The Rebel Allocator

by Jacob Taylor

As Upton Sinclair remarked, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.’”

As John Maynard Keynes quipped, ‘Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.’”

follow my own inner scorecard.

“The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they have excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration or, sometimes, institutional politics.

Once they become CEOs, they face new responsibilities. They now must make capital allocation decisions, a critical job that they may have never tackled and that is not easily mastered. To stretch the point, it's as if the final step for a highly-talented musician was not to perform at Carnegie Hall but, instead, to be named Chairman of the Federal Reserve. In the end, plenty of unintelligent capital allocation takes place in corporate America.”