> Great companies are generally lead by R&D (product, science, engineering) with strong finance / process acting as gravity to keep the company grounded & funct

> Great companies are generally lead by R&D (product, science, engineering) with strong finance / process acting as gravity to keep the company grounded & functioning. When finance / process take over, then gravity will dominate and you crash But to continue the metaphor, a great company will have enough forward momentum that at any time they can pull back on the stick, relying on inertia in their supply chain, designs, customer name recognition, and existing capital assets to briefly zip almost straight upwards really, really fast for a short amount of time. If you want an upwards trajectory for 100 years, it won't work, you'll soon stall, but if you want an upwards trajectory for the next quarter it works phenomenally well! The root of the problem, I think, is that it's really hard to measure long-term assets like culture and trust, but really easy to game short-term metrics by dumping long-term assets.