Founders
Episode 94 #94 Henry Singleton (The Outsiders)
Founders

Episode 94: #94 Henry Singleton (The Outsiders)

Founders

Episode 94

#94 Henry Singleton (The Outsiders)

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike.

What I learned from reading The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike.

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[0:30] The failure of business schools to study men like Henry Singleton is a crime— Warren Buffett

[2:40]Buffett and Singleton: Separated at birth?

[8:35]The Singular Henry Singleton

[14:40] Supremely indifferent to criticism

[19:50] Teledyne breaks up huge business into a bunch of small profit centers

[29:30] Risk is controlled. Divisions will remain relatively small.

[32:00} Building a cash generating machine 

[36:30] Bet heavily when you have an edge.

[44:00] Singleton has found a way to run a multibillion dollar company in an entrepreneurial, innovative way.

[50:16] Singleton had a different focus: Capital allocation.

[50:37] Getting Rich vs Staying Rich 

[55:18] What the people profiled in this book have in common

[59:00] Early career and the founding of Teledyne

[1:00:38] How Henry Singleton thought about acquisitions

1:02:00] Actions express priority

[1:07:12] Ruthlessly cut fat

[1:11:20] Stay within your cirlce of competence and bet heavy

[1:16:30] Singleton on Time Management

[1:19:19] If everyone is doing them, there must be something wrong with them. — Henry Singleton

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#94 Henry Singleton (The Outsiders)

Introduction

According to Warren Buffett, if you took the top 100 business school graduates and made a composite of their Triumphs, their record would not be as good as that of Singleton, who incidentally was trained as a scientist, not an MBA. Here's a direct quote from Buffett. "The failure of business schools to study men like Singleton is a crime." Buffett has also said that Henry Singleton has had the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. Charlie Munger has said, "Singleton's financial returns were a mile higher than anyone else, utterly ridiculous."

Okay. So starting today's podcast, a little different than I normally do. There's not a lot of information written about Henry Singleton. So I'd just start with some quotes that I found. For today's podcast, I've gathered a number of different resources so we can -- to use as like a blueprint for us to study Henry Singleton. One of those is a book. It's called, The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success, and it was written by William Thorndike. There's – one of those 8 is Henry Singleton, and I'm going to quote heavily from that chapter. And then I'm also going to go back to this Forbes article.

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