Building a Great Company

Good is the enemy of great. If a company faces dire circumstances, managers must change because the alternative is death. But if circumstances are good (or even okay) managers can coast along indefinitely. A good company can be lulled into a state of complacency instead of achieving greatness.

So how does a good company become great?

Muhammad Ali and the Hightower Brothers

These photos were taken in 1972 or ‘73 with an old Polaroid camera. During a family road trip, my parents arranged a visit to Muhammad Ali’s training camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania. Dad was a big boxing fan. Mom… tolerated the three males in our household.

How fast was Ali in his prime? Very fast. The photo on the left shows Ali evading a punch from my brother, Edward, who was about seven at the time. I distracted the Champ with a handshake. Hightowers always work together.

Solar and Tesla

We have this handy fusion reactor in the sky called the sun. We don’t have to do anything. It just works.
  ~Elon Musk

Elon Musk shared some interesting thoughts during the April 30th announcement for Tesla Energy. Two charts stood out in particular.

Berkshire Hathaway's 50th

Hi, I’m Warren. He’s Charlie. He can hear, I can see. We work well together.
 
~Warren Buffett,
at the start of the 2015
Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting

Berkshire Hathaway held its 50th annual shareholder meeting on May 2, 2015. The company is a lesson in successful capitalism. Chairman Warren Buffett and vice chairman Charlie Munger have built the most successful investment partnership in human history. The list of wholly-owned Berkshire subsidiaries includes GEICO, Fruit of the Loom, Brooks Shoes, and See’s Candies. The company also owns large percentages of Coca Cola (9.16%), American Express (14.9%), IBM (7.82%), and Wells Fargo (9.01%).

Over 40,000 shareholders attended Saturday’s annual meeting. What draws so many shareholders to Omaha every year? The opportunity to learn.

pgcli - Command Line Interface for PostgreSQL

Debugging is a fact of life when building apps with Rails or any other set of tools. All troubleshooting is easier when we can see what’s going on inside.

pgcli is a command line tool that lets devs examine PostgreSQL databases from the command line. pgcli offers more powerful features than psql (the default terminal front-end for PostgreSQL) such as:

• Autocompletion. In fact, pgcli autocompletion is smart enough to only show table names after FROM in a SQL statement.
• Syntax highlighting. Find gotchas quicker, just like you would in a text editor.

Debugging is easier when you can look inside the black box.