suggests-just-bad-multi-tasking-men-are.html
13. Sneha Alexander, ‘Black Money, Terror & Fake Notes: Did Note Ban Achieve Its Goals?’, Quint, 9 November 2017, https://www.thequint.com/news/india/did-demonetisation-achieve-its-goals
14. George Soros with Byron Wien and Krisztina Koenen, Soros on Soros: Staying Ahead of the Curve (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).
15. J. Oliver Conroy, ‘An apocalyptic cult, 900 dead: remembering the Jonestown massacre, 40 years on’, Guardian, 17 November 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/17/an-apocalyptic-cult-900-dead-remembering-the-jonestown-massacre-40-years-on
16. ‘When Tamagotchis briefly conquered the world’, BBC, 23 November 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-38066730/when-tamagotchis-briefly-conquered-the-world
17. W.E. Hill, ‘My wife and my mother-in-law. They are both in this picture – find them’, 1915, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010652001/
18. Tom Michael, ‘What is The Knowledge taxi test and why is the exam taken by London’s black cab drivers so tough?’, The Sun, 17 October 2017, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3307245/the-knowledge-taxi-test-london-black-cab-drivers-exam/
1. Parts of this chapter first appeared in The Ken as part of a series of articles written by the authors (see Appendix 2 for a list of these). The text contained in these parts has been edited before being included in this chapter.
2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe: The Collected Works—Volume 9: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, ed. and trans. Eric A. Blackall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
3. As quoted in Bruce Thomas, Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 2008).
4. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993).
5. Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown & Co, 2008).
6. Matthew Syed, Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice (London: Fourth Estate—HarperCollins, 2011).
7. Saurabh Mukherjea, Gurus of Chaos: Modern India’s Money Masters (New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2015).
8. Anders Ericsson, Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (London: The Bodley Head, 2016).
9. David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World (London: Macmillan, 2019).
10. Matthew Polly, Bruce Lee: A Life (London: Simon & Schuster, 2018).
11. Igor Chirashnya, ‘Bruce Lee – The World’s Most Famous Fencer?’, Academy of Fencing Masters Blog, 3 December 2015, https://academyoffencingmasters.com/blog/bruce-lee-the-worlds-most-famous-fencer/
12. Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) was a well-known and highly regarded Indian philosopher whose teachings are available on the website www.jkrishnamurti.org
13. Bruce Lee, Chinese Gung Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self-Defense (Burbank: Ohara Publications, 2008).
14. Bruce Lee, Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Santa Clarita: Ohara Publications, 1973).
15. Included in Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey (2000), a documentary from Warner Home Video. YouTube link: https://youtu.be/5D48N21WOtc?t=1667
16. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/22/why/
17. Elle Luna, ‘The Crossroads of Should and Must’, Medium, 8 April 2014, https://medium.com/@elleluna/the-crossroads-of-should-and-must-90c75eb7c5b0/
18. Robert Greene, Mastery (London: Profile Books, 2012).
19. See Science ABC’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuD34tEpRFw/
20. Peter Bevelin, Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger (Malmö: PCA Publications, 2007); Trenholme J. Griffin, Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (New York: Columbia Business School Publishing, 2015); Charles T. Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, ed. Peter D. Kaufman (Virginia: Donning Company Publishers, 2008).
21. Brian Leiberman, ‘The Second Half of the Chessboard — Understanding Exponential Leaps Forward in Tech’, Medium, 23 January 2018, https://medium.com/@brian.leiberman1/the-second-half-of-the-chessboard-understanding-exponential-leaps-forward-1ee0832a10c3
22. Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack.
23. Herbert A. Simon, ‘What is an “Explanation” of Behavior?’, Psychological Science 3, No. 3 (1992): 150–61.
24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WkpQ4PpId4
25. Griffin, Charlie Munger.
26. Shane Parrish, ‘Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More’, Farnam Street, https://fs.blog/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisdom/
27. Griffin, Charlie Munger.
28. Shane Parrish, ‘Peter Bevelin on Seeking Wisdom, Mental Models, Learning, and a Lot More’, Farnam Street, https://fs.blog/2016/10/peter-bevelin-seeking-wisdom-mental-models/
29. Janet Lowe, Damn Right!: Behind The Scenes With Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger (New York: Wiley, 2000).
30. Griffin, Charlie Munger.
31. Ibid.
32. Griffin, Charlie Munger.
1. Parts of this chapter first appeared in The Ken as part of a series of articles written by the authors (see Appendix 2 for a list of these). The text contained in these parts has been edited before being included in this chapter.
2. Often attributed to Einstein but there’s no conclusive evidence that he actually said it. The statement, in its various versions, is widely quoted by many people; for example, by entrepreneur Naval Ravikant in a tweet dated 12 March2017: https://twitter.com/naval/status/840799984014376960?lang=en
3. Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
4. Cliff Edwards, ‘Commentary: Sorry, Steve: Here’s Why Apple Stores Won’t Work’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 21 May 2001, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2001-05-20/commentary-sorry-steve-heres-why-apple-stores-wont-work
5. George Stephanopoulos, ‘Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs: Not “Exceptionally” Smart, But a “Genius”’, ABC News, 24 October 2011, https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/10/walter-isaacson-on-steve-jobs-not-exceptionally-smart-but-a-genius
6. Mark Gurman and Shawn Donnan, ‘Apple’s tariff tradeoff: Raise iPhone prices or suffer a big hit to profits’, Financial Post, 15 May 2019, https://business.financialpost.com/technology/apples-tariff-tradeoff-raise-iphone-prices-or-suffer-a-big-hit-to-profits
7. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/05/13/einstein-simple/
8. https://www.lexico.com/definition/simplicity/
9. https://www.simplicityindex.com
10. https://www.amfiindia.com/mutual-fund (data available till January 2020, last accessed 6 March 2020)
11. This $35 billion, or Rs 2,40,000 crore, is split between Rs 1,40,000 crore in AIFs and Rs 100,00,000 crore in PMS (this refers only to discretionary PMS in order to give a like-for-like comparison). The AIF data, as of 31 December 2019, is from SEBI’s website, https://www.sebi.gov.in/statistics/1392982252002.html; the PMS data, as of April 2019, is from a SEBI Working Group paper on PMS providers (published in August 2019): https://www.sebi.gov.in/sebi_data/commondocs/aug-2019/Report%20of%20Working%20Group%20on%20PMS_p.pdf
12. Nicholas Foulkes, ‘Jony Ive on the Apple Watch and Big Tech’s responsibilities’, Financial Times, 19 October 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/20aad4d4-d2ba-11e8-a9f2-7574db66bcd5/
13. Paul Farhi, ‘Jeffrey Bezos, Washington Post’s next owner, aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the newspaper’, Washington Post, 3 September 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/jeffrey-bezos-washington-posts-next-owner-aims-for-a-new-golden-era-at-the-newspaper/2013/09/02/30c00b60-13f6-11e3-b182-1b3bb2eb474c_story.html?
14. Richard Koch and Greg Lockwood, Simplify: How the Best Businesses in the World Succeed (London: Piatkus, 2016).
15. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013).
16. Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2018).
17. Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (New York: Random House, 2012).
18. Gretchen Rubin, Better Than Before: What I Learned About Making and Breaking Habits–to Sleep More, Quit Sugar, Procrastinate Less, and Generally Build a Happier Life (London: Two Roads, 2015).
19. Saurabh Mukherjea, The Unusual Billionaires (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2016).
20. Mason Currey, Daily Rituals.
21. Shane Parrish, ‘Charlie Munger: 20 Book Recommendations That will Make you Smarter’, Farnam Street, https://fs.blog/2014/06/charlie-munger-recommended-books/
22. Shane Parrish, ‘Hemingway’s Routine’, Farnham Street, https://fs.blog/2013/05/hemingways-routine/
23. Saul McLeod, ‘Solomon Asch - Conformity Experiment’, SimplyPyschology, 28 December 2018, https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
24. James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
25. Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016).
26. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, differentiate and identify our emotions and the emotions of others.
27. Daniel Goleman, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
28. Adam Grant, ‘The surprising habits of original thinkers’, https://www.ted.com/talks/adam_grant_the_surprising_habits_of_original_thinkers?language=en
29. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (London: Heinemann, 1967).
30. Saurabh Mukherjea, Rakshit Ranjan and Pranab Uniyal, Coffee Can Investing: The Low-Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2018).
31. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (USA, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
32. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtQutUM1NsM/
33. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt9OcLynjwE/
34. Eric Johnson, ‘Warren Buffett and the “avoid at all cost list”’, Excellent Journey, 13 April 2015, https://excellentjourney.net/2015/04/13/warren-buffett-and-the-avoid-at-all-cost-list/
35. Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! (London: Time Warner Paperbacks, 1998).
1. Parts of this chapter first appeared in The Ken as part of a series of articles written by the authors (see Appendix 2 for a list of these). The text contained in these parts has been edited before being included in this chapter.
2. Fight Club, directed by David Fincher (1999).
3. Yoda (Star Wars), Gandalf (The Lord of the Rings), Master Shifu (Kung Fu Panda) are taken from popular movies and books. Gibran an author, and Tolle a spiritual teacher.
4. Khushwant Singh, The End of India (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).
5. Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal: The New Unconscious and What it Teaches Us (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
6. Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).
7. Liz Mineo, ‘Good genes are nice, but joy is better’, Harvard Gazette, 11 April 2017, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/04/over-nearly-80-years-harvard-study-has-been-showing-how-to-live-a-healthy-and-happy-life/
8. Ray Dalio, Principles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).
9. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Auckland: Floating Press, 1800).
10. Phil Dobson, The Brain Book: How to Think and Work Smarter (London: LID, 2016).
11. Jason Apollo Voss, The Intuitive Investor: A Radical Guide for Manifesting Wealth (New York: Select Books, 2010).
12. John Selby, Seven Masters, One Path: Meditation Secrets from the World’s Greatest Teachers (London: Rider, 2003).
13. Dalio, Principles; Voss, The Intuitive Investor; Selby, Seven Masters, One Path.
14. Sue McGreevey, ‘Eight weeks to a better brain’, The Harvard Gazette, 21 January 2011, https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/
15. Wall Street (1987).
16. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperPerennial, 2008).
17. Results include the effects of dividends and stock splits on total return. The results were calculated based on data published by Yahoo! Finance and covering the period from 22 September 2000 to 18 August 2005—the length of Voss’s tenure as co-portfolio manager of DAIF. The DAIF ticker symbol is DCSYX.
18. Emerging Technology from the arXiv, ‘A quantum experiment suggests there’s no such thing as objective reality’, MIT Technology Review, 12 March 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613092/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/
1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818).
2. Lauren Feiner, ‘“Facebook is the new cigarettes,” says Salesforce CEO’, CNBC, 14 November 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/14/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-facebook-is-the-new-cigarettes.html
3. Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: On Living Better with Less Technology (London: Portfolio, Penguin, 2019).
4. Matthew D. Lieberman, Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013).
5. Brian A. Primack, et al., ‘Social Media Use and Perceived Social Isolation Among Young Adults in the U.S.’, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Vol. 53, Issue 1 (2017).
6. Lydia Denworth, ‘Worry Over Social Media Use and Well-Being May Be Misplaced’, Psychology Today, 30 May 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-waves/201905/worry-over-social-media-use-and-well-being-may-be-misplaced
7. Lydia Denworth, ‘Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation’, Scientific American, November 2019, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/social-media-has-not-destroyed-a-generation/
8. Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (London: Virgin Books, 2014).
9. Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions (London: William Collins, 2016).
10. Ray Zinn, Tough Things First: Leadership Lessons from Silicon Valley’s Longest Serving CEO (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2015).
11. Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (London: Profile Books, 2010).
12. See WHO Surgical Safety Checklist, https://www.who.int/patientsafety/topics/safe-surgery/checklist/en/
13. Source: Nikhil Sonad, ‘You probably won’t remember this, but the “forgetting curve” theory explains why learning is hard’, Quartz, 1 March 2018, https://qz.com/1213768/the-forgetting-curve-explains-why-humans-struggle-to-memorize/
14. Watch Cal Newport lay out the basics of digital detox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E7hkPZ-HTk/
15. Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (New York: Free Press, 1989).
16. Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).
17. Daniel Goleman, Focus: the hidden driver of excellence (New York: Harper, 2014).
18. Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu & Simone Ahuja, Jugaad Innovation: A Frugal and Flexible Approach to Innovation for the 21st Century (Noida : Random House, 2012).
19. Source: Harsh Mariwala. The wording, underlining and emphasis have been replicated from Harsh’s diary.
20. Loose translation: ‘Have you had your head massaged yet?’
1. Parts of this chapter first appeared in The Ken as part of a series of articles written by the authors (see Appendix 2 for a list of these). The text contained in these parts has been edited before being included in this chapter.
2. Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (London, Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co., 1903).
3. For a fuller discourse on this subject, please refer to Mukherjea, Ranjan and Uniyal, Coffee Can Investing.
4. Doris B. Wallace and Howard E. Gruber, Creative People at Work (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
5. Paul Arthur Schilpp, Albert Einstein: Autobiographical Notes (New York: Evanston, 1949).
6. For an illustrated account of what Einstein is talking about, see John D. Norton, ‘Chasing a Beam of Light: Einstein’s Most Famous Thought Experiment’, University of Pittsburgh, December 2004, https://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/Chasing_the_light/
7. Wallace and Gruber, Creative People at Work.
8. Stang, Nicholas F., ‘Kant’s Transcendental Idealism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism
9. Adam Grant, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (London: Penguin Random House, 2016).
10. Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations, ed. Michael Hamburger (New York: Pantheon, 1952).
11. Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
12. Benedict Carey, ‘Remembering, as an Extreme Sport’, New York Times, 19 May 2014, https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/remembering-as-an-extreme-sport/
13. Anthony Metivier, ‘How to Remember Things: 21 Techniques for Memory Improvement’, Magnetic Memory Method, 22 February 2019, https://www.magneticmemorymethod.com/how-to-remember-things/
14. Rachel Becker, An ancient memorization strategy might cause lasting changes to the brain, https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/16/14950798/memory-palace-method-of-loci-brain-fmri-activity-neuroscience
15. Robert I. Sutton, Weird Ideas that Work: How to Build a Creative Company (New York: Free Press, 2002).
16. Wallace and Gruber, Creative People at Work.
17. Ibid.
18. W.A. Pannapacker, ‘How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci’, Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 February 2009, https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Procrastinate-Like/26491
19. The last two lines of this verse, as quoted in Creative People at Work, are slightly different from those that appear in the original poem by Wordsworth: ‘Beside the lake, beneath the trees,/
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze . . .’
20. Ed Catmull, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (New York: Transworld Publishers, 2014).
21. Steve Coll, On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey into South Asia, (New York: Penguin, 2009).
22. David A. Vise and Steve Coll, Eagle on the Street: Based on the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Account of the Sec’s Battle With Wall Street (New York: Collier Books, 1992).
23. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (London: Penguin, 2005).
24. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: The Story of a Family and its Fortune (London: Penguin, 2009).
25. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (India: Picador, 2007).
26. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi Before India (London: Allen Lane, 2013).
27. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World: 1914-1948 (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
28. Ramachandra Guha, A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport (London: Picador, 2002).
29. Sunil Khilnani, Incarnations: India in 50 Lives (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
30. Manu S. Pillai, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore (Noida: HarperCollins Publishers, 2015).
31. Manu S. Pillai, Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (New Delhi: Juggernaut, 2018).
32. Manu S. Pillai, The Courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History (Context, 2019)
33. Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-48 (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
34. Aristotle, Rhetorica (New York: Penguin, 1991).
35. Nidhi Verma, interview of Manu S. Pillai, Platform, https://www.platform-mag.com/literature/manu-s-pillai.html
36. ‘Info Edge IPO lists at hefty 94.93% premium’, Financial Express, 21 November 2006, https://www.financialexpress.com/archive/info-edge-ipo-lists-at-hefty-9493-premium/184612/
37. https://www.bseindia.com/stock-share-price/info-edge-(india)-ltd/naukri/532777/
1. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).
2. Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (London: Vintage Books, 2014).
3. Rich Karlgaard, The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2014).
4. Tamal Bandyopadhyay, HDFC Bank 2.0: From Dawn to Digital (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2019).
5. Bandyopadhyay, A Bank for the Buck (Mumbai: Jaico Publishing House, 2013).
6. A creamery is an establishment where butter, cheese, cream and milk are prepared and sold.
7. Source: Annual reports for Nestlé and HUL, and GCMMF’s website for the GCMMF-related data.
8. Verghese Kurien, as told to Gouri Salvi, I Too Had a Dream (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 2005).
9. Harish Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
10. Kurien, I Too Had a Dream.
11. Vivian Hunt, Lareina Yee, Sara Prince and Sundiatu Dixon-Fyle, Delivering through diversity (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2018), https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/delivering-through-diversity
12. Walter Isaacson,‘How Steve Jobs’ Love of Simplicity Fueled A Design Revolution’, Smithsonian Magazine, September 2012, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-steve-jobs-love-of-simplicity-fueled-a-design-revolution-23868877/
13. Helen Lee Bouygues, ‘3 Simple Habits to Improve Your Critical Thinking’, Harvard Business Review, 6 May 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/05/3-simple-habits-to-improve-your-critical-thinking
14. Jonah Lehrer, ‘Steve Jobs: “Technology Alone Is Not Enough”’, The New Yorker, 7 October 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/steve-jobs-technology-alone-is-not-enough
15. Steven Levy, ‘One More Thing Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership’, Wired, 16 May 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/apple-park-new-silicon-valley-campus/
16. Shashank Shah, Win-Win Corporations: The Indian Way of Shaping Successful Strategies (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2016).
17. Charles Duhigg, ‘What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team’, The New York Times Magazine, 25 February 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html.
18. Judith A. Ross, ‘Make Your Good Team Great’, Harvard Business Review, 28 February 2008, https://hbr.org/2008/02/make-your-good-team-great-1.
19. Thomas A. Timberg, The Marwaris: From Jagat Seth to the Birlas (New Delhi: Allen Lane, 2014).
20. Gita Piramal, Business Maharajas (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2000).
21. Kumar Mangalam Birla, ‘Butter chicken at Birla’, McKinsey.com, December 2013, https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/asia-pacific/butter-chicken-at-birla
22. Serenitie Wang and Daniel Shane, ‘Jack Ma endorses China’s controversial 12 hours a day, 6 days a week work culture’, CNN, 16 April 2019, https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/15/business/jack-ma-996-china/index.html
23. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (New York: Harper Business, 2018).
24. Katherine Bindley, ‘The Phone Call Isn’t Dead, It’s Evolving’, Wall Street Journal, 19 October 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-phone-call-isnt-dead-its-evolving-11571457605
25. Cal Newport, ‘Was E-mail a Mistake?’, The New Yorker, 6 August 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake
26. Ramachandra Guha, ‘A Brief History of Bipartisanship’, Hindustan Times, 23 March 2010, http://ramachandraguha.in/archives/a-brief-history-of-bipartisanship.html
27. All market capitalization data is as per the Bombay Stock Exchange and INR/USD rates existing on those dates.
28. Robert Hunt, Case Study: State Bank of India, World’s Largest Centralized Core Processing Implementation (Needham, USA: TowerGroup, 2009), https://www.tcs.com/content/dam/tcs-bancs/pdf/bancsprotected/TCSBaNCS_SBI_TowerGroup.pdf
29. ‘TCS edges past US-based DXC to become world’s 3rd largest IT firm by revenue’, Business Today, 24 May 2019, https://www.businesstoday.in/sectors/it/tcs-third-largest-it-firm-by-revenue-in-the-world/story/349954.html
30. Jason Del Rey, ‘The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program’, Vox, 3 May 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/3/18511544/amazon-prime-oral-history-jeff-bezos-one-day-shipping
31. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013).
32. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, ‘Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace’, The New York Times, 15 August 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html
33. Guha, ‘A Brief History of Bipartisanship’.
34. John Kay, Obliquity: Why Our Goals Are Best Achieved Indirectly (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
35. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (London: Bloomsbury 1998).
36. Peter F. Drucker, ‘They’re Not Employees, They’re People’, Harvard Business Review, February 2002, https://hbr.org/2002/02/theyre-not-employees-theyre-people
1. Shane Parrish, ‘Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More’, Farnam Street, https://fs.blog/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisdom/
2. Isaacson, Steve Jobs.
3. Julian Birkinshaw Dickie Liang-Hong Ke and Enrique de Diego, ‘The Kind of Creative Thinking That Fueled WeChat’s Success’, Harvard Business Review, 29 October 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/10/the-kind-of-creative-thinking-that-fueled-wechats-success
4. Hamish McDonald, Ambani & Sons (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010).
5. T.T. Jagannathan and Sandhya Mendonca, Disrupt and Conquer (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2013).
6. ‘Main Financial Data (Consolidated)’, YKK.com, https://www.ykk.com/english/corporate/financial/highlights/c_graph.html
7. Benjamin Fulford, ‘Zipping Up the World’, Forbes, 24 November 2003, https://www.forbes.com/global/2003/1124/089.html
8. Ravi refers to Ravi Narain, a former managing director of the National Stock Exchange (NSE).
9. Pavitra Kumar, Bhujia Barons: The Untold Story of How Haldiram Built a ₹5000-Crore Empire (Gurugram: Penguin Random House, 2016).
10. Noel Tichy and Ram Charan, ‘Speed, Simplicity, Self-Confidence: An Interview with Jack Welch’, Harvard Business Review, September–October 1989, https://hbr.org/1989/09/speed-simplicity-self-confidence-an-interview-with-jack-welch
11. https://www.siegelgale.com/about/
12. Siegal+Gale, ‘The World’s Simplest Brands, 2018–2019’, available on https://simplicityindex.com
13. Molly Muldoon, ‘Netflix revealed as World’s Simplest Brand, according to annual study from Siegel+Gale’, Siegel+Gale, November 2018, https://www.siegelgale.com/netflix-revealed-worlds-simplest-brand-according-annual-study-siegelgale/
14. Apurva Purohit, Lady, You’re Not a Man!: The Adventures of a Woman at Work (Mumbai: Rupa Publications India, 2014).
15. Apurva Purohit, Lady, You’re the Boss!: The Adventures of a Woman at Work – Part 2 (Mumbai: Westland, 2019).
16. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, ‘The Balanced Scorecard—Measures that Drive Performance’, Harvard Business Review, January–February 1992, https://hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that-drive-performance-2
17. Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 1930).
18. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011).
19. Lyrics from a song that features in Gol Maal, directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee (1979).
1. Griffin, Charlie Munger.
2. Ben Carlson, A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan (Hoboken, USA: John Wiley & Sons, 2015).
3. A significant part of this chapter draws upon the material presented in Saurabh’s two previous books—The Unusual Billionaires and Coffee Can Investing: The Low-Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth.
4. D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence (London: W. Heinemann, 1936).
5. Brian Portnoy, The Geometry of Wealth: How to Shape a Life of Money and Meaning (Petersfield, UK: Harriman House, 2018).
6. Ibid.
7. Ashvin B. Chhabra, The Aspirational Investor: Investing in the Pursuit of Wealth and Happiness (Noida: HarperCollins, 2015)
8. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers. Our construct here has been influenced by Chhabra’s book, The Aspirational Investor.
9. Source: Mukti Seth. All calculations are based on assumptions and estimates. These recommendations have been made for representational purposes for this book and should not be considered as financial advice.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers. Our construct here has been influenced by Chhabra’s book, The Aspirational Investor.
13. Source: Mukti Seth. All calculations are based on assumptions and estimates. These recommendations have been made for representational purposes for this book and should not be considered as financial advice.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. From the foreword to John C. Bogle’s The Clash of the Cultures: Investment vs. Speculation (Hoboken, USA: John Wiley & Sons, 2012).
17. Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report 24, www.berkshirehathaway.com, p. 24.
18. Source: Gary M. Brinson Distinguished Lecture delivered by Bogle at Washington State University on 13 April 2014.
19. Knut A. Rostad (ed. ), The Man in the Arena: Vanguard Founder John C. Bogle and His Lifelong Battle to Serve Investors First (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2013). Rob Arnott’s studies are cited on p. 23; John Bogle’s studies are cited on p. 165; and Morningstar’s research on this subject is cited on p. 154.
20. Akash Jain and Arpit Gupta, SPIVA® India Scorecard (New York: S&P Global, 2018), https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-india-year-end-2018.pdf
21. Natalie Zmuda, ‘Vanguard Proves It Pays to Advertise’, AdAge, 26 November 2012, https://adage.com/article/special-report-marketer-alist-2012/vanguard-proves-pays-advertise/238421
22. Disha Sanghvi, Lisa Pallavi Barbora, ‘Passive investing rises as large-cap funds underperform’, Livemint, 27 November 2018, https://www.livemint.com/Money/5uy7XNtE6cEXxoa5UfCiPL/Passive-investing-rises-as-largecap-funds-underperform.html
23. Bogle, The Clash of the Cultures.
24. ‘Funds Mobilised and Total Assets - According To Investment Objectives’, Securities and Exchange Board of India, https://www.sebi.gov.in/statistics/mutual-fund/mf-investment-objectives.html
25. Saurabh Mukherjea, Rakshit Ranjan, Pranab Uniyal, Coffee Can Investing: The Low Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth, (Mumbai: Penguin Portfolio, 2018).
26. Akash Jain, Arpit Gupta, ‘SPIVA India Scorecard Mid-year 2019’, www.asiaindex.co.in › documents › spiva › spiva-india-mid-year-2019
27. Quoted in Charles D. Ellis, Capital: The Story of Long-Term Investment Excellence (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
28. Robert G. Kirby, ‘The Coffee Can Portfolio’, Journal of Portfolio Management 11, No. 1 (1984), pp. 76–80.
29. The equity risk premium denotes the additional return that the investor expects over and above the risk-free rate of return, for investing in equity.
30. It is important to note that we are not looking for companies which have grown sales over a ten-year period at a compounded annualized rate of at least 10 per cent. Instead we are looking for companies which have grown sales every single year for ten consecutive years by at least 10 per cent.
31. ROE is the amount of profits earned (after paying corporate taxes) as a percentage of shareholders’ equity.
32. ROA gives a sense of how efficient a management team is at using its assets to generate earnings. It is calculated by dividing a company’s annual profits (after paying corporate taxes) by its total assets.
33. The assets of a bank are its equity plus the amount of money the bank has borrowed. Therefore, by looking at ROE, rather than ROA, we are not only able to measure a bank’s ability to lend money profitably but also measure its ability to gauge exactly how much money the bank should borrow.
34. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity. All stock prices in this table are as of 30 June 2019. ‘Portfolio Start’ denotes an equal allocation of Rs 100 for the stocks qualifying to be in the portfolio for that year. The portfolio kicks off on 30 June of every year. The CAGR returns for all the portfolios since 2010 have been calculated until 30 June 2019. Both portfolio returns and Sensex returns in this table have been computed using TSR, i.e. total shareholder return, which includes dividends for both portfolio as well as for Sensex. The 2019 iteration started on 1 July 2019 and hence its returns could not be computed. The sales growth filter has been relaxed to 9.5 per cent in FY18 to include Astral Poly, because it was part of the 2017 iteration and missed the filter by a very narrow margin.
35. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity. All stock prices in this table are as of 30 June 2019. EPS CAGR and P/E CAGR have been calculated for the April–March period due to inconsistency of trailing twelve-month EPS data for various stocks, whereas TSR CAGR is for the July–June period. TSR, i.e. total shareholder return, is the stock price change plus cash returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and buy-backs.
36. Median denotes the midpoint of returns, such that there is an equal probability of falling above or below it.
37. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity. Note: Period under consideration is July 2000 to June 2019. The investment horizons are calculated on a weekly rolling basis. For instance, the standard deviation of one-year return is the standard deviation of returns generated by considering 6,855 one-year periods (for all the CCP iterations) including 01/07/2000 to 01/07/2001, 08/07/2000 to 08/07/2001 and so on.
38. Harari, Sapiens.
39. Saurabh Mukherjea, The Unusual Billionaires, (Mumbai: Penguin, 2016).
40. Michael J. Mauboussin, More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
41. This study is for the thirty-two-year period from March 1987 to November 2019. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity. Kirby’s Coffee Can Investing curve is based on the simple average of the ‘probability of gains’ of all the nineteen portfolio iterations highlighted in the tables presented earlier in this chapter.
42. The returns have been simulated over a ten-year period with the investments made on the first day of the first year. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers.
43. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity.
44. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity. *This data is as of 26 November 2019. ** The sales growth filter has been relaxed to 9.5 per cent in FY18 to include Astral Poly.
45. Source: Marcellus Investment Managers, Ace Equity. The returns from Kirby’s investment approach are taken as the average of all live portfolio iterations during the period.
46. Ibid. Total shareholder return is the stock price change plus cash returned to shareholders in the form of dividends and buy-backs.
47. Reshma Kapadia, ‘Exit Interview: Mark Mobius on 30 Years of Emerging Markets’, Barron’s, 9 February 2018, https://www.barrons.com/articles/exit-interview-mark-mobius-on-30-years-of-emerging-markets-1518183233
1. In the foreword to Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music (Noida: HarperCollins, 2011).
2. Nandini Ramnath, ‘“Mozart from Madras”: New documentary celebrates AR Rahman’, Scroll.in, 5 January 2015, https://scroll.in/article/698525/mozart-from-madras-new-documentary-celebrates-ar-rahman
3. ‘Chingari Koi Bhadke’, ‘Kuch Toh Log Kahenge’, ‘Raina Beeti Jaye’ and ‘Yeh Kya Hua . . .’
4. Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music (Noida: HarperCollins, 2011).
5. Richard Corliss, ‘All-TIME 100 Movies’, TIME, 19 January 2010, http://entertainment.time.com/2005/02/12/all-time-100-movies/slide/roja/
6. Krishna Trilok, Notes of a Dream: The Authorized Biography of A.R. Rahman (Gurugram: Penguin Viking, 2018).
7. Ibid.
8. Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Balaji Vittal, R.D. Burman: The Man, The Music (Noida: HarperCollins, 2011).