#431 How Henry Singleton Worked

第431期:亨利·辛格如何工作

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2026-08-31

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What I learned from reading Distant Force: A Memoir of the Teledyne Corporation and The Man Who Created It by George Roberts and The Outsiders by William Thorndike. Made possible by: Ramp: ⁠⁠https://ramp.com⁠⁠ Applovin: ⁠⁠https://www.applovin.com Vanta: ⁠⁠https://vanta.com/founders Some of my favorite quotes: 0:00 — "He aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying over ninety percent of Teledyne's shares." 0:45 — "He was known as The Sphinx for his reluctance to speak with either analysts or journalists." 1:25 — Charlie Munger: "Singleton's financial returns were a mile higher than anyone else's, that they were utterly ridiculous." 2:00 — Buffett: "The heads of many companies are not skilled in capital allocation. Their inadequacy is not surprising. Most bosses rise to the top because they've excelled in an area such as marketing, production, engineering, administration, or sometimes institutional politics." 4:10 — Singleton: "Our conclusion was that the key was cash flow. Our attitude towards cash generation and asset management came out of our own thinking. It is not copied." 4:30 — Buffett: "Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's." 9:40 — Singleton: "If anyone wants to follow Teledyne, they should get used to the fact that our quarterly earnings will jiggle. Our accounting is set to maximize cash flow, not reported earnings." 10:50 — Singleton believed buying stock at attractive prices was self-catalyzing, analogous to coiling a spring that at some future point would surge forward to realize full value." 11:50 — Singleton: "I don't reserve any day-to-day responsibilities for myself, so I don't get into any particular rut. I do not define my job in any rigid terms, but in terms of having the freedom to do whatever seems to be in the best interest of the company at any time." 14:35 — Singleton: "If everyone's doing them, there must be something wrong with them." (on share repurchases by Fortune 500 companies) 26:30 — Singleton: "Teledyne is like a living plant, with our companies as the different branches and each putting out new branches and growing so that no one business is too significant." 28:35 — Singleton: "We work our heads off to increase our own capability at collecting and promoting the right people. To the extent that we succeed, the whole company will succeed." 32:30 — "What's unique about him is that I'll ask him a question about one of these companies that I've asked him to supervise, and he always knows the exact numerical answer. That's the kind of fellow that you pick who runs a company and does it well." 35:00 — Singleton: "There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high." 41:35 — Claude Shannon on Singleton: "He always tries to work out the best moves, and maybe he doesn't like to talk too much because when you're playing a game, you don't tell anyone else what your strategy is." 42:00 — Singleton: "We are not particularly persuaded by quick, temporary gains. We'd rather get something permanent, and that takes time." 44:40 — Munger: "Henry Singleton was the smartest single human being I've ever known in my entire life." 45:00 — Munger: "Henry was a lot smarter, but Warren had thought about investments a lot longer." (distinguishing raw intelligence from accumulated experience)
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  • Henry Singleton was a remarkable man with an unusual background for a CEO,

  • a world-class mathematician who enjoyed playing chess blindfolded.

  • He had programmed MIT's first computer while earning a doctorate in electrical engineering.

  • During World War II, he developed technology that allowed Allied ships to avoid radar detection,

  • and in the 1950s, he created a guidance system that is still in use in most military and commercial aircraft.

  • All of that before he founded the conglomerate Teledyne in the early 1960s and became one of history's greatest CEOs.

  • Conglomerates were the internet stocks of the 1960s.

  • A large number of them went public.

  • Singleton, however, ran a very unusual conglomerate.

  • Long before it became popular, he aggressively repurchased his stock, eventually buying over 90% of Teledyne shares.

  • That's nuts.

  • He avoided dividends, emphasized cash flow over reported earnings, ran a famously decentralized organization,

  • and never split the company's stock.

  • He was known as the Sphinx for his reluctance to speak with either analysts or journalists.

  • It turned out he was right to ignore the skeptics.

  • The long-term returns of his better-known peers...

  • Were generally mediocre.

  • Singleton, in contrast, ran Teledyne for almost 30 years,

  • and the annual compound return to his investors was an extraordinary 20.4%.

  • If you had invested a dollar of Singleton in 1963, by 1990,