Companies that can both execute and adapt are very rare indeed

From The Adaptable Corporation by Eric D. Beinhocker.

We thus have, on the one side, high-performing executers that can't sustain their performance and, on the other, long-term adapters that don't perform well. Companies that can both execute and adapt are very rare indeed. Wiggins and Ruefli found that fewer than 0.5 percent of the companies in their sample stayed in the top stratum for more than 20 years. Only three companies - American Home Products, Eli Lilly, and 3M, or 0.04 percent of the whole - made it to the 50-year mark. (This sample didn't include multibusiness companies, such as GE.)

The market performs better than companies do

From an interview in McKinsey Quarterly:

Richard Foster: In the book, Sarah Kaplan and I show that over the long term, the market performs better than companies do. There can be periods - 5, 7, 10, even 15 years - when that isn't the case, but corporate performance always reverts to a lower level than the market because the economy is changing at a faster pace and on a larger scale than any individual company so far has been able to do without losing control. That's the challenge: to create, operate, and trade - to divest old businesses and acquire or build new businesses - at the pace and scale of the market without losing control.

A single mouse

From John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, page 160. In describing some of the testing on mice Barry mentions:

Male mice were and are generally not used in experiments because they sometimes attack each other; the death or injury of a single mouse for any reason can distort experimental results and ruin weeks of work.

Which makes sense. But I am surprised to come across this only now and in this place after so many hundreds if not thousands of science papers I have read over the years. It makes me wonder what, if any, bias or distortion using only female mice might have introduced into over a century of medical research from this pragmatic response to a quotidian issue. Presumably none, but you have to wonder.

He would sally forth to seek them

Thomas H. Huxley in An Essay, Joseph Priestley. Heh.

If the man to perpetuate whose memory we have this day raised a statue had been asked on what part of his busy life's work he set the highest value, he would undoubtedly have pointed to his voluminous contributions to theology. In season and out of season, he was the steadfast champion of that hypothesis respecting the Divine nature which is termed Unitarianism by its friends and Socinianism by its foes. Regardless of odds, he was ready to do battle with all comers in that cause; and if no adversaries entered the lists, he would sally forth to seek them.

To live is to think

Cicero, Tusculanes Disputationes -

To live is to think.

To move in harmony

Thomas H. Huxley in A Liberal Education and Where to Find It.

Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws.

He became extraordinarily careful

From John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, page 158. Oswald Avery, early in his research career at the Rockefeller, became excited about the results from a couple of initial experiments and rushed to publish two papers. The ideas he advanced and the tentative evidence he offered both proved to be wrong to his great mortification.

Avery again reached well beyond his experimental evidence for a conclusion.

Both were quickly proved wrong. Humiliated he was determined never to suffer such embarrassment again. He became extraordinarily careful, extraordinarily cautious and conservative, in anything he published or even said outside of his own laboratory. He did not stop speculating - privately - about the boldest and most far-reaching interpretations of an experiment, but from then on he published only the most rigorously tested and conservative conclusions. From then on, Avery would only - in public - inch his way forward. An inch at a time, he would ultimately cover an enormous and startling distance.

Swirling personal experience

From John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, page 158, quoting Albert Einstein.

One of the strongest motives that lead persons to art or science is a flight from the everyday life. . . . With this negative motive goes a positive one. Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. This is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation, he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.

All else was extraneous

From John M. Barry, The Great Influenza, page 157. Describing one of the key scientific investigators of influenza, Oswald Avery, who manifests the discipline and focus that is so often associated with great achievements.

Avery had almost no personal life. He fled from one. He almost never entertained and rarely went out to dinner. Although he was close to and felt responsible for his younger brother and an orphaned cousin, his life, his world, was his research. All else was extraneous. Once the editor of a scientific journal asked him to write a memorial piece about Nobel laureate Karl Landsteiner, with whom he had worked closely at Rockefeller. In it Avery said nothing whatsoever about Landsteiner's personal life. The editor asked him to insert some personal details. Avery refused, stating that personal information would help the reader understand nothing that mattered, neither Landsteiner's achievements nor his thought processes.

(Landsteiner likely would have approved Avery's treatment. When he was notified he'd won the Nobel Prize, he continued working in his laboratory all day, got home so late that his wife was asleep, and did not wake her to give her the news.)

Polonius' advice

From William Shakespeare, Hamlet. I am always scanning material for the embedded adages and proverbs that serve as cultural code for living an effective life. I came across this miscellany from Lord Polonius in Hamlet.

Yet here, Laertes! aboard, aboard, for shame!
The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail,
And you are stay'd for. There; my blessing with thee!
And these few precepts in thy memory
See thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man,
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all: to thine ownself be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!