Art Of Boring

Building on his conversation in Episode 153, Portfolio Manager Samir Taghiyev takes a deep dive into the mental models and frameworks that Mawer uses to evaluate company management teams, particularly within the small-cap space. Using both personal and financial examples, he illustrates the benefit of exploration and exploitation, striking a balance between focus and curiosity, and identifying opportunities on the S curve of the corporate lifecycle. Key points from this episode: Company management can be evaluated by determining if they are growing revenues while controlling costs and risks. This can be combined with other frameworks to create a comprehensive picture. The exploration vs. exploitation framework can be used to evaluate how well management balances focus with curiosity. There are four phases in the S curve of the corporate lifecycle—startup, growth, maturity, and decline. Mawer focuses on companies in the middle two phases, with Trisura and TerraVest provided as examples. Incrementalism is ver