Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun's Principles

雷军把它总结成七个字，号称七字决，即“专注、极致、口碑、快”，雷军坚信只要按照这个方法去做就会战无不胜，攻无不克。

第一是专注，很多站长有时候喜欢办一堆站，但是每个网站办得都不精，很多时候“少即是多”，其实现在像很多微博站每天没有很多更新，但是文章质量好很多，现在是信息过多，怎么样把东西做的很精致，很有价值，才是问题关键。

为了更形象解读“专注”这个词语，雷军举了一个苹果公司的例子。苹果公司成立这么多年只出过5款手机，但是为什么苹果公司的推出的手机每次都那么的抢手，其实就是因为专注的因素。据了解，深圳的三个厂一天就能出100款，但是每出一款你需要有莫名其妙的自信，如果你不自信就做100款，如果你自信就做精一款，但是这个事情是说起来容易做起来难。

雷军表示，当自己做手机的时候真的觉得大到至简的重要性，其实越简单的东西越容易传播，越难做。当大家把一个书从薄读厚，从厚读薄的过程当中就明白了简单的东西是最具力量的。在这方面乔布斯的iPhone给我们做了一个很好的示范，你不需要做几百款手机，你只需要做一款，只要坚信你的东西是最好的就具备了一个成功的前提。

第二条极致，极致就是做到你能做的最好水平，他同事也是做到别人达不到的高度。谈到极致雷军表示这同样是一个说起来容易做起来难的事。他同时举了个例子，比如PC电脑的充电器，由于每天都要用，但是整个市场上的设计都非常难看，为此他还曾当面联想的相关工作人员提过这个问题。在这一点苹果又再一次证明了自己的极致属性。

雷军同时表示，极致就是要做到别人看不到的东西，而且要做的非常好。对于外界说小米山寨iPhone的时候，自己真的不知道怎么表达，他认为伟大的作品是根本不可能抄袭的。如果小米还会被别人抄袭，那因为我们做的不够好，好的东西是不可能被抄袭的。他坦言，自己根本不怕别人山寨，虽然知道自己与极致还差距很大，但是并没有绝望，还是希望通过我们每天脚踏实地，一步一步努力，能离偶像再近一点，再近一点。

第三个要讲的是口碑。在雷军看来海底捞并不比五星级餐馆好。他认为，口碑的本质是超越用户的希望值。因为海底捞在一个很破的地方，当我们走进去的时候他超越了我们所有的期望值，我们觉得好。当我们去五星级餐馆的时候我们期望值很高，怎么可能超越呢。

他还表示自己在做小米创业的初期时候一直强调保密的重要性。当公司第一个产品出来的时候，只是在几个论坛里发了几个帖，靠“米粉”口口相传，甚至传到全世界去了，还被翻译到20几个国家版本，前年年底还有一个美国博客站提名小米公司的产品为年度产品，那个褒奖支持让雷军自己都感到汗颜。至于当很多人说我这么努力，为什么我的产品还是没有口碑啊？很简单，你的产品没有做到极致，你真的凭着老命做的吗？如果你真的做到了，我相信你能做好。

第四个就是快。雷军坚信“天下武功唯快不破”，在互联网的今天，从刚开始琢磨互联网的时候，到小米用了4年时间才做到今天规模，确实太慢了，他表示自己每天都在焦虑，希望自己可以更快一些。怎么在确保安全的情况下提速是所有互联网企业最关键的问题。有时候，快就是一种力量，你快了以后能掩盖很多问题，企业在快速发展的时候往往风险是最小的，当你速度一慢下来，所有的问题都暴露出来了。

7 Buckets of Stocks

• Aggressive Growth for counters with earnings growth of at least 15%
• Cyclical names with compelling valuations
• Special Situations stocks (buyouts/mergers /restructuring)
• Asset Plays with large discounts to underlying assets
• Steady Growth for those with a predictable steady stream of earnings growth
• Moat counters with strong franchise and competitive advantage
• Yield plays with high but sustainable dividends.

So which do you specialise in?

Pull marketing

today's world is not so conducive on push marketing but rather pull marketing. all of us are getting it every day: in facebook, twitter, instagram, whatsapp, wechat. and almost all of it are social in nature.

from seth godin:

Three changes in marketing

1. Advertising and marketing are no longer the same thing.

2. The most valuable forms of marketing are consumed voluntarily.

3. The network effect is the most powerful force in the world of ideas.

(The last assertion is based on the fact that culture changes everything about how we live our lives, and culture is driven by the network effect... society works because it's something we do together.)

Just about every big organization ignores all three. 

Schedule DAILY

So. Today I made a commitment to myself. 

Sometimes, it happens. When you first graduate or when you first embark upon your career, for the more focused, you can lose yourself to your focus and never gain it back for long periods of time. Whether be it engineering, accounting, law, medicine, any other kind of discipline, you just lose yourself and days, months, years can just pass you by. 

Until you hit your first insurmountable wall of complex difficulties. 

OR

until you hit your first career stride and you start to cruise.

Things get comfortable. Unlike when you first started on your career, you no longer have to ask basic questions on a daily basis. Colleagues start to look for your time to gain insights (or more cases, answers) from you. 

You then notice that the days start to get longer. 

You find that problems are no longer interesting and seem to follow a certain template of resolution.

You divert your attention to other things.

You have hit your Competency Plateau.

You start to realize that certain things that are important to you have fallen by the side along the way. 

You see your parents older, you have missed your children's milestones, you haven't spoken to that childhood friend of yours for 10 years and you now have a beer gut with greying hair with teeth stained and discoloured from years of cigarette smoke (maybe, maybe not).

You do a review of your life and finances: your children are still growing and time cannot be fastforwarded (neither can it be clawed back), your finances hasn't grown to the point where you can just concentrate all your focus on your family life.

What gives? 

You have been working hard on your career your entire life. But though you are ahead of your peers, it feels as though they have enjoyed and lived a better life than you did and the difference in money didn't feel like there is a difference.

You have gotten to the point where the rocks pebbles sand in jar story is most apt for you.

source: startupswami.com

So what do you do? 

You go back to the schedule. And you start with the things that are important to you and you schedule them first. DAILY.

You find the things that are important to you next. And you schedule them. DAILY.

You keep scheduling them DAILY in order of priorities in the time of the day that they are supposed to be done until your day is filled. 

And here's how it works:

1. You check your schedule DAILY and do the eaxct items scheduled for that time.

2. If you can't do it for some reason (frivolous example being stormy day not a good day to dry clothes), you either do the next item on that day's schedule or the adhoc item that just came up.

3. If an adhoc item comes up, decide if that is more important or not. Or if you are really good, check if it contributes to your life goals at all.

So. I have come back to the important things in my life that has fallen by the side this entire career and I'm going back to them. DAILY.

"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."
- Stephen Covey

Ray Dalio & his Economic Machine

Who is Ray Dalio?

Ray Dalio wrote a paper on how the economic engine works back in 2008 and his website is at http://www.economicprinciples.org/. And it got converted into a video.




Here's his latest April 2015 video: CNN Ray Dalio Interview

A few points from his latest interview:

• Bullish on Innovation in US.
• Bullish on China in long term
• Capital in China has not yet flowed to a lot of parts of their economy

So it begins: The Cloning of Singapore & the book move

I recall, as a kid, growing in Singapore, the geography textbooks of that time would say that the factors contributing to Modern Singapore were primarily the Port and the People.

That was way back when Singapore was recategorized and shoved into the developed country category in 1995.

We did a little of muddling and 'monkeying' around, riding the still ascendant Asian wave before crashing against the rocks in 1997 and were nowhere really, until the effects of the late nineties industries consolidation and late 2000s infrastructure boom culminated in a more dynamic and diverse racial landscape.

The need for FDI draws backward chains into the need for cultural draws and it couldn't have come in a better time with the economic turmoil and political standoff about.

You could say that the real draw of the country .. nay .. city is really the governance, infrastructure and operational culture (honed hammered through the decades through tripartism 'soft' influence).

In fact, this is probably the ONLY factor keeping us relevant.

In a world of warring countries, left to rot bankrupt american auto cities, economically asleep western europe, in-the-midst-of-transition chinese-indians, deflated japanese and selfserving/corrupt governments, we probably appear as a bastion of reasonableness and getting things done.

My friends, we compete against all cities with our City.



http://www.vietnam-briefing.com/news/da-nang-set-singapore-vietnam.html/

And because our City is our only competitive advantage against all others for our basic survival, we open with our Sicilian Dragon.

Hanging on to leveraged instruments while it runs up

Read: March Madness Apr 2015 https://www.janus.com/bill-gross-investment-outlook

I have always felt that leveraged instruments are a double bet, similar to when a friend buys a number of bets from the local betting station be it lottery tickets with various numbers or, both a draw and win/lose result on a soccer match.

The only difference between the two, I find, is that for a leveraged instrument, it is on the results of 2 separate rolls of a dice whereby the results does not appear simultaneously.

Perhaps, more similar to wagering on a table, intending on using the winnings of a prior wager on a separate table.

Knowing how to maximize return versus risk in these new waters will be key. There are at least several approaches, anyone of which may be the correct one. 

• Dalio/Prince from Bridgewater cautiously advance the theme that if borrowing costs center around 0% real, then assets can be cautiously levered, being cognizant at the same time of the fat tails inherent in our new world of leverage and extreme monetary policy. 

• Jeremy Grantham and fellow professionals at GMO hint at waiting it out in low returning cash under the assumption of a 7 year reversion to the mean, instead of a 20 year cycle hinted at by Rogoff and others. Grantham expects a stock market deluge in the near term future and he may be right, but if not, GMO may underperform while waiting. 

• Then there is Warren Buffett, who has the benefit of a near perpetual closed-end fund purchasing stocks when fundamentally cheap. 

• For most investors who don’t have the benefit of a closed-end business structure, perhaps Jack Bogle is right. 

unconstrained portfolios at Janus mimic most closely the strategic philosophy at Bridgewater. Cheap leverage is an alpha generating strategy as long as short rates stay low and mimic the 0% real new neutral. Of course if an investor borrows short term to invest longer and riskier, the potential alpha necessarily demands choosing the correct assets to lever. That is not easy these days since almost all assets are artificially priced. The challenge is to purchase the ones that might remain artificially priced over one’s investment horizon. For me, credit spreads are too tight and therefore expensive. Duration is more neutral but there is little to be gained from it in the U.S., Euroland, and the UK unless the global economy inches towards recession. The most attractive opportunity to me rests with the notion that Draghi’s 18 month QE, which roughly purchases 200% of sovereign net new issuance during that time, will keep yields low in Germany and therefore anchor U.S. Treasuries and UK Gilts in the process. I would not buy these clearly overvalued assets but sell “volatility” around them, such that much higher returns can be captured if say the German 10 year Bund at 20 basis points doesn’t move to –.05% or up to .50% over three months’ time. Draghi’s QE should place a high probability on staying within that range 

It is lesser surprise to me, that Fed wants to increase interest rates. Now, it is more a curiosity to me: how? The components more interesting to me, of the current global arena, are the price of oil, USD value and the political/economic tightrope between a world accelerating toward bipolarity.

A more serious concern however, might be that low interest rates globally destroy financial business models that are critical to the functioning of modern day economies. Pension funds and insurance companies are perhaps the most important examples of financial sectors that are threatened by low to negative interest rates. Both sectors have always attempted to immunize their long term liabilities (retirement, health, morbidity) by investing at a similar duration with an attractive yield. Now that negative and in almost all cases low short term rates are expected to persist, long term bonds and similar duration assets do not offer the ability to pay claims 5, 10, 30 years into the future. With 10 year German Bonds at 30 basis points and the possibility of them going negative after the beginning of the ECB’s QE in March, what German, Dutch, or French insurance company would attempt to immunize liabilities at the zero bound or lower? Immunization makes no economic or business sense at these levels; similarly for pension funds. In fact even households are handcuffed by low/negative yields, who everyday must now address their inability to save enough money at a high enough rate to pay for education, healthcare, and retirement obligations. Negative/zero bound interest rates may exacerbate, instead of stimulate low growth rates in all of these instances, by raising savings and deferring consumption.

This possibility may be one reason why the Fed appears to be moving to raise interest rates gradually beginning in June this year. In an attempt to elevate returns, investors and savers do all the wrong things required of a stable capitalistic model. Savers save more, not less, and invest at higher risk levels in order to reach their long term liability expectations. Asset prices for stocks, high yield bonds and other supposed 5-10% returning investments, become stretched and bubble sensitive; Debt accumulates instead of being paid off because rates are too low to pass up – corporate bond sales leading to stock buybacks being the best example. The financial system has become increasingly vulnerable only six years after its last collapse in 2009. 

source: https://www.janus.com/bill-gross-investment-outlook/march