Sublime

Murphy had an unusual negotiating style. He believed in “leaving something on the table” for the seller and said that in the best transactions, everyone came away happy. He would often ask the seller what they thought their property was worth, and if he thought their offer was fair he’d take it (as he did when Annenberg told him the Triangle

confidence.

Murphy’s approach to the roll-up was different. He moved slowly, developed real operational expertise, and focused on a small number of large acquisitions that he knew to be high-probability bets. Under Murphy, Capital Cities combined excellence in both operations and capital allocation to an unusual degree. As Murphy told me, “The business of

America had once been an archipelago of small towns in which hierarchy commanded deference and local opinion bounded behavior. But the country’s extraordinary social and geographic mobility was creating a horizontal society. When every man or woman is free to constantly recreate himself or herself, one never knows who one should be or, just as

But sometimes you can also make an instant judgment about a stranger. Probably not for the loan of your life savings or the pin-number to your bank account, but certainly for a drink at the bar or a bit of help at the roadside. So how do we make that judgment?

“self-interested behavior is learned behavior, and people learn it by studying economics and business.”

You know the exact boundaries of the relationship and what would hurt them. You also know exactly what would cause them to sever the relationship.