No. of Recommendations: 13
I also hear excellent things from very good sources wrt the very new CEO, Mark Miller, who has been an outstanding leader there for decades. Mr. Miller also has a lot of skin in the game, as my info reveals he owns over 1% of Constellation. The successful culture, management and allocation/ growth will continue.
I listened to as much of Miller that I could get my hand on and he does seem excellent. He communicates in a rather technical way related to his main role as capital allocator. He was involved with Leonard in all the important deals and plays the same game. As far as I could perceive, when Miller talks, his ideas are coming straight from his mind with conviction, rather than just trying to follow Leonard's values.
Miller recently explained that you can't grow your business in a decentralized way without letting people have a lot of rope, make mistakes, and part of the built in trust over time. Leonard followed Miller's remarks by saying that by default when a firm grows, if you don't have trust then you are forced to supplement with bureaucracy, such as a guard watching the guards, and the bureaucracy grows in a geometric fashion, so you have got to have trust to avoid being eaten by that. If you *don't* trust, then you *do* need systems, and then the bureaucracy. He want on, "Does bureaucracy naturally shrink? -- Generally .. *not* - so you have to actively shrink it." Miller followed immediately, almost viscerally, "When your central headcount is growing in proportion to the business - you have a problem, so you have always got to ... be let other people figure out how to spend their money, rather than you becoming a central taxing authority downloading all those costs that you built up over time, so that's a key measurement".
- Manlobbi
