1: “So tell me this,” the young executive asked, “Is Panera almost as good as Donatos?”
“Is he joking?” Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich thought to himself.
It was the early 2000s. Ron was sitting in an executive boardroom at McDonald’s headquarters outside Chicago. Ten years earlier, he had purchased the St. Louis Bread Company and renamed it Panera.
On the other side of the table were members of McDonald’s … continue reading
1: “Should Yahoo bring back Koogle?”
Felicia Horowitz smiled at her husband, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz.
“Huh?”
It was 2012, and Yahoo had just fired its CEO, Scott Thompson.
“Tim Koogle? How do you even know who Tim Koogle is?” he writes in his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Felicia then recalled a conversation they had shared eleven years earlier, back in 2001.… continue reading
1: “Fortune favors the curious,” Sahil Bloom writes in his book The 5 Types of Wealth.
As it turns out, curiosity is an actual “Fountain of Youth.”
Yesterday, we looked at how curiosity makes us healthier as we age—both mentally and physically.
The bad news? “Unfortunately, that raw childhood curiosity we’re born with slowly atrophies throughout our adult lives,” Sahil writes.
We begin our lives brimming with curiosity. … continue reading
1: “Don’t make a decision until you need to,” Panera Bread founder Ron Shaich writes in his book Know What Matters.
“That might sound obvious,” Ron notes, “but so many companies leap to promising dramatic growth and then trap themselves under the weight of the expectations they’ve created.”
Thinking back on the early days of Panera, Ron recalls: “We knew we were ready to grow, and we had an … continue reading
