Harvard Business School's "The Ultimate Management Model" Special Lecture
The essence of management discovered by Harvard Business School over eight years
The one and only business principle discovered by Harvard Business School!

What makes a successful CEO? Looking at famous CEOs, we often think of charisma, communication skills, and a confident management style.
But what really matters when you're running an organization? Eight CEOs, including Warren Buffett, who have managed their companies with better results than Jack Welch over the past 50 years, surprisingly have something in common.
The author describes their management strategy as “convention-breaking management” and defines the common management style of the eight as “reverse thinking CEO strategy.”
Furthermore, this book thoroughly analyzed the management strategies of "reverse thinking CEOs" to derive the "strongest management model" for future CEOs and business leaders.

In the 1986 annual report of his investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett reflected on his first 25 years as CEO and cited the most important and surprising lesson he had learned.
It was something like teenage peer pressure, a strange aura in the industry that pressured CEOs to emulate their competitors.
Buffett calls this powerful force that is everywhere "institutional pressure," and points out that to become a competent CEO, you must break free from it.
All the CEOs featured in this book are immune to this powerful pressure.
How could that be possible? They found the solution in their management philosophy.
These are the values ​​that permeate the organization and its culture, and they guide decisions about managing the business and allocating capital.
They each established their own management philosophy.
But what's really strange is that, despite their very different industries and environments, their management philosophies are surprisingly similar.
--- pp.39~40

Their core value was that a CEO should prioritize optimizing share price over the long term.
It wasn't about growing the organization.
Executives at larger companies tend to have higher salaries and are often asked to join prestigious committees and clubs.
For this reason, it is very rare for a company to proactively downsize.
However, almost all of the CEOs in this book have significantly reduced their equity bases by buying back their own stock.
In addition, the company reduced its size by selling assets or dividing the company, and was not shy about selling off or closing down underperforming business units.
Ultimately, growth was found to be unrelated to maximizing shareholder value.
--- p.45

Singleton took full advantage of these wide-ranging arbitrage opportunities to build a diversified business portfolio.
From 1961 to 1969, Singleton acquired a whopping 130 companies.
It spanned a wide range of industries, from aviation electronics to special steel and insurance.
All but two of these were purchased using expensive Teledyne stock.
However, Singleton's acquisition method was different from that of other large corporate executives.
He didn't acquire companies haphazardly.
We avoided companies whose performance had bottomed out and focused on profitable, growing companies that dominated their markets.
Niche market companies were also often shown interest.
--- pp.80~81

In 1981, two important events occurred.
First, the Washington Post's longtime rival, the Washington Star, finally went out of business after a steady decline in circulation.
As a result, the Washington Post became the only daily newspaper in the nation's capital to have its costs reduced after the strike.
As a result, circulation and profitability soared, a trend that continued for the next decade.
Second, after four attempts throughout the 1970s, Graham finally found a brilliant COO in Dick Simmons.
Simmons, who previously served as COO of the diversified media company Dun & Bradstreet, immediately began rationalizing and improving businesses that were underperforming compared to competitors when he became COO of The Washington Post.
His hiring was a stroke of genius that led the Washington Post into an era of remarkable profitability.
This case proves once again how crucial a capable COO is to the success of our counterintuitive CEOs. --- p.171

Buffett's open market investment approach, specifically portfolio management, is worth a closer look.
It's important not only in terms of Berkshire's overall earnings, but also because it allows you to understand Buffett's broader capital allocation philosophy.
Portfolio management, or how much stock an investor owns and how long he or she holds it, has a huge impact on returns.
Even if two investors share the same investment philosophy, their portfolio management methods will differ dramatically in terms of performance.
Buffett's approach to managing Berkshire's stock investments has two key characteristics: a high degree of concentration and an extremely long holding period.
In both areas, his thinking is far from conventional wisdom.

--- p.257