There's a book that Ken Griffin recommends reading.
It's called Hardball.
And the subtitle of that book is Are You Playing to Play?
Are You Playing to Win?
It is a book about extreme winners and some of the best operators in business.
And there's a line in that book that sounds
like it could have been written by any of the almost 400 historically great founders that you and I have studied on this podcast so far.
It says, if you have not examined your costs in detail,
it is very likely that there exists lurking somewhere in your cost structure,
a major opportunity to improve your profits, weaken your competitors, and expand your influence.
The first move is to drive down your costs faster than your competitors can and use that savings to upset their strategies.
Two weeks ago, I told you about Todd Graves, who owns 90% of his business, over 90% of his business.
That is a business that's worth at least $10 billion and is still growing at 30% a year.
Todd Graves is obsessed about staying in the details of his business,
just like Ken Griffin is obsessed about staying in the details of his business.
And Todd said that one of the most,
some of the most successful or all of the most successful people he knows stays in the detail of their business.
He mentioned learning from one of his friends who runs a multi-billion dollar shipping company and how that friend would even pay attention to how much his business was spending on bottled water.
When I read that section, I thought it'd be a lot easier to do that if that shipping company was running on ramp,
something a lot of history's greatest founders have in common,