Charlie Munger gave a speech back in 1996 which he titled Practical Thought About Practical Thought?. It was a speech that few people at the time really understood. Even when they read it very slowly.. twice.
And the title of the speech didn’t help much in terms of comprehension. Especially that last question mark.
But the people that think deeply about the message of Munger’s ideas find that the speech is actually a one-of-a-kind business case study and a lesson in how to solve problems. It’s one of the rare gems from the files and, of course, it belongs to be put here in the Junto articles section.
In the speech, Charlie Munger neatly explains the success of Coca-Cola by viewing the businesses through the lens of the simplest academic models from the fields of psychology, biology, physics, and business. To many, that sounds odd. To many, the success of Coca-Cola seems like a coincidence; a kind of first-mover advantage coupled with a top-secret recipe. But as we will soon learn, that’s first-level thinking.
What’s interesting about the timing of Munger’s speech is that Coca-Cola between 1991-1997 ranged from comprising 34% to 43% of the entire equity portfolio at Berkshire Hathaway. It was a hugely concentrated bet. And over that period, Coca-Cola delivered an annual return of 34.7%.
Before getting into speaking about Coca-Cola, Munger lays out five simple notions (as a framework) that help to quickly solve problems. He then shows how to practically apply these notions in showing how to turn a start-up capital of $2 million into $2 trillion.
These five notions are…
1. Decide Big “No-Brainer” Questions First.
The first helpful notion is that it is usually best to simplify problems by deciding big “no-brainer” questions first.
2. Gain Numerical Fluency
The second helpful notion mimics Galileo’s conclusion that scientific reality is often revealed only by math as if math was the language of God. Galileo’s attitude also works well in messy, practical life. Without numerical fluency, in the part of life most of us inhabit, you are like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.
3. Invert, Always Invert
The third helpful notion is that it is not enough to think problems through forward. You must also think in reverse, much like the rustic who wanted to know where he was going to die so that he’d never go there. Indeed, many problems can’t be solved forward. And that is why the great algebraist Carl Jacobi so often said, “Invert, always invert.” And why the Pythagoreans thought in reverse to prove that the square root of two was an irrational number.
4. Think in a Multidisciplinary Manner
The fourth helpful notion is that the best and most practical wisdom is elementary academic wisdom. But there is one extremely important qualification: You must think in a multidisciplinary manner. You must routinely use all the easy-to-learn concepts from the freshman course in every basic subject. Where elementary ideas will serve, your problem solving must not be limited, as academia and many business bureaucracies are limited, by extreme balkanization into disciplines and sub-disciplines, with strong taboos against any venture outside assigned territory.
Instead, you must do your multi-disciplinary thinking in accord with Ben Franklin’s prescription in Poor Richard: “If you want it done, go. If not, send.”
5. Identify Lollapalooza Effects
The fifth helpful notion is that really big effects, lollapalooza effects, will often come only from large combinations of factors. For instance, tuberculosis was tamed, at least for a long time, only by routine, combined use in each case of three different drugs. Another lollapalooza effects, like the flight of an airplane, follow a similar pattern.
Turning $2 Million Into $2 Trillion
It is now time to present my practical problem. And here is the problem: It is 1884 in Atlanta, Ga. You are brought, along with twenty others like you, before a rich and eccentric Atlanta citizen named Glotz. Both you and Glotz share two characteristics: First, you routinely use in problem solving the five helpful notions, and, second, you know all the elementary ideas in all the basic college courses, as taught in 1996. However, all discoverers, and all examples demonstrating these elementary ideas come from dates before 1884. Neither you nor Glotz know anything about anything that has happened after 1884.
Glotz offers to invest two million 1884 dollars, yet take only half the equity, for a Glotz Charitable Foundation, in a new corporation organized to go into the non-alcoholic beverage business and remain in that business only, forever. Glotz wants to use a name that has somehow charmed him: Coca-Cola.
The other half of the new corporation’s equity will go to the man who most plausibly demonstrates that his business plan will cause Glotz’s foundation to be worth a trillion dollars 150 years later, in the money of that later time, 2034, despite paying out a large part of its earnings each year as a dividend. This will make the whole new corporation worth $2 trillion, even after paying out many billions of dollars in dividends.
You have fifteen minutes to make your pitch. What do you say to Glotz?
And here is my solution, my pitch to Glotz, using only the helpful notions and what every bright college sophomore should know.
Well Glotz, the big “no-brainer” decisions that, to simplify our problem, should be made first are as follows: first, we are never going to create something worth $2 trillion by selling some generic beverage. Therefore we must make your name, “Coca-Cola,” into a strong, legally protected trademark. Second, we can get to $2 trillion only by starting in Atlanta, then succeeding in the rest of the United States, then rapidly succeeding with our new beverage all over the world. This will require developing a product having universal appeal because it harnesses powerful elemental forces. And the right place to find such powerful elemental forces is in the subject matter of elementary academic courses.
We will next use numerical fluency to ascertain what our target implies. We can guess reasonably that by 2034 there will be about eight billion beverage consumers around the world. On average, each of these consumers will be much more prosperous in real terms than the average consumer of 1884. Each consumer is composed mostly of water and must ingest about 64 ounces of water per day. This is eight eight-ounce servings. Thus, if our new beverage, and other imitative beverages in our new market, can flavor and otherwise improve only 25 percent of ingested water worldwide, and we can occupy half of the new world market, we can sell 2.92 trillion eight-ounce servings in 2034. And if we can then net four cents per serving, we will earn $117 billion. This will be enough, if our business is still growing at a good rate, to make it easily worth two trillion dollars.
A big question, of course, is whether four cents per serving is a reasonable profit target for 2034. And the answer is yes, if we can create a beverage with strong universal appeal. One hundred fifty years is a long time. The dollar, like the roman drachma, will almost surely suffer monetary depreciation. Concurrently, real purchasing power of the average beverage consumer in the world will go way up. His proclivity to inexpensively improve his experience while ingesting water will go up considerably faster. Meanwhile, as technology improves, the cost of our simple product, in units of constant purchasing power, will go down. All four factors will work together in favor of our four-cents-per-serving profit target. Worldwide beverage-purchasing power in dollars will probably multiply by a factor of at least forty over 150 years. Thinking in reverse, this makes our profit-per-serving target, under 1884 conditions, a mere one fortieth of four cents or one tenth of a cent per serving. This is an easy-to-exceed target as we start out if our new product has universal appeal.
That decided, we must next solve the problem of invention to create universal appeal. There are two intertwined challenges of large scale: first, over 150 years we must cause a new-beverage market to assimilate about one fourth of the world’s water ingestion. Second, we must so operate that half the new market is ours, while all our competitors combined are left to share the remaining half. These results are lollapalooza results. Accordingly, we must attack our problem by causing every favorable factor we can think of to work for us. Plainly, only a powerful combination of many factors is likely to cause the lollapalooza consequences we desire. Fortunately, the solution to these intertwined problems turns out to be fairly easy, if one has stayed awake in all the freshman courses.
Let us start by exploring the consequences of our simplifying “no-brainer” decision that we must rely on a strong trademark. This conclusion automatically leads to an understanding of the essence of our business in proper elementary academic terms. We can see from the introductory course in psychology that, in essence, we are going into the business of creating and maintaining conditioned reflexes. The “Coca-Cola” trade name and trade dress will act as the stimuli, and the purchase and ingestion of our beverage will be the desired responses.
And how does one create and maintain conditioned reflexes? Well, the psychology text gives two answers:
1. by operant conditioning, and
2. by classical conditioning, often called Pavlovian conditioning to honor the great Russian scientist.And, since we want a lollapalooza result, we must use both conditioning techniques – and all we can invent to enhance effects from each technique.
The operant-conditioning part of our problem is easy to solve. We need only
1. maximize rewards of our beverage’s ingestion, and
2. minimize possibilities that desired reflexes, once created by us, will be extinguished through operant conditioning by proprietors of competing products.For operant conditioning rewards, there are only a few categories we will find practical: Food value in calories or other inputs; Flavor, texture, and aroma acting as stimuli to consumption under neural preprogramming of a man through Darwinian natural selection; Stimulus, as by sugar or caffeine; Cooling effect when man is too hot or warming effect when man is too cool.
Wanting a lollapalooza result, we will naturally include rewards in all the categories.
To start out, it is easy to decide to design our beverage for consumption cold. There is much less opportunity, without ingesting beverage, to counteract excessive heat, compared with excessive cold. Moreover, with excessive heat, much liquid must be consumed, and the reverse is not true. It is also easy to decide to include both sugar and caffeine. After all, tea, coffee, and lemonade are already widely consumed. And it is also clear that we must be fanatic about determining, through trial and error, flavor and other characteristics that will maximize human pleasure while taking in the sugared water and caffeine we will provide. And, to counteract possibilities that desired operant-conditioned reflexes, once created by us will be extinguished by operant conditioning employing competing products, there is also an obvious answer: we will make it a permanent obsession in our company that our beverage, as fast as practicable, will at all times be available everywhere throughout the world. After all, a competing product, if it is never tried, can’t act as a reward creating a conflicting habit. Every spouse knows that.
We must next consider the Pavlovian conditioning we must also use. In Pavlovian conditioning powerful effects come from mere association. The neural system of Pavlov’s dog causes it to salivate at the bell it can’t eat. And the brain of man yearns for the type of beverage held by the pretty woman he can’t have. And so, Glotz, we must use every sort of decent, honorable Pavlovian conditioning we can think of. For as long as we are in business, our beverage and its promotion must be associated in consumer minds with all other thing consumers like or admire.
Such extensive Pavlovian conditioning will cost a lot of money, particularly for advertising. We will spend big money as far ahead as we can imagine. But the money will be effectively spent. As we expand fast in our new-beverage market, our competitors will face gross disadvantages of scale in buying advertising to create the Pavlovian conditioning they need. And this outcome, along with other volume-creates-power effects, should help us gain and hold at least 50 percent of the new market everywhere. Indeed, provided buyers are scattered, our higher volumes will give us very extreme cost advantages in distribution.
Moreover, Pavlovian effects from mere association will help us choose the flavor, texture, and color of our new beverage. Considering Pavlovian effects, we will have wisely chosen the exotic and expensive-sounding name “Coca-Cola,” instead of a pedestrian name like “Glotz’s sugared, caffeinated water.” For similar Pavlovian reasons, it will be wise to have our beverage look pretty much like wine, instead of sugared water. And so we will artificially color our beverage if it comes out clear. And we will carbonate our water, making our product seem like champagne, or some other expensive beverage, while also making its flavor better and imitation harder to arrange for competing products. And, because we are going to attach so many expensive psychological effects to our flavor, that flavor should be different from any other standard flavor so that we maximize difficulties for competitors and give no accidental same-flavor benefit to any existing product.
What else, from the psychology textbook, can help our new business? Well, there is that powerful “monkey-see, monkey-do” aspect of human nature that psychologists often call “social proof.” Social proof, imitative consumption triggered by mere sight of consumption, will not only help induce trial of our beverage. It will also bolster perceived rewards from consumption. We will always take this powerful social-proof factor into account as we design advertising and sales promotion and as we forego present profit to enhance present and future consumption. More than with most other products, increased selling power will come from each increase in sales.
We can now see, Glotz, that by combining
1. much Pavlovian conditioning,
2. powerful social-proof effects, and
3. wonderful-tasting, energy-giving, stimulating and desirably-cold beverage that causes much operant conditioning, we are going to get sales that speed up for a long time by reason of the huge mixture of factors we have chosen.Therefore, we are going to start something like an autocatalytic reaction in chemistry, precisely the sort of multi-factor-triggered lollapalooza effect we need.
The logistics and the distribution strategy of our business will be simple. There are only two practical ways to sell our beverage:
1. as a syrup to fountains and restaurants, and
2. as a complete carbonated-water product in containers.Wanting lollapalooza results, we will naturally do it both ways. And, wanting huge Pavlovian and social-proof effects we will always spend on advertising and sales promotion, per serving, over 40 percent of the fountain price for syrup needed to make the serving.
A few syrup-making plants can serve the world. However, to avoid needless shipping of mere space and water, we will need many bottling plants scattered over the world. We will maximize profits if (like early General Electric with light bulbs) we always set the first-sale price, either
1. for fountain syrup, or
2. for any container of our complete product.The best way to arrange this desirable profit-maximizing control is to make any independent bottler we need a subcontractor, not a vendee of syrup, and certainly not a vendee of syrup under a perpetual franchise specifying a syrup price frozen forever at its starting level.
Being unable to get a patent or copyright on our super important flavor, we will work obsessively to keep our formula secret. We will make a big hoopla over our secrecy, which will enhance Pavlovian effects. Eventually food-chemical engineering will advance so that our flavor can be copied with near exactitude. But, by that time, we will be so far ahead, with such strong trademarks and complete, “always available” worldwide distribution, that good flavor copying won’t bar us from our objective. Moreover, the advances in food chemistry that help competitors will almost surely be accompanied by technological advances that will help us, including refrigeration, better transportation, and, for dieters, ability to insert a sugar taste without inserting sugar’s calories. Also, there will be related beverage opportunities we will seize.
This brings us to a final reality check for our business plan. We will, once more, think in reverse like Jacobi. What must we avoid because we don’t want it? Four answers seem clear:
First, we must avoid the protective, cloying, stop-consumption effects of aftertaste that are a standard part of physiology, developed through Darwinian evolution to enhance the replication of man’s genes by forcing a generally helpful moderation on the gene carrier. To serve our ends, on hot days a consumer must be able to drink container after container of our product with almost no impediment from aftertaste. We will find a wonderful no-aftertaste flavor by trial and error and will thereby solve this problem.
Second, we must avoid ever losing even half of our powerful trademarked name. It will cost us mightily, for instance, if our sloppiness should ever allow sale of any other kind of “cola,” for instance, a “peppy cola.” If there is ever a “peppy cola,” we will be the proprietor of the brand.
Third, with so much success coming, we must avoid bad effects from envy, given a prominent place in the Ten Commandments because envy is so much a part of human nature. The best way to avoid envy, recognized by Aristotle, is to plainly deserve the success we get. We will be fanatic about product quality, quality of product presentation, and reasonableness of prices, considering the harmless pleasure it will provide.
Fourth, after our trademarked flavor dominates our new market, we must avoid making any huge and sudden change in our flavor. Even if a new flavor performs better in blind taste tests, changing to that new flavor would be a foolish thing to do. This follows because, under such conditions, our old flavor will be so entrenched in consumer preference by psychological effects that a big flavor change would do us little good. And it would do immense harm by triggering in consumers the standard deprival super-reaction syndrome that makes “take-aways” so hard to get in any type of negotiation and helps make most gamblers so irrational. Moreover, such a large flavor change would allow a competitor, by copying our old flavor, to take advantage of both (1) the hostile consumer super-reaction to deprival and (2) the huge love of our original flavor created by our previous work.
Well, that is my solution to my own problem of turning $2 million into $2 trillion, even after paying out billions of dollars in dividends. I think it would have won with Glotz in 1884 and should convince you more than you expected at the outset. After all, the correct strategies are clear after being related to elementary academic ideas brought into play by the helpful notions.
How consistent is my solution with the history of the real Coca-Cola company? Well, as late as 1896, twelve years after the fictional Glotz was to start vigorously with $2 million, the real Coca-Cola company had a net worth under $150 thousand and earnings of about zero. And thereafter the real Coca-Cola company did lose half its trademark and did grant perpetual bottling franchises at fixed syrup prices. And some of the bottlers were not very effective and couldn’t easily be changed. And the real Coca-Cola company, with this system, did lose much pricing control that would have improved results, had it been retained. Yet, even so, the real Coca-Cola company followed so much of the plan given to Glotz that it is now worth about $125 billion and will have to increase its value at only 8 percent per year until 2034 to reach a value of $2 trillion. And it can hit an annual physical volume target of 2.92 trillion servings if servings grow until 2034 at only 6 percent per year, a result consistent with much past experience and leaving plenty of plain-water ingestion for Coca-Cola to replace after 2034. So I would guess that the fictional Glotz, starting earlier and stronger and avoiding the worst errors, would have easily hit his $2 trillion target. And he would have done it well before 2034.
This brings me, at last, to the main purpose of my talk. Large educational implications exist, if my answer to Glotz’s problem is roughly right and you make one more assumption I believe true – that most Ph.D. educators, even psychology professors and business school deans, would not have given the same simple answer I did. And, if I am right in these two ways, this would indicate that our civilization now keeps in place a great many educators who can’t satisfactorily explain Coca-Cola, even in retrospect, and even after watching it closely all their lives. This is not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Moreover – and this result is even more extreme – the brilliant and effect executives who, surrounded by business school and law school graduates, have run the Coca-Cola company with glorious success in recent years, also did not understand elementary psychology well enough to predict and avoid the “New Coke” fiasco, which dangerously threatened their company. That people so talented, surrounded by professional advisers from the best universities, should thus demonstrate a huge gap in their education is also not a satisfactory state of affairs.
Such extreme ignorance, in both the high reaches of academia and the high reaches of business, is a lollapalooza effect of a negative sort, demonstrating grave defects in academia. Because the bad effect is a lollapalooza, we should expect to find intertwined, multiple academic causes. I suspect at least two such causes.
First, academic psychology, while it is admirable and useful as a list of ingenious and important experiments, lacks intradisciplinary synthesis. In particular, not enough attention is given to lollapalooza effects coming from combinations of psychological tendencies. This creates a situation reminding one of a rustic teacher who tries to simplify school work by rounding pi to an even three. And it violates Einstein’s injunction that “everything should be made as simple as possible – but no more simple.” In general, psychology is laid out and misunderstood as electromagnetism would now be misunderstood if physics had produced many brilliant experimenters like Michael Faraday and no grand synthesizer like James Clerk Maxwell.
And, second, there is a truly horrible lack of synthesis blending psychology and other academic subjects. But only an interdisciplinary approach will correctly deal with reality – in academia as with the Coca-Cola company.
In short, academic psychology departments are immensely more important and useful than other academic departments think. And, at the same time, the psychology departments are immensely worse than more of their inhabitants think. It is, of course, normal for self-appraisal to be more positive than external appraisal. Indeed, a problem of this sort may have given you your speaker today. But the size of this psychology-department gap is preposterously large. In fact, the gap is so enormous that one very eminent university (Chicago) simply abolished its psychology department, perhaps with an undisclosed hope of later creating a better vision.
In such a state of affairs, many years ago and with much that was plainly wrong already present, the “New Coke” fiasco occurred, wherein Coke’s executives came to the brink of destroying the most valuable trademark in the world. The academically correct reaction to this immense and well-publicized fiasco would have been the sort of reaction Boeing would display if three of its new airplanes crashed in a single week. After all, product integrity is involved in each case, and the plain educational failure was immense.
But almost no such responsible, Boeing-like reaction has come from academia. Instead academia, by and large, continues in its balkanized way to tolerate psychology professors who mis-teach psychology, non-psychology professors who fail to consider psychological effects obviously crucial in their subject matter, and professional schools that carefully preserve psychological ignorance coming in with each entering class and are proud of their inadequacies.
Better Methods of Thought
Solving problems the way Munger describes the practical problem of Coca-Cola sounds overwhelmingly hard but is, as Munger puts it, a rather simple exercise.
Munger did not incorporate any complex models within each academic discipline that only an inside qualified scholar would know with the rest of us left outside. He applied [mental] models that we have all have pretty much learned or encountered in our lives at some point.
The real reason why his speech is hard to understand is that many people are not used to taking the mental leap of pulling a single problem through multiple models and thus think deeply about its effects. This is a skill that requires routine exercise and gradual progress. Our minds are not wired to think outside the silos of single mental models within each discipline.
But by cultivating the habit of using Munger’s five notions in our decision-making, we can begin exercising.
P.S. The “Practical Thoughts About Practical Thoughts Speech” was included in Poor Charlie’s Almanack together with a bunch of fantastic other collections of Munger wisdom throughout his life. I highly recommend picking up a copy.
