The fourth [general theme in winning corporations] is a view of profit and wealth-creation as inevitable by-products of doing other things well.

my favorite book on management, The Winning Performance by Clifford and Cavanaugh:

Eight years later, we built Trader Joe’s on the principle of discontinuity.

But I was reading The Guns of August, by Barbara W. Tuchman, with its implicit concept of multiple solutions to non-convex problems.

But I hope you’ll consider the following, my favorite quote from my favorite book on management, The Winning Performance by Clifford and Cavanaugh:

The calculus of what do I risk if I sell included the fact that Trader Joe’s was my Zen window on the world. I experienced the world mostly through Trader Joe’s. That’s an advantage of being self-employed. That window can never be as open while you’re an employee, even a Frederick-Forsyth rich one, even one given great discretion by absentee

An entire chapter, “Crime Side Retailing,” could be written because that’s how I spent half of my time: dealing with crime with before-the-fact controls, and after-the-fact with detection and action.

Human Use of Human Beings,

And there’s the element of enthusiasm. As soon as we got into Whole Earth Harry, we started to attract health food nuts who probably believed more in what we were doing than we did. To a considerable extent, they kept us on the straight and narrow: management was policed by its own employees! I noticed the same phenomenon when I began consulting