WEEKLY THOUGHTS

Our regular readers know the Chenmark team are fans of professional football.  This week, when catching up on some "reading", we came across an article about Khalil Mack's insane strength, which reminded us of an article we wrote back in 2016 about the two highest-drafted defensive players from the 2014 NFL draft, Jadeveon Clowney and Khalil Mack, and what their starkly different paths to the NFL might say about their success in it.

Like many readers, we spent a good amount of time this week closely tracking pivotal news cycles and just had to chime in with our thoughts.  Yes, we are talking about Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark” becoming the most-watched video ever on YouTube, racking in 7.043 billion views (that’s billion with a “B”, folks).

Over the past couple of weeks, some of our team members have been working their way through an online negotiation course.  Much of the content has been both useful and interesting, one of the most relevant topics has been the emphasis placed on differentiation vs. commoditization for any company involved in a negotiation.

We learned recently about the phenomenal Jill Heinerth, a cave diver who has some serious nerves of steel.  At the age of 55, Heinerth leads technical dives into areas no living person has ever gone, facing considerable danger in the process (for example, she led the first dive into an iceberg which self-imploded minutes after her team got back to the boat). 

Second-year MBA students graduate in late Spring, and as some of that group embark upon a search for a small business acquisition, we tend to observe a consistent seasonal uptick in advice requests around that time.  We often get asked for our opinion on working with a partner, and lately, we have noticed a trend towards “solo” searchers in place of search fund partnerships

We recently read a LinkedIn post from Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business, who opined “careers are asset classes - don’t go where it’s over-invested.... if a sector becomes overinvested with human capital, the returns on those efforts are suppressed.”