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People and Companies

Read this take on how winners and losers are being determined in Scott Galloway's Post Corona

The thing about capital market predictions is that they are to an extent self-fulfilling. By deciding that Amazon, Tesla, and other promising companies are winners, the markets lower those companies’ cost of capital, increase the value of their compensation (via stock options), and enhance their ability to acquire what they cannot build themselves.

Being anointed a winner works about the same at the person level as it does for a corporation. If a person is a presumed winner, forces start to conspire to make it so. Some of them less ethical than others. Similarly what he says about value of brands of companies apply at the individual level too. 

As much as we humanize them, brands are not people—they are assets to be monetized. Letting one die is only a bad thing if you don’t get all the value out of it in its golden years. Too many managers try to Botox their aged brands into a semblance of youth, when they should be letting them go to a profitable hospice.

People may have had the moment of brilliance or profundity once, did something game-changing or innovative some decades ago but there is no spark left now. Yet, they want to burnish their image using glory from a distant past. 



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