Next up, I’ll be reading Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, on the political activism of the Koch brothers, alongside the two books on company management by Charles Koch.
6
13
36
Conversation
The most interesting idea from Koch’s operating playbook is that they expand according to capabilities. Most companies expand by acquiring industry adjacent companies. Like oil -> refining. Koch doesn’t. Instead, they expand by deciding what capability they want in the company.
1
2
Koch started with oil-related capabilities. They acquired a paper company (short jump from oil due to existing chemical processing capabilities) to build consumer marketing & branding capabilities. After which they could start acquiring consumer-oriented businesses.
1
1
Other examples: INVISTA (nylon and advanced materials) → oil pipeline technologies.
Consumer marketing and branding capability → Molex (electronic connectors+sensors) → oil pipeline monitoring
Oil futures trading → built trading capability → enabled bets on oil wells.
1
1
Why is this interesting?
Take Warren Buffett as an example. Buffett's MO (grossly simplified) is to buy companies with high free cash flow, collect those earnings, and then use it to buy yet another company with high FCF. Rinse and repeat.
1
But Buffett is all capital allocation, no operations. Koch is what you get when you combine some capital allocation ability with a crazy amount of operational excellence. Nearly all of Koch's subsidiaries contribute to each other in some way or form.
2
2
The difficulty here is to develop knowledge capture and knowledge sharing capabilities within the conglomerate. This is why I find Koch so interesting. I'm not sure if there are other conglomerates who have so successfully managed to do this, and away from the public markets.
1
1
(And, yes, this is also somewhat relevant to my thing about career moats. commoncog.com/blog/career-mo Capability building, where each additional capability strengthens existing capabilities, is very much applicable to the individual career.)
1
1
I'm about 60% through with Koch's Good Profits book. He seems incredibly reasonable and very humble (because of course he will; it's his book!) To balance this out, I'm reading Dark Money, which portrays him as an ideologue.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
1
1
I should also add, there's amazon.com/Kochland-Histo, which was published just a few days ago. I've added that to my toread as well.
2
1
2
Perhaps the science of success is ... inheriting a lot of money? This is obviously reductive, but I’m already seeing the benefits of reading Mayer’s book in parallel with Koch’s.
Replying to
So, potential narrative violation: Mayer asserts that Koch expanded outside oil because of regulatory clashes. Koch, on the other hand, says his expansion was based on disciplined, market-based experimentation.
Honestly, this could be a mix of both.
1
Mayer also documents Koch’s aggressive and frankly frightening tactics against regulators in the late 70s and early 80s.
Koch says he’s learnt from that period and now makes compliance a core virtue. 🤷♂️
1
This makes it a little difficult to evaluate Koch’s MBM framework, frankly speaking.
Plausible narrative: in the early years, Koch pollutes and breaks the law because it’s easier to compete and win. Later, after regulatory problems, Koch reforms and implements MBM.
1
One problem with that narrative is that regulatory oversight is incompatible with libertarian ideology, and Koch was setting up the Mercatus Center and IHS in the 80s, and tries implementing MBM in the Cato Institute in the early 90s. 🤷♂️
1
(Sidenote to the accounts who have started following this thread: this is NOT about politics. I’m trying to evaluate MBM as a management philosophy. Koch may have done horrible things, but the company is remarkably successful, and Charles asserts its due to MBM).
1
1
I've reached the point in Dark Money where I think at least 50% of Koch's writing in Good Profit is bullshit. Or at least, there's no way to take him seriously on 'values', when he very happily messes with gov regulation in order to benefit his companies.
1
1
Replying to
Perhaps but then how would that explain for eg the vanderbilts?
forbes.com/sites/natalier
1
Replying to
Yeah I don’t want to discount what they’ve done with the fortune since. But this was an important thing that Charles Koch conveniently left out of all his books.
1
1
Show replies
Replying to
They also know how to hire the "best":
1
1