Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life

course, action, opinion.The distinction is crucial. Bennis lays out a number of critical distinctions between the two: • The manager administers; the leader innovates. • The manager is a copy; the leader is an original. • The manager focuses on systems and structure; the leader focuses on people. • The manager relies on control; the leader inspires

Schumpeter. In his Theory of Economic Development, written nearly a century ago, Schumpeter dismissed material and monetary gain as the prime mover of the entrepreneur, finding motivations like these to be far more powerful: (1) The joy of creating, of getting things done, of simply exercising one’s energy and ingenuity, and (2) The will to conquer

Look at the modish popularity of so-called Monte Carlo simulations. The problem with these simulations—essentially calculating the monthly returns on stocks, tossing them into a blender, and casting the seemingly infinite series of permutations and combinations in the form of probabilities—is that by relying simply on historic total returns for the

Rule 9: Lead and Manage for the Long Term

“you can’t take them with you”), what is it that does matter? What are the characteristics by which we should measure our lives? Surely the nineteenth-century German philosopher Goethe identified one of them: boldness. Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute; What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it; Boldness has genius, power and magic in

Albert Schweitzer got it exactly right. “Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.”

In my time as head of Vanguard, none of these standards and values was ever written down in a manual. Rather, I proposed a single overarching but simple rule: “Do what’s right. If you’re not sure, ask your boss.”

In the very long run, all of the returns earned by stocks are created not by speculation but by investment—the productive power of the capital invested in our business enterprises. History tells us, for example, that from 1900 through 2007 the calculated annual total return on stocks averaged 9.5 percent, composed entirely of investment return, rou

The merger agreement was signed on June 6, 1966.

Too Much Counting, Not Enough Trust